Dojo Toolkit | Why Dojo?

Personally:

• Widgets are very handy to have when you are working on web or intranet apps.
• Code pedigree is very nice to have when you are trying to release a project at a big company.
• Once you wrap your head around it, the architecture of Dojo is very logical and predictable.

Trac is an excellent web-based wrapper for SVN that adds bug tracking, a wiki, and several handy project management features. I keep setting up new repositories up for all the little projects we cook up in DB2 Technical Marketing, so I thought I’d write up a guide.

Installing Trac, SVN, and dav_svn for Apache2 is left as an exercise for the reader.

Create a new SVN repository:

Create a new Trac environment:

Change the owner to Apache so that it can read and write:

Navigate to Apache site settings:

If you want Trac to support multiple repositories, edit the trac file to look like this:

The above assumes that all the repositories are in /var/trac

Navigate to Apache settings:

Append to dav_svn.conf:

The above lets you check out from http://yoursite/svn/Project

If you like, you can add a new user to dav_svn.psswd:

Users can then be granted permissions by editing the dav_svn.authz file. Sample file:

Restart Apache:

killall apache2
apache2

You now have have an Trac/SVN install with SVN at http://yoursite/svn/Project and Trac at http://yoursite/trac.cgi

The latest nightlies of Webkit (development branch of Apple Safari) now have the web inspector in them. It doesn’t replace the tools in the other browsers, but it does have one very effective piece of unique functionality — a page load graph that gives an exact breakdown of order-of-loading and time-to-load of each script, stylesheet, and image.

First of all, enable the debug menu. It gives you access to the Javascript console and such things.

1. Open C:\Documents and Settings\chng1me.T40-92U-V46\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari
2. Open Preferences.plist
3. Insert the lines below mid-file:

Open Safari by executing run-nightly-webkit.cmd in your Webkit install. Right-click and the inspect an element from the context menu.

Now, click on the icon in the bottom left-hand corner and choose Network.

Voila!

Apple has released Safari 3 Beta for Windows. Besides being slick and a pleasure to look at, it finally lets Windows-based web developers test their sites for the 5% that use Macs.

The other browsers that good web developers like us should test for are Opera, IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox.

Rails

dW | Turbocharge Ruby on Rails with Active Scaffold (June 2007)
dW | DB2 and Ruby on Rails, Part 3 (June 2007) [added]
dW | DB2 and Ruby on Rails, Part 2 (June 2007)
dW | DB2 and Ruby on Rails, Part 1 (May 2007)

I am using ActiveScaffold in my next mini-project.:)

When creating a table in a Rails migration, you have to specify data types using platform-agnostic names. The mapping of Rails types onto DB2 types is defined in ibm_db_adapter.rb:

Useful Resources

InfoCenter | DB2 Data Types
dW | DB2 and Ruby on Rails, Part 1 (May 2007)
dW | An Introduction to Ruby on Rails for DB2 Developers (June 2006)

The DB2 adapter is now called ibm_db. You can refresh your installation by typing gem install ibm_db at the command line and choosing the latest win32 release.

TechCrunch | Facebook Launches Facebook Platform

developers.facebook.com

Facebook is going to do to the Web what the Web did to the Internet.

When the Web with its HTTP showed up, it was just one among Email, Usenet, FTP, Telnet, Gopher, and many others. Now, most people think of the other things as applications running on top of the Web.

Facebook is a social-network driven by real-life relationships. I have my real-life friends, my classmates, and my coworkers on it. At least 20% of Torontonians are on it already. When one of my contacts posts a photo, joins a group, accepts an event invitation, or changes their status, I can see it on the front page. I check it daily.

They are about to add third-party applications to the site. They’ll nest in tidy spots on our profiles or improve on Facebook’s features. More than that, whenever I choose to use a third-party app, all my contacts will be notified via their front page.

This is unobtrusive, extremely viral, and has zero distribution cost. If I add the Last.fm widget, all the Last.fmers on my contacts list will add it too within a week.

Facebook is still just one among billions of sites. Shortly, it’ll be a platform. Digg, Delicious, Last.fm, Flickr, Gmail, et al. will be reduced to applications running upon the one true site — Facebook.

Is this a good thing? It’s easy and convenient, but it’s also centralized — the bad guys will need only one subpoena to find out things they should not.

Can it be stopped? Facebook’s reached critical mass. Usenetters have tried boycotting the Web, and yet the Web has soared past Usenet’s slow oblivion. Attempts to boycott Facebook are unlikely to succeed if a plurality uses it and gets locked in by it.

I, for one, welcome our new Facebook overlords. As a trusted web guru, I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground API caves.

It’s very easy to do reflection in Javascript. Reflection is when your code looks onto itself to discover its variables and functions. It allows two different Javascript codebases to learn about each other, and it’s useful for exploring third-party APIs.

Preamble

In Javascript, all objects are hashes/associative arrays/dictionaries. A hash is like an array, except that values are associated with unique key string rather than a numeric index.

Adding a new variable to an object is as simple as assigning a new value to a key in the object.

You can declare everything in place:

Or you can start with a blank object and assign things later:

Or you can do the same, but in a different notation:

The last is especially handy because it allows you to go from the string name of the variable to the variable without the performance penalties of eval().

{} is synonymous with new Object().

Reflection

The loop below pops up a dialog box with the name and value of every variable in object:

Everything in Javascript is an object. Functions are objects! document and window are objects. The most reliable reference for Javascript in a given browser is reflection into its innards.

Finally, some slightly more useful code:

More sophisticated uses are left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

After a successful form entry, a Rails scaffold redirects you to the list view of all items. This is controlled by app/controllers/customers_controller.rb, where “customers” is the name of the scaffold. You can easily change it to redirect to the edit view or the show view.

You want to change the redirect action from:

to

where ’show’ is the view that you want and customer is your model.

While writing a DB2 stored procedure that invoked a SOAP/WSDL web service using Apache Axis as part of WSIF, I ran into this doozie:

Ultimately, it’s caused by a too restrictive lib/security/java.policy file that ships with DB2.

Wrong Solution

The standard way to define an implementation is to create the following commons-logging.properties file and place it anywhere in your CLASSPATH (such as the root of a JAR file):

Alternatively, you can set the org.apache.commons.logging.Log configuration attribute for LogFactory programmatically.

Right Solution

Solution: Running an Axis SOAP client in Domino [or DB2]

My DB2 is installed into C:\Program Files\IBM\SQLLIB

1. Copy all your JARs to C:\Program Files\IBM\SQLLIB\java\jdk\jre\lib\ext
2. Open C:\Program Files\IBM\SQLLIB\java\jdk\jre\lib\security\
3. Open java.policy
4. Add:

5. Restart DB2

“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”
- Thoreau

How users read on the web
In short:

• Neutral language is 27% easier to read than marketese
• Short text is 58% easier to read than verbose text
• Scannable bullets are 47% easier to read than blank prose
• Start with conclusion; add details after
• Voice one idea per paragraph