The Simple Part

This morning, I found out about a very useful jQuery function going by the unassuming name of data. This fantastic little beast creates a data store for an element, and lets you store just about anything in there.

One of the ways in which this can be used is to attach functions to an element, and using them when required. To demonstrate the usefulness of this feature, I wrote two versions of a simple validation system. In one, we use the data function to assign one or more validators to an input box [Example 1: using $(x).data()]. In the other, we iterate over the inputs and check them against validators as needed [Example 2: not using $(x).data()]. Read the full post

Today I was writing some interceptors in Java, and I wanted to be able to filter the input based on whether it implemented a given interface or otherwise. Class<?> exposes a very handy isAssignableFrom method for this, but it doesn’t look very nice, so I tried to go for something a bit neater, like:

   1: Feature.<TargetFeature>isImplementedBy(interceptedInstance);

Neat, and much more readable. I didn’t quite make it there, but got close enough for my purposes, and had some (very little) deeper knowledge of generics inflicted upon me for my sins.

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Summary: How to write a quick and dirty Wordpress widget to add social network links to your template.

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