SitePen’s Support service is built using a variety of interesting techniques and technologies. Read on to see how we built a system that treats the web browser as a real client tier and bridges the worlds of JavaScript, Python and PHP seamlessly to provide a great experience for our customers.

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In the middle of May, we were given a mission: create a speedy, offline API documentation viewer and a graphical Dojo build tool. Here we are at the beginning of July, and the result is the Dojo Toolbox 1.0. This article is a first look at this new application.

Adobe® AIR™ has received a good deal of press attention over the past few months, and with good reason. It provides a way for web application developers to use the skills they already have to create cross-platform desktop applications. Starting with Dojo 1.1, Dojo has included support for AIR out-of-the-box. This made AIR an ideal target environment for the Dojo Toolbox.

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Dojo on the client and Python on the server make for a great combination. They’re easy, productive and powerful. In this article, I’ll show you how to use Python + Dojo to cut the number of requests to your server by 95% and simplify development and deployment while you’re at it.

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In March, we introduced the SitePen Support service to provide high-quality support for Dojo, DWR and Cometd from the people who know those projects inside and out.

We’re always watching to see how we can make our services better and after listening to our early support clients we’re making changes to ensure that clients are successful with the products we support.

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Mark Ramm-Christensen posed some questions about using the JVM as a platform for dynamic languages. Many people do, in fact, use dynamic languages on the JVM (Groovy, Beanshell, Rhino, Jython, JRuby are some big ones… and don’t forget Scala, Nice and other “non-dynamic” languages that target the JVM). But Java the platform has not gotten widespread or serious attention until recently (witness the recent resurgence of Jython, the rise of JRuby and the coming of the Da Vinci Machine).

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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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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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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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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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