While working on the country picker widget for Tine 2.0 I got remembered on a long discussion with a customer about the country picker in the traditional web application address book they where running.
The country selection user interface element there was a normal combo-box with 238 countries in it. If you want to select a country you have to search this alphabetical sorted list yourself. This is a quite annoying task for people working the whole day with the address book.
So they thought, it would be a tremendous amendment to make the country field a normal text field where the user just types in the country e.g. ‘Germany’. In normal operation most users only deal with only a few countries and do not need to have counties like ‘Saint Vincent and the Grenadines’.
This approach has two problems. First, If the country is a free text field, you will have typos in the data e.g. ‘Gremany’. You will miss such entries when you filter you addresses by the country ‘Germany’. Secondly, this only works if the company operates in one language, cause French employees would write ‘Allemagne’ in the field.
The worse situation is caused by limitations of an old fashioned web application. It could be solved nowadays by using up to date web techniques. Below is the current country selection we use in Tine 2.0. It’s a combination of a text field, a combo-box and a search field:
- You could only select well defined values
- You can perform a live search / type ahead
- You can use it like a traditional combo-box
- You can use the ENTER key to select, no mice input needed (please notice the fluent work flow: after pressing ENTER you can directly perform a new search)
- You can use the COURSER keys to navigate in the results
BTW: After we noticed, that the old web address book (guess which) stores localised country names in the database, we switched the country selection to a text field as the data are messed up in any case.
Last weekend I attended the PHPUnconference in Hamburg.
The concept of an unconference was new to me. One the one hand I found the approach relaxing, the amount of free time between the sessions was really great to come in contact with the other attendes. One the other hand the selforganisation costed plenty of time and also brought some confusions. This seems to be the natural drawback of an unconference.
In Particular the talks about software-quality from Sebastian Bergmann and Manuel Pichler where pretty interesting to me. A complete list of sessions and notes of them could be found in the PHPUnconferences wiki.
Here are my impressions I got from the various conversations there:
- The php web application world goes javascript for the user-interfaces. Although it was a PHP converence, you could talk with allmost anyone about the exciting world of javascript. Many people, who started with conservertive aproches and replaced server generated HTML on the client, are now in the process to switch to real javascript clients.
- The php web application world goes to mission critical places. Where in the beginning of the php area it had the smack of a hobbyist sphere of activity, php applications do more and more mission critical computing in various business areas.
- Php web application is not a synonym for open source code. In fact as a ambassador of a high quality mission critical open source web application, I felt like a bit of an exception there. The majority of attendees is into closed sourced ‘commercial only’ projects.
- A lot of java coders switch to php. As php is not in the academic scope yet, many newcomers in the web-scene start coding in java. After their first contact with php they love the language due to it’s flexibility. Even in the open source world, one might find this tendency according to ohloh.
Finaly many thanks to the orga team for the great unconference and the extraordinary catering.
