Post 8: STAR, AJAX with ASP.NET, PHP OOP

In career connections class, we talked about some interview questions and especially STAR technique for answering some kind of questions about a story or an event related to my previous experience. The acronym STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Results. We can give an example of a situation where we had to face a challenge; the task is what we should have to do or to achieve in that situation, the action that we took to overcome the problem and finally the result which how well my action reflected on the situation in a positive way.

As I expected the XML class will be, we went beyond the basic topics of using XML to using a language called XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations). XSLT is a way to transform XML from one format to another, for example converting an XML document to HTML document. Although the output of transformation could be in any form of text file, XSLT can only operate XML files. XSLT has some terms or commands that are used in other programming languages but it is a declarative language and uses templates to define the output that should result from processing different parts of the source files (XML documents). In the lab exercise, we had to retrieve different info, in other words, targeting different elements and attributes in the source XML file. The task was interesting; it was my first time to use or work on this language.

For ASP.NET class, using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) with ASP.NET was easier than using AJAX with JavaScript, again as I mentioned before in my previous posts that ASP.NET framework has many built-in libraries that do many tasks behind the scene on behalf of the programmer. Microsoft wants to provide their ASP.NET developers the tools they need to build pure client-side Ajax applications easily without going deep in learning JavaScript or even writing a single line of JavaScript code. Therefore, Microsoft has both a server-side Ajax framework and a client-side Ajax framework.

For the PHP Class, we had to write some codes using the Object Oriented part of PHP. Although PHP is not a strongly object-oriented language (OOP) like C# or JAVA and it’s a server side scripting language, but it has started supporting OOP since version 3 and improved in PHP 4 and finally many new features had been introduced in PHP 5. Going OOP is really necessary in today’s world and with all these sophisticated web applications, there is no doubt that OOP became something essential to any developer or programmer even with JavaScript.

The subjects or the information in Security and Quality Assurance class still in theory and sometimes I find it no easy to grasp. We didn’t get the chance yet to have our hand dirty with coding as we need to master the fundamental before applying these information to our code. I think when we start coding using the security topics that we learned in our code (PHP and JavaScript) understanding the whole idea will become much easier.