Author Archive
Thursday, October 9th, 2008
A typical server-side web framework today includes three main components: a URL dispatching to some controller object scheme, a template engine, and a data mapping facility. Currently in Dojo, you’ll find that the latter two items already exist. dojox.dtl provides the first one, and dojo.data provides the second.
We provide SitePen Support customers with a custom-built user interface for managing their support account. When we started working on this customer interface, we opted to make the entire user interface driven by JavaScript. The server-side provides data and data manipulation functionality via JSON-RPC, but does not dynamically serve up pages as a typical web app would.
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Tags: django, reinhardt
Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, Performance, ajax | 9 Comments
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Building the Dojo Toolbox allowed us to dive into Adobe® AIR™, and to create a blended toolchain of JavaScript, PHP, Python and Rhino (JavaScript on the Java Virtual Machine) for developing an amazing desktop application using open web technologies. Read about how we built the Toolbox and what we really think of AIR.
The Initial Whirlwind
We started in late May with zero experience developing an Adobe AIR application and a goal of getting a great application developed in about one month. We had to figure out what exactly we wanted the Toolbox to do and what it could do. We also had to begin figuring out how to make it all happen. Just about all software projects start out that way, right?
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Tags: adobe air, dojo toolbox
Posted in Dojo, Open Source, ajax, browsers | 16 Comments
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
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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Tags: Dojo, helpspot, JavaScript, php, python
Posted in Cometd, DWR, Dojo, Support, ajax | 3 Comments
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
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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Tags: air, dojo toolbox, dojotoolbox
Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, News, Open Source, Performance, ajax | 22 Comments
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
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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Tags: build, deployment, paver, python, setuptools
Posted in Dojo | 4 Comments
Sunday, May 11th, 2008
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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Posted in Cometd, DWR, Dojo, Support, ajax | 1 Comment
Monday, May 5th, 2008
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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Tags: ecmascript, ecmascript 4, es4, java, jruby, jython, python
Posted in JavaScript, thoughts | 4 Comments
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
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
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
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
Monday, March 31st, 2008
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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Tags: pycon, pycon2008, python
Posted in Conferences, Dojo | 20 Comments
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