April 4th, 2008 – by Torrey Rice
There are some significant challenges facing Python, not the least of which are the large numbers of developers currently using Java and PHP.
Dangoor who is also a Product Manager at Web application developer SitePen, commented that for Java programmers, the barrier is likely that Python is dynamically typed whereas Java is statically typed.
“I am firmly in the camp that believes that static typing does not buy you much safety and that you need good automated tests to help ensure that your code is correct and stays correct,” Dangoor stated. “However, it is also true that static typing gives IDEs more information that they can use in helping out the user. Ultimately, though, Python’s language features make your code so much simpler that you very quickly get over some of the IDE extras that you get from static typing.”
Check out the full InternetNews article
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April 4th, 2008 – by Dylan Schiemann
Since Dojo 1.1 was released a week ago, several outlets have published articles:
Posted in Dojo, Dojo Offline, JavaScript, News, Open Source, ajax, status report | No Comments
April 3rd, 2008 – by mwilcox
The purpose of this article is to provide a list of advanced debugging techniques that are not easily found elsewhere on the web. Using Google to search for JavaScript debugging just gives you hundreds of articles about using alerts and how Firebug works. We all worship at the altar of Firebug, but there are things that can go beyond a console.log(). The following is a list of methods that every developer should have in their toolbox.
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Posted in Dojo, Firebug, JavaScript, browsers, debugging | 24 Comments
April 3rd, 2008 – by Kevin Dangoor
Brad Neuberg, of the Gears team, took a stab at defining the “Open Web”. We at SitePen are very strongly in favor of the Open Web concept, because it’s the Open Web that has gotten us what we have today and will ultimately lead us to the best “web of the future”. I think that Brad does a good job laying out the characteristics that have made the web successful thus far.
The one thing that I disagree with is this part of “Transparency”:
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Tags: adobe, flash, flex, gears, microsoft, open web, silverlight
Posted in Open Source, browsers, thoughts | 23 Comments
April 2nd, 2008 – by phiggins
The Dojo Toolkit 1.1 introduces support to run within Adobe’s AIR environment, and I think it may have re-sparked my interest in ActionScript. It was a lot easier than I had anticipated to get started coding, but came to a halt when it occurred to me that my newly created .air installer and badge would be at best a ~5MB download simply because of the default release size. A 5MB “Hello AIR” app is less than unimpressive, so I immediately started thinking of ways to better the situation. I need a custom minified Dojo Toolkit package.
Enter “dojo-mini” – an experiment in Dojo Toolkit deployment optimization. When Alex tagged the release, I immediately downloaded it, dropped it in as the toolkit for my upcoming AIR Demo and began browsing the source making a mental list of crufty files I could drop to shave some bytes away. I was amazed with my results:
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Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, Performance | 27 Comments
April 1st, 2008 – by Kevin Dangoor
As programming languages go, Python is hot. It was TIOBE’s language of the year in 2007 because of its fast growth. Python’s performance, while certainly good enough for most applications, is middle of the road in the grand scheme of languages. This has led to efforts like Psyco and Cython to make Python faster as needed.
We’re pleased to introduce the latest SitePen-supported open source project: Psychotic. As the name implies, Psychotic is inspired by the previous work of Psyco. Indeed, speeding up your program with Psychotic is just as easy as it is with Psyco:
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Tags: psychotic, python
Posted in News, Open Source | 1 Comment
