As programmers we rarely have a luxury to write a project from scratch. Usually we have to retrofit existing projects with all cool things we need. If a new component, or a library we want to use introduces new concepts that bleed outside its boundary, we have a “culture clash”, when old code is unaware about new concepts have to work with it anyhow. Sometimes the clash is so bad that we have to give up on using shiny new things, or have to significantly rework their code, which requires time and efforts we cannot afford.

Incomplete objects allow us to concentrate on important properties of JavaScript objects ignoring the rest: we don’t need to specify every single property, and we can deal with cyclical graphs. Incomplete arrays is a complimentary feature to inspect only the first few array items. Both features are very useful for patterns, and heya-unify provides rich facilities to automate creating incomplete objects: they can be marked up explicitly on per-instance basis, recursively with a special utility, and we can specify how to deal with objects by default during unification.

Custom unification in heya-unify allows us to deal with our specific objects in JavaScript, create unification helpers, and even custom logical conditions. It is there to bridge unification with our existing projects. Looking at the 1st part and the 2nd part of the series is recommended before diving into details. Custom unification Unification makes comparing simple objects a cinch no matter how complex they are, and we can easily apply it to JSON-like trees as is.

Finally: my open source JavaScript project DCL is built on ideas described in this article. Available for node.js and modern browsers, it implements OOP with mixins and AOP at "class" and object level. Read documentation and background articles on www.dcljs.org, clone its code on github.com/uhop/dcl, and follow @dcl_js. Almost any Java programmer, who starts to study JS groking its OOP facilities and a dynamic nature of JS, thinks that they can be greatly improved and starts its own OOP library/helpers.

Many years ago I decided to replace plain text areas in Django’s Admin with rich text editor, so I can edit HTML on my blog using WYSIWYG. Six (yes, 6) years ago I looked around and selected TinyMCE. Over time it turned out that I was forced to upgrade TinyMCE and the link script I had because new browsers continue breaking my rich editor editing. Finally it stopped working again in all modern browsers, and I decided that enough is enough.

Explaining some dark corners of JavaScript, browsers, or Dojo for the 100th time I realized that I already did it on numerous occasions, and some of my answers are published on public web sites. So I decided to round up the most general ones I posted on StackOverflow and publish links to them here for a future reference. JavaScript This section is for language-specific topics. They can be equally applied in any environment.

In the previous post we explored “array extras” and how they can help us to write concise yet performant and clean code. In this post we take a look at generalizing recursive algorithms with recursion combinators — high-level functions that encapsulate all boilerplate code needed to set up the recursion. These functions were added to dojox.lang.functional and will be officially released with Dojo 1.2. In general the recursion is a form of iterative problem solving in the same category as loops.

Finally: my open source JavaScript project DCL is built on ideas described in this article. Available for node.js and modern browsers, it implements OOP with mixins and AOP at "class" and object level. Read documentation and background articles on www.dcljs.org, clone its code on github.com/uhop/dcl, and follow @dcl_js. If we look at the history of computer programming languages, we can see that practically all new programming methodologies were about one thing: taming complexity.

Everybody knows that JavaScript is a multi-paradigm language, and it can be used to program functionally. Practically all functional idioms can be used directly: higher-order functions, recursion, closures, and so on. The recent resurgence of Functional Programming (FP) brings functional methodologies in the mainstream. FP fundamentals gave us a lot of powerful idioms: iterative functions, which can replace loops, list processing in general, function manipulations, and many other things, which helps us to keep our code small yet concise, more powerful, and more fun.

Update 9/30/2006: when you finish this article don’t forget to read more about setting up tools in the second part: Setting up tools 2. My goal is to set up working environment for Django development on Windows box. You can find a lot of information on setting up open-source development tools on Linux. Somehow it is assumed that your project should target LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python). Windows-bound guys are advised to decorate their platform as ersatz Linux: install Apache, install MySQL, and you have WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, Python).

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.

Update: "The Simple Way" part of this tutorial is obsolete now. I am going to recreate examples using new improved RSS framework. Stay tuned! I was asked several times to explain how I did RSS for my site. Django has RSS framework, which is not documented. Most probably I am not the right guy to explain it but I’ll try. There are three ways to implement RSS with Django: The Simple: using Django’s RSS framework.

After some requests I decided to publish my code for categories. It’s very simple. It was inspired by following articles: A "category" Data Model (note: this article uses old-style model format, it doesn’t work anymore) and Relating an object to itself, many-to-one. from django.core import meta class Category(meta.Model): """ Category defines following fields: name - simple name of category, e.g., 'C++' full_name - full name of category, which includes names of all parents, e.