Django -Dojo alliance was finally announced to the world by our very own Jacob Kaplan-Moss :

Starting with version 0.92 (which should be out in a few weeks, Murphy willing), Django is going to bundle Dojo with the toolkit. Specifically as part of Django’s admin interface (but available to user apps as well).

Read all about it in Jacob’s post .

I am overjoyed to see such cool high quality open source projects are working together. Clearly it will make it easy to create kick-ass highly interactive web applications in Django and it will advance Dojo positions as a premier AJAX toolkit. It is a rare win-win situation for everybody involved including users of both frameworks.

Finally full Snakes & Rubies video went live on Google Video! And it took only 18 days to verify it (19 days, if you count when I started to upload it). Apparently the whole process of verification depends on file size nonlinearly. It cannot depend on content because it is a combination of smaller files: Adrian’s Django presentation , David’s Rails presentation , and Q&A session . Oh, well.

And now is time for some stats (1/9/2006–1/27/2006):

It looks like nbd was able to find the problem, which plagued many people (including me) with QoS. You can find details in this thread on OpenWrt forum. Instructions on how to install QoS package can be found in this FAQ entry . Give it a whirl and don’t forget to thank Felix Fietkau (nbd ).

QoS was the biggest feature on my "wanted" list. It means now I can produce an OpenWrt GUI (webui) module to deal with it. It coincides well with release of Dojo 0.2.2 . But most probably I’ll be using a snapshot because guys added so much new stuff to Dojo preparing for Dojo 0.3 (widget release). Given the stability of OpenWrt GUI Homunculus Alpha release , I may upgrade new release to Beta status.

Some time ago Jacob Kaplan-Moss released his documentary about Snakes & Rubies event . It is a must see video for all serious programmers working in different fields because it gives you a rare chance to understand the motives of two successful software projects.

Pretty soon it became obvious that sending links to hefty files or torrents is not the best way to spread the word — people are lazy and distractible. I needed something, which can play almost immediately. What can be better than Google Video (Beta) ? Jacob gave me his blessing and I started the process.

Brad Neuberg wrote a good article , which compares two different approaches to AJAX: thick client (e.g., Dojo style) and thin client (e.g., Prototype style). While it does a good job contrasting two approaches, I want to underscore that the underlying problem is a clash of two cultures between "local application" developers, and "web site" developers.

There is no doubt that local applications create the most satisfying end-user experience. Their typical weakness is in restriction of underlying data to local installation, which makes any collaboration impossible. "Connected applications" can help to alleviate this problem, but networking is hard in general and many local app programmers try to avoid it. They don’t have proper culture to do it, existing network APIs are hard to combine with GUI, and so on. In general they don’t get it.

Nowadays this question is asked frequently. A lot of guys in their 30s realize that they are the oldest guys in their groups. 20+ guys don’t see wise sages around. What is going on? It was debated on /. without any productive outcome (as usual).

Let’s take a look at the problem using available statistics. One nice source of data is the National Center for Educational Statistics . I made a chart using Table 280. "Earned degrees in computer and information sciences conferred by degree-granting institutions, by level of degree and sex of student: 1970-71 to 2002-03" (only totals are used):

Update on 11/25/2007: today this article presents mostly historical interest. Since Dojo 0.2 a lot of versions were published and many things were changed. At the time of this writing Dojo is at ripe 1.0. I had to disable all Ajax action in examples because I don’t use Dojo 0.2 anymore.

What is Filtering? It is a selection of items using some criteria (filter). In this tutorial I am going to filter documents of my blog (made with Django , of course) matching titles against user-specified substring. Later on I’ll talk about generalization of this approach.

In case you missed it too: TinyMCE 2.0.1 is out.

I am getting a feeling that everybody is trying to roll out something for Xmas. Hmm. Maybe I should do it too.

Dojo 0.2.1 is out. This is a maintenance release, which doesn’t change API but fixes some pesky bugs. Go and get it.

Today I saw new search phrase, which brought visitors to my humble blog: rails 1.0 "Lost connection to MySQL server during query". Yes, you guessed it right! Ruby on Rails 1.0 was released 4 days ago. Scrip.aculo.us 1.5 and Prototype 1.4 were released as well.

On 15th Dojo 0.2 was released too. It sports many widgets, improved speed, and new BSD license, which was added to AFL. Now you can use it in GPL projects as well as in commercial applications even, if you don’t understand legalese of AFL. Now there is no excuse for reinventing the wheel .

Many programmers have DIY attitude. It is understandable: they want to do new exciting stuff themselves. In some cases it is perfectly reasonable: exotic functionality, special requirements, performance enhancements, and so on. Sometimes incorporating 3rd-party library makes overall API inconsistent, which is bad especially for programming tools, or big projects.

There is a fine line between DIY and NIH , when DIY part is used without rational explanations. Of course, in some cases NIH is reasonable too, e.g., high price of acquisition of required 3rd-party tools, or intellectual property concerns.

A week ago I posted a link to David’s take on "Snakes and Rubies" event. Of course I am talking about article written by RoR’s creator. It is a great read, but this time I’ve read reader’s comments (or "challenges to the Loud Thinking"). Oh, boy! It gives you insight into Rails, Django, and their perception by developers and users. For example, I am not very familiar with i18n problem, but it looks like a lot of people were quite passionate about it.

Three weeks ago we had a discussion about Ajax support in Django, which resulted in "Ajax and Django" wiki page. A short recap: it lists a vague goal, some general considerations, and possible strategies; it scratches the surface of existing implementations (mostly RoR), existing third-party toolkits (Mochikit/Dojo), and related RPC-style and REST-style services. No code was produced, no consensus was reached, but now it is a part of Django’s Version One roadmap .

David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Ruby on Rails) wrote a little piece on Snakes and Rubies event highlighting differences between Ruby on Rails and Django . Very interesting read!

Rob Lambert just posted his thoughts on Snakes and Rubies event in Chicago today. I am sure we will have more info later (including promised video) but it is an interesting read anyway. And it is available now.

Update: Eric Sinclair posted his notes on the event .

I just released a refresher for OpenWrt WebUI alpha package. It fixes a bug, which was reported by several people.

Some users had problems with Net configurator applet, if wl0_country_code was unset in NVRAM. While it is extremely easy to set, I suggest reinstalling webui. Please read the original post on how to do it.

Thank you guys for your great feedback! Working together we will make webui even better.

It is practically impossible to travel to Muslim countries without hearing some anecdotes about Nasreddin Hodja . Here is one (the source ):

Hodja was once a judge. One day a man came to his house to complain about his neighbor. Hodja listened carefully and then said to him,

— My good man, you are right.

The man went away happily. In a little while the first man’s neighbor came to see Hodja. He complained about the first man. Hodja listened carefully to him, too, and then said,

Finally I released WebUI 0.1 (Homunculus) alpha — AJAX-based web interface for OpenWrt made with Dojo ! Highlights of this release: 5 more applets including firewall configurator and more network settings. Now proceed to install the package and to read release notes.

The package is here: webui-0.1-alpha.ipk . You can install it using following command in OpenWrt shell:

ipkg install http://lazutkin.com/download/webui-0.1-alpha.ipk

Release notes:

• WebUI can be installed side-by side with webif (comes standard with OpenWrt White Russian RC4). To access it use following URL: http://your_router/webui.html.
• Five more applets are added to this release:
  • System: provides a menu for existing applets.
  • Firewall configurator: simple management of DMZ and port forwarding.
  • Hosts configurator: manages a list of static hosts (used by DNS and by Firewall configurator).
  • Ethers configurator: manages a list of static assignment of IP by MACs.
  • WDS configurator: manages WDS connection settings.
• General clean up of user interface:
  • More information is moved to tooltips.
  • Help is provided by tooltips.
  • Context-specific references to OpenWrt documentation.
• Tested on following browsers:
  • Firefox: works.
  • IE6: works.
  • Opera 8.50: doesn’t work.
  • Konqueror: doesn’t work.
• I decided to proceed with release in spite of Konqueror and Opera problems. I hope it will be solved later. For now use Firefox.
• As always I appreciate your feedback: openwrt [@] lazutkin [.] com.

OpenWrt RC4 is out . Take it while it’s hot! It includes multiple stability updates and webif web-based user interface!

Update: OpenWrt GUI alpha is released and tested with RC4.

During final tests I found a nasty bug in "Firewall configurator" applet. I decided to postpone the release until I’ll be able fix it. Here is the bastard: