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,
— My good man, you are right.
Hodja’s wife had been listening to all this, and when the second man left, she turned to Hodja and said,
— Hodja, you told both men right. That’s impossible. They both can’t be right.
Hodja listened carefully to his wife and then said to her,
— My dear, you are right, too.
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:
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:
I found a blog post describing London Web Frameworks Night, which took place on 11/17/2005 at the University of Westminster. Jabbering Giraffe reports on presentation of three web frameworks: Catalyst, Django, And Ruby on Rails.
It is an interesting read. Author remarks that Django’s Admin ("with lots of Ajax and JavaScript goodness") was the main object of envy of other frameworks. Another interesting remark was how good Rails people are at marketing.
I was able to work more on OpenWrt GUI. Alpha release seems inevitable now. I’ll try to publish it during this weekend.
I added back the main applet, which serves as a menu for all other applets. More network configuration-related applets are added. Status applet is cleaned up considerably: all less important information was moved to tooltips. Here is a new screenshot for your viewing pleasure:
Stay tuned for upcoming alpha release!
As you all know Django has new shiny RSS framework. This change breaks my simple RSS tutorial and I am glad that it happened! To tell you the whole truth, it breaks only "The Simple Way" to do RSS in Django replacing it with even simpler one. "The Smart Way" RSS still works as you can see on my web site. Like I predicted the feedgenerator is still around and it learned some new tricks: it can produce Atom feed now! I am going to update the tutorial recreating old examples with new RSS framework. It will be fun!
Recently I looked at the stats of my web site. DreamHost provides Analog 6.0. I supplemented it with awstats. Plus there are some other means to analyze the traffic. Let’s put it this way: I know my average reader. I thought I did. Anyway I found a few surprises.
The country list includes 77 countries. Out of 193. Not bad for a personal blog. Practically all Eurasian countries, and countries of both Americas are in the list. Australia, New Zealand, and many island countries are there as well. Only 2 countries from Africa: South Africa and Senegal. Pity.
As of today i18n branch of Django is merged back to trunk. What is i18n? It is an abbreviation of the big word "internationalization". l10n ("localization") is a sibling of i18n. In practice it means that now you and I can do truly international multi-language web sites without much hassle. While this is more important for big corporations and international organizations, it is a big step for Django’s truly international community. Let’s thank Hugo (the engine behind this effort), all participating developers, and all translators for their monumental effort to make it a reality.
New TinyMCE 2.0RC4 is out. It fixes numerous bugs, which never bit me. Is it going to be the last RC before actual release? Who know. Grab it while it is hot!
I didn’t have a lot of time this weekend. So I decided to implement the simplest part of upcoming OpenWrt GUI (webui) — hosts editor. It is a perfect candidate to write something in 15 minutes or less — it has almost no "business" logic in it: read/edit/verify/write cycle. The hardest part was to learn how to upload dynamically generated files without writing them to disk first.
It turned out to be very simple. Right now it is implemented using Dojo’s versatile dojo.io.bind() facility and some external code.
Update: this document is officially obsolete — alpha is released!
Please download it again: /webui-0.1-pre-alpha.ipk — two debug files made their ways to the release messing things up. Now it is fixed and I hope it’ll work for you.
After some requests I’ve updated the OpenWrt GUI screenshots (below). Additionally I’ve recorded a screencast using Wink. Enjoy!
Update: new OpenWrt GUI alpha is released!
Update: this document is officially obsolete — alpha is released!
Finally I released a preview: /webui-0.1-pre-alpha.ipk!
I included two information applets and a simple network configuration applet. I think it would be enough for a proof of concept. I borrowed heavily from nbd’s webif. So if it works for you, it is due to his OpenWrt expertise. If it doesn’t, it is my fault.
Both webif and webui can be installed side by side:
Finally I found time to finish it up. It is pre-alpha quality now, but shows the direction.
The only problem is a packaging. I didn’t mean OpenWrt’s IPKG. I am talking about creating a custom build of Dojo to reduce the foot print. Dojo has a special provision for that but so far I was not able to do it getting some strange errors. I hope I’ll get some help from developers.
