Over the past 10 business days, I’ve been working heavily on a project for a client that is using Salesforce but my coding efforts have been nearly 100% focused on client side javascript. To be more specific, I’ve been living in the jQuery world for 10 days. Doing so has proven to be beneficial to me as a developer in several ways, and it caused me to reflect a bit on why I feel I really needed this breather:

1. I’ve been living solely in Apex and Visualforce for two years now & I feel like I’ve lost a bit of ground on some of the things I used to do “pre-Salesforce”. Client side javascript was one of those things. It has been good to rekindle some of that front-end fire and exercise that skill set a bit. The old adage is true, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
2. It revealed some features to me that I didn’t know about the platform. Specifically, the ability for the apex:actionStatus tag to call out to javascript using “onStart” and “onStop” events (perhaps a more technical post on this subject in the future is warranted). In this case, there were several re-renders happening over panels that need jQuery’s attention as well. Since these items may or may not have been part of the DOM on the initial page load, this wasn’t very straightforward. Furthermore the re-render actions were setting defaults from the server that needed to be overwritten by jQuery due to previous user actions, so after the re-render was complete, I needed to re-establish or re-evaluate the user inputs from before the re-render. Due to the project’s usage of the jQuery BlockUI plugin, I was able to tie into that plugin’s “hide” method and then execute the necessary jQuery to manipulate the newly rendered DOM elements. #Slick
3. Sometimes you just need a break from status quo to refresh your mind. It opens you up to new techniques that living in a silo’d world may sometimes prevent you from picking up. In the end, taking these sideline breaks only strengthens your overall knowledge and that’s a good thing. #AlwaysBeLearning

I’ve still got plenty of jQuery time in front of me on this project so I’m looking forward to further honing that skill set and learning more about what is available to me on the platform side. Breaks are a good thing, but it will be good to get “home” again as well :)

:wq!