Develop Reference

How can I convert an XML Object into a Javascript Object?

I have a project I need to do that requires the use of xml and javascript, however I'm not experienced in either.
Basicly its for a company that posts jobs in an rss feed using xml, and what they need is to have a page that allows a user to type in a search query, click a search button and have a list of available jobs returned back to them with only the title and the link, and upon clicking the link they will be directed to the full rss xml item. which they can then read.
Now as far as my logic goes, I don't know how to use jquery and quite honestly I don't think its necesary, I think that all this project needs is a bit of ajax however firstly one would need to create an xml object, convert it to a javascript object and only then manipulate it. etc...
If anyone has any insight I'd really appreciate it.

Is it a bad idea to store javascript and css in a database?

Ok so I'm trying to store user custom css and javascript in mysql database to be used later the head section on the page, so is it a good idea to store css and javascript in a database ? and if not what is the safe way to do this ?
I'm using wordpress and using esc_js() on javascript code I noticed it adds a backslash before quotes, and adds \n instead of new lines, so is it enough for javascript ?
and thanks in advance.

Short answer: Yes, it's fine as long as it's people you trust.
Long answer:
Make sure you 100% trust your users. There's a lot of exploits that can be done through CSS/JS, so make sure you're only allowing people you completely trust to do this. Even if you tried to implement filtering of some kind, people would find ways around.
Depending on how easily you could figure out the file name, I might consider storing the data in a file. After all, the database is unnecessary overhead if you can readily determine the file name. If you can't determine the file name easily, I just go ahead and store it in the database. (Or if you're planning on storing any meta data or version information or anything, I would go ahead and go for a DB.)

Email processing with NodeJS

I'm writing a Node application which among other things needs to receive email and process it so that it can be rendered in a Web page (as happens in Web mail, list archives, etc.). I've got the receiving part covered with Haraka (https://github.com/baudehlo/Haraka). From there to storing the received emails in Mongo is easy, and so long as they're plain text I can display them.
The part I'm missing is handling the rather involved varieties of ways in which email content can come, including alternatives, HTML, attachments, inlined images, and much more. That's a rather steep amount of functionality to have to put together, and I can't seem to find a JS library that will do it for me. Given the number of libraries out there and the speed at which new ones are added, it might just be that I've missed it — so pointers welcome!
And failing that, if I were to port an existing library for this over from another language, which one(s) would you recommend I look at?
Thanks!

You should check out haraka-couchdb and the other work maxogden is doing.
https://github.com/maxogden/haraka-couchdb
https://github.com/maxogden/couchmail
Haraka-CouchDB deals with storing the attachments. At the very least it should tell you how to do it with Mongo too.
At some point I'm hoping to put a simpler layer over the email parser in Haraka, so that you can just see the email contents easily - but that requires a javascript HTML to Text converter. Or I guess you could do it the other way around and convert the Text to HTML.

Im probably a little late responding, But I had a similar requirement for persisting emails in mongo-db. I created this stub of code that gets the body of emails and inserts into mongo, Next iteration is attachments.
The plugin can be found at https://github.com/jamescowie/haraka-mongo

Check out Kyatchi -> https://github.com/hamin/kyatchi
hope that helps

XML and Javascript: the right tool for the job?

For years I've been reading about XML and I have just not quite grokked it. Most documents I see about it simply explain the syntax (extraordinarily easy to understand) and say that it's portable: I've worked with Unix my whole life so the idea of putting things in plain text to be portable is hardly revolutionary. My specific question is that I have a document (my CV) that I would like to present to web visitors in several formats: as a webpage, as a pdf, or even as plain text. Is XML and Javascript the right approach to take?
What I need is for the document to be easily editable, conversion easy and just easy general upkeep. For example, when I publish a paper, I'd like to take less than five minutes to add the info and then have everything go automatically from there.
Give me your opinions: I also use LaTeX compulsively, so my current approach has been just to have my CV in LaTeX and to convert it to a web-page using LaTeXML. However, I sorta have the feeling that with everybody jumping up and down about XML and Javascript, that there might be something good to learn about it.
I would also like to simplify maintaining my homepage by not duplicating the same footer for every single page that I set up.
Thanks,
Joel
Edit: I'll also take any book recommendations!

I think this is a slight misunderstanding of the combination of JavaScript and XML.
XML, in and of itself is an excellent means of representing data. It's largely human-readable, and easily parsed with libraries in nearly every programming language. That is the main benefit of XML.
Using XML with JavaScript is certainly a solution, but I think it's a matter of the question you're asking. JavaScript can parse XML, and allow you to obtain and manipulate data from your XML document. If you want to grab data from a server without reloading your HTML page (synchronously or asynchronously), then using JavaScript and XML is a valid way to do that.
If you want to, however, display your XML as a webpage, you would likely be better off using XML and XSLT [wikipedia], or perhaps PHP and XPath, to transform the document into browser-readable HTML. On the other hand, you could use nearly any language to convert the XML to a plain-text file, rich text file, or store it in a normalized database.
To sum up, XML is a great way to store data, because it can be used in so many different ways, and by so many different languages. It's an answer to many different questions; you just have to figure out which questions you're asking.

To elaborate on my comment
The transformation to whatever output you desire is depending on how you store your CV on your server and whether you have the possibility to process it on the server. If you store it in XML, you can transform it to desired (binary) output using server based tools - that would for php be pdf and word (on windows server platform) for example. XML would be interesting from a mark-up point of view since it would make it clear where the table of contents, headers, lists of experience and so one would be found.
JavaScript cannot transform something into PDF or word, that has to be done on the server. What javascript can do is to get a text from the server in XML or JSON using AJAX and manipulate this into what the user sees on the screen. For XML that can be done with XSL(T) too. If you want for self-education purposes to use JavaScript, JSON is very nice since it is in my opinion more readable than XML and it creates a populated javascript object with the least work.
Footer in javascript: in the page have
<script type="text/javascript" src="footer.js"></script> and in footer.js, you can for example do
var footerText = 'Here goes whatever you want';
document.write(footerText);
Comparison between XML and JSON

I've got a webpage with browser-side XSLT transformation up and running for years. It's a playground, only some words in german. See how easy it is to build this on heese.net/test. You can switch between "Beispiel" (=Demo) and XSL. The sourcecode of the page in the iframe is the XML. You can do this serverside with 3 lines of PHP-code.
On Javascript: you can use it with XSLT and I show this on my site, but it can't interact. First the XSLT builds an HTML page out of your XML data and after this job is completely done the Javascript in the resultig HTML document begins to work.
Parsing XML with Javascript is a different task.

Is there any alternative to obfuscation to make it harder to get any string in javascript?

I use DropBox and I've had some trouble reaching to my files from other computers:
I not always want to login to anything when I'm in a public computer, but I like being able to reach my stuff from wherever I am.
So I've made a simple application that when put in the public folder, ran and given the right UID, creates (still in your public folder) an HTML of all the content in the folder (including subfolders) as a tree of links.
But I didn't risk loading it anywhere, since there are slightly private things in there (yes, I know that the folder's name is "PUBLIC").
So I've came up with the idea to make it a simple login page, given the right password, the rest of the page should load. brilliant!, but how?
If I did this by redirecting to other HTML on the same folder, I'd still put the html link in the web history and the "url's accessed" history of the administrator. So I should generate itin the same page.
I've done it:
alt text http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3045472/validate.png
And currently the page is a textbox and a button, and only if you type in the right password (defined in the generator) the rest of the page (with the link-tree) loads. The fault is that everything (password, URL's) is easily reachable through the source code.
Now, assuming I only want to avoid silly people to get it all too easily, not make a bulletproof all-content-holding NSA certified website, I though about some ways to make these information a bit harder to get.
As you may have already figured, I use a streamwritter to write an html file (head, loop through links, bottom), then it's extremely configurable, and I can come up with a pretty messy-but-working c# code, though my javascript knowledge is not that good.
Public links in DropBox look like this:
Summarizing: How do I hide the URL's ande the password to show them (MAINLY the password, of course) in my source-code so that no that it should require some effort on reading ?
P.S.: It's not that personal, if someone REALLY wants it, it could never be 100% protected, and if it was that important, I wouldnt put it in the public folder, also, if the dude really wants to get it that hard, he should deserve it.
P.S. 2.: "Use the ultra-3000'tron obfuscator!!11" is not a real answer, since my javascript is GENERATED by my c# program.
P.S. 3.: I don't want other solutions as "use a serverside application and host it somewhere to redirect and bla bla" or "compress the links in a .RAR file and put a password in it" since I'm doing this ALSO to learn, and I want the thrill of it =)
Update 1:
The one answer so far gives a perfect way (according to this question) to hide my password.
Now I want a good way to hide the URL's, maby a code snippet of the example URL I gave being composed, and if it's too tricky, maby how to generate it in C#, or anything ?
Update 2:
I thought about maybe making three "obfuscating methods" and choosing them randomly in the runtime. So anyone who figures out how to read one XML, could only read about one third of them, and maybe having a hard time finding the other rest of this third..
Update 3:
Just thought about REGEX, the URL could be neatly crowded by dummy not-url-allowed characters added randomly that would be removed by something like:
regex.replace(url, ^[^\w\d/:-\.%]+$,"")
So the nosy dude should have to be pretty advanced into programming somehow, eh? could anyone tell me if it would work or not ?

Well, as it seems you already know, this is a rather poor choice of security mechanism, but if you insist...
Don't store the actual string in the source. Store, for example, its MD5 hash. Then, when the user types in a password, compute its MD5 hash and compare it with the expected one.
Check out:
MD5 in JavaScript
MD5 in C#

To elaborate on miorel's idea, you can also encrypt the whole page, using password as a key. Basically, encode all content into one big string, ask for the password and decrypt that string. If the password is wrong, it will show loads of rubbish, that is it. Like
content = "encrypted string"
function decrypt(str, key) { your algorithm of choice here }
document.write(decrypt(content, prompt('Password?')))
The only thing you need is a decrypt implementation in javascript - but that's easy to google out, for example here or here.
This also renders the separate 'login' page useless.

Granted, this is akin to asking how you can strip in public without people seeing you, but given that, I'm assuming that the password you are trying to store is the one to DropBox. I suppose you could obfuscate the password and store it in a cookie. That would at least prevent someone from simply viewing the source to see the password, but obviously wouldn't stop someone running something like Fiddler and seeing it.
[snipped server side suggestion]
EDIT: To munge the Urls, why don't you simply build the urls on the fly and have the links call a javascript function to get the url? Your server-side code would populate an array in this function with obfuscated urls and the calling code would simply pass an index into the array. Thus, on viewing the source, there would be no instances of "http" anywhere other than static unsecure links.
ADDITION Ok. now that I have a better bead on the problem, it is easier to devise solution. There are libraries for doing encryption on the net in javascript (e.g. http://point-at-infinity.org/jsaes/) but the problem comes down to key management. Since its javascript, it is going to be public but there are hoops you can devise to make it harder to determine the key. In general, those tricks involve indirection. For example, store a lengthy stream of random characters (e.g. 40-50 or more) that is generated by your C# code and stored in the HTM file. In addition, the C# code would would store into your javascript function an array numeric values that represent pointers into the long stream of text that were used by the C# code to encrypt the passwords (or just the whole url).