Hello. This is Brian Anderson again. I gave a brief introduction to myself in July of 2012. If you are curious, the best way to get to know more about me is through my LinkedIn page.
I have not been updating this site as frequently as I would have liked. This is partially because I have had too much to write about and partially because I have not been confident that this weblog is the ideal venue. I recently took a fantastic class on Content Management Systems taught by Mark DuBois for Working Connections and it really opened my eyes to some of the interesting things I could do with this website, so I am newly committing myself to keeping this site more up-to-date.
The site will be restructured as follows:
- New Website Map
I will be adding stubs to locations where there will be future articles and discussion. In the interim, the second phase of the barcode articles needs to be written, because I have the code written that will replace the brute force method to Code 128 barcodes. This is still browser-based, and while I lack the resources and inclination to test the software on all sorts of different versions of every browser imaginable, I do know that it works on any Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox or Opera browser that supports scripting. By the way, the Javascript is of a rudimentary and benign nature and requires no interaction with your local file system. The source files are extremely small and in the interest of keeping things open and comprehensible I will be combining them for each symbology in the examples. Remember, the initial constraint for this software is the user must be able to generate barcodes independent of any network. We are using the browser merely as a tool to display HTML. That means no jQuery, no PHP, no server-side calculations and no files external to the source.
Away we go. If you remember the first series of articles, they were focused on getting an HTML browser to represent barcodes that, when printed, would scan. I started with the Code 128 symbology and indicated that the technique would work with almost any flavor of barcode up to and including QR Code. As proof of that, I am including some examples of barcodes that are printed from browsers using the new Javascript technique. So far I have created Code 128, Code 39, Interleaved 2 of 5 and QR Code symbols with the new method.
I have found some quirks with the browsers and some other technical challenges I am working on before I can get this code “production ready”, but in the coming weeks I will be posting my progress. Until next time, thank you for tuning in.