Programing on the Shoulders of Giants

Programing is complicated. It’s a galaxy of ideas built on ideas, from Claude Shannon’s breakthrough paper, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, to the multitude of individuals all over the world sharing their code snippets online. Software developers don’t author applications in a vacuum. If we did, we would get nothing done. Here are a few of the first-degree people we felt deserved thanks for making MemexPlex possible.

JavaScript Code

Rich Text Editors found on Meme and Schema forms provided by TinyMCE at Moxicode which was extremely easy to integrate into our framework and JS event model.

JavaScript events are loaded via Simon Willison’s addLoadEvent() function, which has been invaluable for handling the large number of functions that must be performed to keep this site dynamic.

Much thanks to Dustin Diaz for pointing us to the Prototype Dollar Function ($()) replacing “document.getElementById” which has greatly slimmed down our code and enhanced its readability.

Bonus thanks to Dustin Diaz for his object-oriented implementation of a JavaScript Observer Class, which has dramatically increased the reusability of our functions and helped us overcome otherwise insurmountable technical hurdles.

The excellent Modal Windows are designed by Subimage LLC and can be found at Googe Code.

Thanks to Bobby Van Der Sluis for his Unobtrusive Dyanmic Select Boxes JavaScript, which allows us to easily filter the options available in a child dropdown based on the value of a parent.

PHP Code

Bonus thanks to Simon Willison for his fantastic PHP HtmlValidation Class, without which we would not be able to allow HTML markup in our text areas.

ricocheting’s MySQL class allowed us to skip having to figure out all the functions necessary for our persistence-layer transaction. Awesome sauce.

Rasmus Lerdorf and all the contributors to the PHP programing language, which we came to at a time when its object-oriented support had just matured, making our code slimmer through reusability and abstraction.

Douglas Lovell’s email validation function allows us to verify emails are properly formated.

Theory and Standards

Special thanks to Eric T Freeman, Elisabeth Robson, Bert Bates, and Kathy Sierra, authors of Head First Design Patterns, which brought the concepts introduced in the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns book down to Earth for us to understand them enough to actually implement a few.

Miscellaneous

The animated twisted dual geodesic dome image used for our loading screen is the creation of user Papy77 and made available through Wikipedia.

Our website favicons were designed using the online favicon.cc tool.

Both the IDEs Eclipse and Netbeans were used in the production of this application, depending on developer preferences.

Server2Go makes the deployable, run-off-a-local-machine version, of this application possible.

The Apache Software Foundation makes the server software running MemexPlex possible.

MySQL for the database behind MemexPlex.