John's Blog

The app is a single, dynamic web page that’s split into five horizontal divisions or divs. Each div spans the full width of the screen. From top to bottom they are: header, navbar, form, table, and footer. The dashed light-blue border around each div is temporary, as is the black border around the grid cells. They’re helpful during dev.

The site currently proves that I can combine html, css, php, and javascript in a useful way.

Three of the five divs have purpose that should be self explanatory. As for ‘form’ and ‘table’: Selecting a ‘mode’ via the tan-colored navbar will cause the ‘form’ div to display user interface elements (buttons, fields, check boxes, etc) that are needed for that task.

The ‘table’ div will display tables of parts, images, etc.

The site is far enough along to support database operations so that’s next. I’ll be coding for CRUD (Create, Return, Update and Delete).

As I do that I’ll be deciding how to divvy up the code. I was going to put all the code for, say, adding a part to the database in a few files. But that fails the DRY test (Don’t Repeat Yourself). Instead I’ll group together everything for data creation. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a part or an image, the same chunk of code will do the work.

For this project I’m using the MVC paradigm (Model View Controller) but my implementation may upset purists. I’ve always believed that everything (yes, everything) should flow through the controller. None of that ‘the model updates the view’ business. Stay tuned.