Start an Online Business – providing specific products and services has a good business potential. Currently, popular online trades include internet marketing, web design, and copywriting. It’s easy to start a business nowadays. But it is important to find the right people who will help you succeed. In addition, building relationships with the internet community is critical.

Join Get-Paid-To Websites – although the income potential of this technique is quite limited, it can provide easy extra income. Completing surveys, surfing the web, and signing up for trial offers are just some of the ways you can make fast money. There are many offers like this online. If you intend to join get-paid-to sites, it is important to differentiate legitimate sites from scams.

Find a Virtual Job – there are a lot of online jobs in today’s economy including online self-coaching, virtual assistance, and technical support. There are also consultation networks such as Bitwine that allows anyone to set up their profile and offer advice for pay on the web. A lot of these jobs involve communicating with clients directly through virtual means whether it is through emails, instant messaging, or online telephony.

Freelance Work – offering your specific services in exchange for money can be done on the internet as well. Services such as programming, copywriting, and web design are highly in demand on the internet today. Other freelancing jobs include translation, transcription, and proofreading. There are many freelance marketplaces that connect you to potential clients.

MVC or Model-View-Controller is a design pattern that separates a program into three components, the View, the Model and the Controller. The View refers to the component that appears to the user.  It is the code that generates what is shown to the user and it also receives input from the user as needed.  The Controller on the other hand, refers on the code that determines what action should be taken when a request from the user is received.  Finally, the Model refers to the section of code that does the processing of the request and also saves or retrieves data for the user before handing it back to the View.

Now, let’s focus on this design pattern in the web application programming point of view. MVC is currently being implemented by two of the popular web programming languages.  It is used in J2EE through the Struts, Spring, and JSF frameworks while it is also implemented by Ruby through the Rails framework. Other languages also have similar frameworks available though not as popular as those mentioned.  Lately, Microsoft has also released an update for their .NET framework to support the MVC pattern.

What really makes this pattern so powerful is that it allows an application to be built independently from each other.  This means, changes made to the implementation of one component should not drastically affect the other sections.  This is especially beneficial for teams working on a program.  Some of them can be working on the View component; creating the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code that allows for a more pleasing web interface for the user.  Others on the team could be working on the business logic of the program, focusing on how the data is processed and saved or retrieved from the database.  Most importantly, the controller can be used to direct where requests are sent and to what page will the information be displayed.

Let’s trace how a request is processed in an MVC pattern.  Let’s start with the request coming from the user.  The user usually makes their first request by invoking the initial page of a website by entering the website’s URL in the browser.  The controller catches the request for the initial page and invokes the proper action which makes the proper calls to the model components that accomplish the necessary processing.  Once all the required information are gathered, the page is rendered by the view and the page is shown to the user.

Volumes can be written about the MVC pattern and its intricacies so for more information, you may visit WikiPedia for more information and links to MVC frameworks for your programming language of choice.

Years before, Internet Explorer introduced DHTML or Dynamic HTML to allow these kinds of effects to be done from within the browser.  However, this was available to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer only.  There is a way to implement these effects via Javascript however, you had to know about animation and mathematical and physics equations to create them.  However, with the arrival of Script.aculo.us, these effects can now be easily created.

Script.aculo.us is not only for animation though.  It also has several functions that allow the programmer to add drag and drop functionality, in place editing, dynamic creation of Document Object Model(DOM) elements on the page, AJAX functionality, playing sounds, and unit testing.  That’s quite a mouthful of useful features that could not only make pages you make attractive but also make it functional and easier to program.

Checking out the homepage of Script.aculo.us, we can find links for all the features of the framework.  They are categorized into 6 groups.  These categories include: Core Effects, Combination Effects, Effect Helpers, Behaviours, Controls, and Miscellaneous.

The functions for the animation effects are found in the Core Effects, Combination Effects, and Effect helpers groups.  Some of the effects that can be created include:

• highlight
• morph
• move
• opacity
• scale
• parallel
• queues

Parallel and queues are not really separate effects but are instead a way for the programmer to string together several effects to create the illusion of one continuous effect.  Combination effects are a mixture of the core effects that have already been customized in a way so that they appear to be one smooth effect.

As for behaviors, script.aculo.us includes the following functions:

• draggable
• droppable
• sortable
• form element dalayed observer

These functions allow the programmer to create elements on the page that can be dragged and dropped using the mouse, sort values and text, and provide a way to monitor page events and respond to them after a specified time delay.

For AJAX programmers, the controls group of script.aculo.us would be beneficial.  These functions include:

• in place editor
• in place editor for collections
• auto-complete
• auto-complete with results from a local array
• slider

The in place editors allows the programmer to allow the user to change values of elements on the page and save them immediately.  The auto-complete features on the other hand allows the user to experience a more responsive system while typing information in the form of auto-suggest lists.  Finally, the slider feature allows the user to use slider bars to choose from a range of values instead of typing in the values manually.

The miscellaneous group of features are truly varied.  The builder feature allows the programmer to insert new elements to the page, while the sound feature provides a way to play and stop music on the page.  Finally, the unit testing features allows the programmer to test sections of their program without much difficulty.

So if you’re a web programmer looking for a way to integrate great effects and features to your page without the pain of creating them all from scratch, you may want to give script.aculo.us a test drive today!