validation
6 Jul 2008
This past week has seen yet another week of heavy development on the new Singularity web conference site.
A lot of what we're doing this year is building infrastructure. Singularity is a new breed of conference and we are doing a lot of work behind the scenes to ensure that we have the solid foundations we need not just to run it this year but to build upon for future years. My friends and fellow team members will probably tire of hearing the worlds "focus", "form follows function", and "solid foundations" over the course of the next few months if they haven't already. Our focus is on building a stable, functional platform to host global conferences on. There won't be any frivolous bells and whistles and whizz-bang eye-candy. Instead, we are building a minimalist, accessible social site and a stable and functional conference application. As I keep telling myself and everyone around me: focus, focus, focus!
When you're doing Ajax-based validation on a text input control, you really don't want your data calls firing off at every
keyup event as this will put unnecessary load on your server. Instead, the thing to do is to wait a little while after the user's last key release to see if she's stopped typing before firing off a request.
I'm sure that there are hundreds of code snippets lying about for doing just this, and that JQuery probably already has something built in or a plugin for it, but a quick Google search didn't turn up anything for me so here I am, sharing my simple solution for delayed Ajax validation in JavaScript.
EU-based businesses are required to obtain valid VAT numbers from VAT-registered entities.
Unfortunately, especially for e-commerce systems, there isn't a simple way to check the validity of a European VAT number. The European Commission provides a web site where you can validate VAT numbers by entering them in an HTML form. This is not practical, of course, for web applications.
Enter, the European VAT Number Validation API that I just hacked together on Google App Engine.
Flex comes with a built-in form validation system that unfortunately uses mystery meat tooltips to display component validation errors.
To see what I mean, take a look at the example I wrote a while back in the Validating Data Quick Start.