The PyCon 2008 talk videos are making their way up to YouTube. My talk is not yet there, and the footage they’re putting up right now is the “raw” footage from the camera at the back of the room. I have posted a screencast version of my talk, “Rich UI Webapps with TurboGears 2 and Dojo”:

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We’re pleased to announce the release of the Dojo Toolkit 1.1. Significant progress has been made with this release, including:

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Recently Apple delivered Safari 3.1 with some very exciting features. While we still can’t use things like multiple background images and drop shadows across all browsers, we are getting to play with the future and I, for one, am loving it. One of the most interesting things in Safari 3.1 is the (hopefully soon to be proposed and standardized as part of the CSS3 spec) CSS Animations. CSS animations allow you to animate just about any property on an element as well as do fun things like rotate and skew. As a demo of this I created a quick and dirty CSS3 fisheye/dock demo. As an added bonus, the demo uses SVG in the img tag.

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As people are becoming more interested in Comet, “which Comet implementation should I use?” is becoming a common question.

At Comet Daily, we recently had a post comparing the maturity of various Comet implementations. From this, we came up with the idea of a Comet Comparison Guide to make it easy to learn about the major differences between implementations. We still have to add information about the Comet servers not developed by the contributors to Comet Daily. Once finished, we hope to have the definitive source for quickly comparing the options available for implementing Comet.

The Dojo Toolkit 1.1 (currently at RC2 stage) has introduced an improved RPC system that provides support for multiple forms of RPC like JSON-RPC and raw POST requests. The new RPC system also supports REST. Understanding the relationship between RPC and REST can help you to fully utilize this new system.

Often Representational State Transfer (REST) style architecture is pitted against Remote Procedure Call (RPC) style architecture. These contrasts may be beneficial for understanding the conceptual motivations and benefits of these two architectures. However, by understanding their relationship, RPC and REST style interaction can both be leveraged harmoniously. By utilizing the right combination of RPC and REST in the appropriate situations you can maximize application manageability, scalability, and efficiency. The relationship can be defined quite easily.

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Today, I was eating lunch alone at a restaurant and reading some news via my iPhone’s EDGE connection. Suddenly, Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » Optimizing Page Loading in the Web Browser made even more sense.

Apple has been putting actual dollars into making Safari and the underlying open source WebKit really, really fast. Safari 3 is significantly faster than Safari 2. There was another big speed boost after Safari 3.0.

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This past weekend was the time for PyCon 2008, which was in Chicago for the first time. The US PyCon conference is a volunteer-run conference, which means that it’s filled with Python enthusiasts. Even the vendors there are enthusiastic about Python.

This year, there was a lot to be cheery about. The Dallas venue of the past two years would never have held the 1,000+ person crowd. For me, the primary appeal of a conference like PyCon is that it’s a chance to meet many people who are doing interesting things. I’m a big fan of the “hallway track” and open spaces. I think it was at the first CodeMash that I heard Bruce Eckel talk about how you can watch an “eyes-forward” presentation anywhere on video, but the face-to-face discussion can only happen when people are brought together.

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We have been leading the efforts in the development of Service Mapping Description (SMD). SMD is a flexible format and can be used to describe JSON-RPC, REST, JSONP, and other web services. SMD will provide a foundation to facilitate a future of pluggable interoperable SAO-based web services, where client and server components can be decoupled. Existing client/server frameworks tend to have tightly coupled communication, and applications built with standalone JavaScript libraries like the Dojo Toolkit generally must build their own client and server communication with the only assistance in the form of Ajax wrappers. With SMD, web services can be described with an open format, and client libraries can utilize these SMD descriptions to build high-level friendly communication wrappers. Of course, the Dojo Toolkit has taken the lead with the new SMD implementations in the Dojo Toolkit 1.1, but with SMD-based web service interaction, there is no lock-in. This provides an open definition of web services: any client and server can participate in providing or consuming these web services.

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I was first exposed to metaclass programming through JavaScript, though I didn’t realize it. When I started digging into the guts of Django’s ORM system, I learned how metaclass programming in Python worked and discovered I’d been doing something similar in JavaScript for a while.

So what is it? Some great articles on metaclass programming turn up in Google and are worth a read. But for those of you that would rather just get down to business, I’ll try to summarize the idea really quickly, focusing on what we’re going to be able to do with Javascript.

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We recently added JSONPath support to the Dojo Toolkit. In the Dojo Toolkit 1.1, JSONPath queries can now be executed by calling dojox.jsonPath.query. JSONPath is a powerful tool for extracting data from JavaScript data objects, and has query capabilities that are similar to those of XPath queries on XML, except applied to JSON originating data. JSONPath follows JavaScript/C syntax where possible, borrowing from ES4 and Python as needed for certain operations, making for a very readable portable syntax.

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