Skip to main content

Things to investigate

Good chat with Jon. He suggests I should look into these things:

New CSS improvements: CSS Grid and CSS Custom Properties

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

JSON/MySQL Schemas

As noted previously, there is a lot of overlap between the RDBMS world and the JSON world. Identifiers JSON is defined to allow identifiers of any kind of Unicode string, encoded in UTF-8 (or UTF-16, etc.). They begin and end with double quotation marks (U+0022), so included quotation marks and '\' must be escaped as \" or \\. Control characters (ASCII 0-x1F) must be escaped as well. In practice, JSON identifiers conform to ECMAScript standards . There are some 68  reserved keywords (function, import, for, if, else, and so on) that should not be used as identifiers. Unexpected reserved words include abstract, await, debugger, delete, finally, instanceof, super, synchronized, transient, volatile, and yield. The spec makes a distinction between identifiers and IdentifierNames (specifically, array keys), but why risk it? ECMAScript allows '$' and '_' anywhere in an identifier. Length or camelCasing are not part of the spec. As for length, there seems t...
Post a Comment
Read more

A JSON Db Product?

The last post "solved" the problem of many-to-many table joins by papering over the association table with a RESTful JSON interface. As long as we're using JSON, we might as well take advantage of multi-valued table cells. I'm naturally wondering where this leads. JSON identifiers and types and SQL identifiers and types overlap so much that their intersection is a useful subset. Camel-case fields in string, number, bool flavors. Many-to-many occurs often in the world: Students in Classes Actors in Films (musicians on recorded songs) Parts in Assemblies Customers and Products (joined by Orders) The generalized description is that a Table requires a unique identifier for each row. Tables list students, actors, films, customers, and so on.  An Association Table is has two or more foreign keys that match unique identifiers in other tables. The knowledge of how a FK maps to a specific Table is baked in--we wouldn't want a "table name" column....
Post a Comment
Read more

GraphQL is the many-to-many solution

Exactly! Regular readers of this blog (me) will appreciate my stumbling attempts to pre-define a REST interface that supports many-to-many interfaces. GET a class, for example, and the return includes an array of the students in that class. In this context, we don't want a full Student record, just the Student's name and Id, for example. With a REST interface, the server writer has to guess how to abbreviate the Student record. GraphQL fixes that. The front end requests just the data it wants. If we want a list of the students in a class and the assigned roommates for that student...we can do that! A lot of my prototype REST service is hardwired--not single tables, so much, but the many-to-many stuff certainly. There was a certain amount of work implementing the simple router ("/table/recordno"). GraphQL means throwing a lot of that away, but I can see immediately that GraphQL's approach is what I want. My schema tables (implementing INSERT and UPDATE) look ...
Post a Comment
Read more