Friday, April 13, 2012

jQuery, validation & clueTip

The sordid world of validation continues to turn. Validation is the red headed step child of development. Ignored, neglected and even scorned it rarely garners the attention it deserves. After you're done twiddling those javascript tricks that please your brainless marketing trendoids, it's time to turn your attention to that sneaky little detail of data integrity. After the fanfare has died down, the tiki torches dark we're left with business web forms gathering data. And are they going to gather the data well? Is the backend+frontend going to be a frightful mess of spaghetti? Frequently this answer is yes. I for one say no, this is not what we should accept. It's been this way for years and needs to end. jQuery has made a move in the right direction with a cohesive and sensible client validation component, which itself has extensive plugin points and ajax capability. The last hurdle, and it is not insignificant, is marrying this to a back end which can feed the hungry baby and keep it from descending into the blob of unmaintainable code that javascript loves to be. Oh Silverlight, why could you not have become more popular? So this became a rant instead of a useful discussion on the title. Sorry about that. Next time I'll do better.

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