Last week we had to submit our assignments for the Digital Design course, the requirements were to convert two pages from a Photoshop mockups to HTML files. Because of this course is my favorite one in this semester, I liked to challenge myself by converting three pages not only two in a record time. The time I spent in designing those three pages using Photoshop and the nice result that I got pushed me to use them all in creating the HTML files and to have more samples in my portfolio. Actually, the task was not as easy as I thought; I tried to use many Photoshop enhanced features to add a professional look to my design, and that made me spending more time than I expected in order to keep the same look and feel in the HTML pages as in Photoshop mock-up. Being detailed oriented in using the same pixel distance and the gradients exactly, is important for the front-end developing and that took me a while, but I was able to finish my project the end.

For the Database course, starting MySQL DBMS (Database Management System) was a kind of relief to me after spending the previous two weeks using more advanced topic in PL/SQL (Procedural Language/SQL), for more details visit: Oracle (PL/SQL). It was not easy to me understanding the full topics of using procedures and function with the PL/SQL depending on the lab exercise or the PowerPoint slides only; I had to go through the chapters that talk about these advanced programming subjects in our textbook. Certainly, the more exercise I do with procedures and functions the better knowledge I will have. Although, we are going to use MS-SQL server with ASP.NET and MySQL with PHP for the back-end development, learning Oracle Database plus PL/SQL database programming languages was helpful to me to understand the real structure of the database tables using one of the major DBMS, Oracle, in the world.

In web programming course, we wrote a simple web form to demonstrate the work of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) using regular JavaScript and jQuery was so important. Reloading the entire HTML page just for a piece of information that has to be fetched from the server is time-consuming, especially if the page has many multimedia files. Using XMLHttpRequest Object was a great solution for this problem, for more details visit: Ajax/jQuery. In the class, we tried to send the form information to a local server using XAMPP, a free and open-source web server, to imply the functionality of AJAX, you can read more about XAMPP.