At SitePen, we work very hard to to provide our customers and fellow developers with useful web app development services. We’re currently deconstructing the development of Queued, our Netflix Queue management application built with Dojo and Adobe AIR. Having presented on dojo.deferred and related topics at the Ajax Experience, and having heard that the Queued team ran into a few problems with them, I thought it would be interesting to review problems that are sometimes encountered when using Deferreds. What is the source of these problems, are these problems related to bugs or because there are misunderstandings, and how should we address this going forward?
Archive for March, 2009
Queued: Demystifying Deferreds
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009Queued: Architectural Decisions
Monday, March 30th, 2009Dojo is a very flexible toolkit; it doesn’t dictate how you organize your code or create your widgets. It simply provides tools, and it’s up to you to decide how you want to fit them together. Developing with AIR puts you squarely in the browser-based application model, but aside from that it mostly stays out of your way as well. As part of our series on the Queued development process, I’m going to take a look at the decisions we made and the philosophies we adopted for the project. It should provide some insight into our process.
Introducing DojoX DataChart
Monday, March 30th, 2009The latest addition in the Dojo 1.3 release is the new dojox.charting class, DataChart. Its primary purpose is to make connecting a chart to a Data Store a simple process. There are also other benefits with DataChart: less parameters are needed to create a basic chart, and more defaults and convenience methods get you up and running quickly with Dojox Charting.
Queued: Visualizing the Queue
Friday, March 27th, 2009Visual Translation
As with every SitePen project, we started out Queued with a set of written requirements that defined what the app should do. From that set of requirements, the design team began to define common user goals and create wireframes that detailed how the user would achieve these goals.
We created a set of wireframes for every screen in the app and then the visual fun began. What should it look like?
Queued: API Challenges
Thursday, March 26th, 2009SitePen’s new Queued application works very well with the Netflix API, but the smoothness of this functionality was the result of a lot of research, and trial and error. In fact, this experience led me to propose that future project timelines should budget extra time when working with an unfamiliar API—and even more time when that API is brand new and untested. Netflix released one of the more exciting APIs in recent months and SitePen began to work with it right away. The Netflix team did great work on their API and they were also very helpful with us when we had questions or there was a bug on their end. I can imagine the challenges of setting up a (Netflix) REST API with an existing system and a large and complex library of items was not simple. Integration with the Netflix API presented its own set of challenges to us.
Queued: New Interaction Tricks for the Old Netflix Dog
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009Sometimes building an application from scratch is easier than building on an already existing interaction model. For Queued, our goal was to take the Netflix user experience and port it to a lightweight desktop application, while adding some modest enhancements.
Creating an alternate interface for an already well-known web site carries some unique responsibilities. First, unless there is something seriously wrong with the original site, straying too far from the established model can be counterproductive. Second, innovating on existing features becomes more important than replacing them. And third, adding new interface functionality without obstructing existing interactions remains a crucial consideration.
For the Queued project, SitePen faced the additional challenge of showing off features of Adobe AIR that might not necessarily lead to the most fluid interaction, but which were powerful enough to merit inclusion as a demonstration of AIR’s powerful capabilities. We’ll discuss a few of our interaction changes here, though these aren’t the only modifications that we decided to implement.
Queued Overviewed
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009Last month, we announced Queued, an open-source application for managing your Netflix Queue. Queued is a desktop application created with web technologies and techniques including the Dojo Toolkit, and it is distributed as an Adobe AIR application to provide several performance boosting benefits from living on the desktop.
At SitePen, we help our clients build great web applications. Most are not available for public consumption as they live behind company firewalls and/or require licensing. On the other hand, Queued is free and open-source software, BSD-licensed, and hosted on Google Code.
Slacker Databases Break All The Rules
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009At first glance, the Persevere database looks like most of the others. You push pairs of keys and values into it, and it stores them away. But that’s just the beginning. Persevere provides a well-established hierarchy for objects that makes it possible to add much more structure to your database, giving it much of the form that we traditionally associate with the last generation of databases. Persevere is more of a back-end storage facility for JavaScript objects created by AJAX toolkits like Dojo, a detail that makes sense given that some of the principal developers work for SitePen, a consulting group with a core group of Dojo devotees.
Munich Dojo Workshop
Friday, March 20th, 2009SitePen and uxebu are pleased to announce their first joint Dojo workshop in Munich, Germany. Come join some of the co-creators of Dojo on the 7th and 8th of May, 2009 to learn how to build great web sites and applications with Dojo. This new workshop will be an engaging experience for anyone wanting to learn more about Dojo!
Dynamic Stylesheets, Part 1
Friday, March 13th, 2009New to Dojo 1.2+ is dojox.html.style. This is a collection of methods which give you the ability to query the stylesheets collection in a document, add and remove rules, and dynamically create new sheets. In this article I’ll explain why and where this is of use, and walk through a split-panel demo that uses dynamic stylesheets to size a 2 column layout.
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