Currency Highlighter

Posted by Administrator on May 5, 2012 in My Stuff | 0 comments

About 7 years back I was still in college taking Computing Studies course and I received a freelance project to build a bookie system. It was not a solo work, I built it with my buddies. What the client wanted sounds simple but it was a difficult job to us. We were so dumb and we did not know how to start.

The client wanted a page to show with a large table that contains of a lot of rows and columns with numbers in there. And there was a local XML file in the server and they had a big team and their job is to update the XML every seconds if there is changes in the data. And our job is to update the table with the provided data in the XML file. I know you can’t visualize how it looks like, but have you seen stock system with a large table and a bunch of numbers in there and then number sometimes turn to green and red sometimes? Yea, the output is similar. Well, I can’t really remember how we did it, but it took four us about one month time to get that single page done I guess.

I was quite free for the past few days at the night time, and suddenly I was in a mood of building jQuery plugin, but I did not know what to build. And I slowly recalled back there was this bookie system took four us one month time to complete a page, and immediately I felt like building a plugin for that thing with jQuery skill I have now after 7 years. At first I thought of building a table with wordwide currencies rate in there and get real time data from RSS feed somewhere with aJAX. Well, those who know me well, they know I am a lazy person. Furthermore, I couldn’t find real time RSS feed that provides me a list of real time worldwide currencies rate. So in the end, I made something like this:

I made table with random numbers in there and also unique IDs for each boxes.
Then I made an aJax call to server side to generate random numbers with random IDs.
With random numbers and boxes IDs, I can now compare boxes value to see if it is greater or smaller than the new generated random number, if yes I change the background color to green else change it to red.

If you know there is a real time worldwide currencies RSS feed service and it is FREE, do drop a comment here please. I will definitely work on it and most probably make the whole thing into an open source jQuery plugin.

Below is what I built: