Michael Girouard

Mike Girouard's Blog There are a lot of professions that have emerged from the web: designers, developers, strategists, search engine optimists, information architects, usability and accessibility consultants, the list goes on… Today, I’d like to talk about the first two. I wouldn’t go so far to say that the titles should be considered harmful by any means, rather we have just outgrown our job titles! In the last three jobs that I have worked, there seems to large differences of opinions in the definitions of the job descriptions of web designers and web developers. As most folks in management see it, the definitions are pretty obvious: designers make the pretty pictures; developers bring them to life with code. However, the web poses an interesting problem: where does slicing, XHTML and CSS come in? Is it something that only developers do because i... (more)

Rolling Your Own MVC: The Page Load Scenario

Michael Girouard's Blog Before I get into any sort of detail, I think it's important to say that there is more than one way to approach an MVC. Go ahead, ask a few seasoned developers how they would hack together a project like this and each one will give you a completely different answer. I'm going to do my best to simplify the process as much as I possibly can without damaging the stability, security, and scalability of the framework. In my previous article, I announced that I would be documenting the process of developing a simple MVC framework. In this one I will go into a litt... (more)

AJAXWorld RIA Conference - Speaker Mike Girouard's JavaScript Design Patterns, #1

Mike Girouard's Blog I would like to begin this special series in the run-up to AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October with one of the most useful and commonplace patterns in my code. Arguably, this can be considered a feature of the JavaScript language rather than a design pattern; however, when considering the contexts in which it is applied, I regard it as a pattern. Self-invocation (also known as auto-invocation) is when a function executes immediately upon it’s definition. This is a core pattern and serves as the foundation for many other patterns of JavaScript developme... (more)

Rolling Your Own MVC Framework - Starting-Point for Any PHP Application

Michael Girouard's Blog Over the next couple of articles, I'll be walking you through the process of developing a simple MVC framework that you can use as a starting point for almost any PHP application that needs to be developed. Furthermore this framework won't be like any other framework you've seen: it's going to be small enough to not obstruct the real development, elegant enough to make it a pleasure to work on in the future, and scalable enough to be useful in the development of applications of any size. How? By keeping things simple and resisting the urge to add tons of stupi... (more)

AJAXWorld RIA Conference - Speaker Mike Girouard's JavaScript Design Patterns, #2

Mike Girouard's Blog Load time configuration is the process where a JavaScript application configures itself as it is being loaded. This pattern is most commonly found in libraries in which they configure themselves at load time to be optimized for a particular browser. Load time configuration is also known as load time branching. Motivation The primary motivation behind load time configuration is to optimize conditional operations such as generating XMLHttpRequest instances or adding event listeners. Since both operations vary amongst clients, specific conditions must be checked... (more)