Posts tagged: WEB DEVELOPMENT

I’m not trying to cop out of learning actual Javascript, honest. My copy of the DOM Scripting book is on its way and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot. And I like almost everything about Javascript (except the curly braces and semicolons). I still remember reading an article by Simon Willison several years ago which demonstrated techniques for standards-compliant and elegant use of Javascript. Like many who lived through The Great DHTML Frenzy circa 2000, I found this idea completely shocking at the time.

I was working on a sharp little post about the bewildering array of available Javascript libraries and how I had almost become resigned to collecting lists-of-lists-of-libraries for future analysis. Then, while I was mulling this over, a neato Javascript library demo I was running crashed Safari, taking my post with it. Lesson 1: I will remember to always use “Edit in TextMate” in the future. Lesson 2: I won’t get too excited about cramming my pages full of Javascript.

Each year I spend some time doing research on inexpensive web hosting options for my students. It’s virtually impossible to find a cheap hosting company whose name doesn’t produce copious results for a Google search on “FoobarHost.net sucks”. The predominating mood for me at the end of this research is always: I’m really glad I have more than $10/month to spend on hosting. Since fall 2003 I’ve had a FreeBSD VPS with JohnCompanies, and it’s really quite excellent.

A small but common task in web interfaces, especially “admin” (back-end, content manager) interfaces, is sequencing items. Any time you have a collection of objects that requires arbitrary, user-defined ordering (i.e. ordering that can’t be derived from the objects’ values) you are faced with this problem. Navigation is a common example. If people can add items to a dynamically built navigation menu or tree, how do we let them specify the ordering so that “Contact” can appear below “About Us” or vice-versa?

My little pastebin site, dpaste.com, has been chugging along nicely since I announced it here about six weeks ago. Today I updated to the very latest Pygments codebase, which allowed me to add colorizers for Apache config files and bash scripts. I’ve also started to add some Django-specific rules to the Python colorizer; it now recognizes Django model field types (model.CharField and the like). My thanks go to everyone who’s been using it, especially those who have given me feature suggestions and problem reports.

E-Scribe is not, strictly speaking, a standards organization. However, I think the time is right to release this draft document on an important Internet standard. The document is presented inline here for convenience; however, the preferred permanent reference is: http://e-scribe.com/stfu Recent trends in internet-based application development have fostered the rapid spread of asynchronous, Javascript-based techniques known by the umbrella term "Ajax" and by related terms such as "AHAH", "POX", and so on.

Congratulations to Adrian and Jacob on the launch of their GFDL-licensed book on Django. From the Django blog: This is a pre-release, which means we’re actively looking for comments, typo fixes, corrections and other suggestions from readers like you, all around the world. We’ll try to incorporate your suggestions into the final product, which will be published by Apress early next year. Amazon.com is accepting preorders for the print edition, and the number of preorders so far has been astounding.