Brain Dump

Some miscellaneous thoughts

Archetypes, Ajax Web Services, offline Web Applications

In Django and Rails you make a model

In Plone you make a schema

The schema outlines the fields

You define a field

language = StringField('language',
  vocabulary = available_languages,
  enforceVocabulary = True,

And you also define the field appearance

widget = SelectionWidget(
  label="Source language",
  description="The language of the...")

This shows the form, the rest is the template

code = TextField('code',
    searchable = True,
    widget = TextAreaWidget(
        rows = 40,
        label = "Source code",
        description="The source code that you'd like to add to the site"
        )
    )

One file to define fields and views

Rest is boilerplate and bingo you've got models

For the sick, ArchgenXML is very popular

Check out: http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov

Ajax Web Services

Once upon a time there was Web Services

Does anyone use them?

Concept of the cloud is good

But can't it just be xml-rpc etc

There is a new (old) kid on the block Ajax

Reads xml

But Ajax talk rarely involves data

Data is remote

Ajax can't talk to remote

(Dojo and a few other things now can)

AjaxProxyTool, a proxy for data

Browser > Proxy > Remote site

Example: ClearSpell

Example: ClearRSS

Other neat things

Caching

Security

Transforms

A new age of Web Services that might work

...no specification to read

...it's simple

...it's cool

Will Writely ever beat Word?

People who wrote it are rich

But does you mother use it?

Mine doesn't

Several reasons

Web sites don't feel like the real thing

...or interact with things clipboard (well)

An application like say a powerpoint killer

Combination of data storage

Security on that data

Application specific code

Presentation code

Do I need to build all those?

Can I just integrate it all together?

Tools: Javascript, S3

Python would be very good at this

Example: erm I haven't built one yet

But: if writely ran locally and synced up...

Confidence

Work on-line and off-line

Fast

Note: http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2006/04/now-in-browser-near-you-offline-access.html

Rumours: Apollo project from Adobe

...that's it