Linde002::PHP

I was working on a small webapp a couple of months ago that would help my girlfriend manage her research data on horses. Amongst her wishes was that she would be able to view the selected horse’s family tree.

Now this is a specific wish that contains two generic problems.

• Retrieving hierarchical data from flat dataset
• Representing hierarchial / genealogical data in a browser

More info after the jump:
(more…)

I attended a session on Dojo yesterday and I can’t say I’m impressed. The speaker was good and enthousiastic but it just felt like another general purpose ajax-enabled javascript framework. Especially the remarks that DOJO is inherently slow and includes 40 other .js files for one request if you include all the features were adding to my suspicion that I was right in never giving it a go.

The thing that really struck me though was that you can circumvent the 40+ include problem by, here it comes, recompiling dojo with a custom made built script that is read by java which will output a compressed dojo package that you can use.

IMHO, if you need a java packager for a javascript framework you might want to rethink your approach.

I was wandering around the exhibit hall and started talking with one of the reps from appcelerator and he explained to me what it did. Well, in short… It kicks ass.

The long version though, is that it changes the developmentparadigm from functional programming to declarative programming, a short example is creating a calendar with HTML. We normall create a html table  or a div structure and if we want to make it interactive we add a lot of javascript. What Appcelerator does is  that is uses it’s own XML namespace and allows you to ‘declare’ a calendar widget like
<app:calendar opt1='apple' opt2='pear'/>
which is pretty cool.

Another cool feature is that they’ve created a client side messaging bus that interacts with their custom event model. This might work out to something like this:
<a on="click then activatedSignal"/>
And every widget that has subscribed to the ‘activatedSignal’ event can respond. This looks something like this:
<app:calendar on="activatedSignal then display:hidden"/>

It does alot more cool things and it’s free! so go check it out.