Javascript Toolkits; Web Programming

So I've started working with the Dojo Toolkit -- mostly because I ran the demo for it, and I was impressed by what it could do out of the box. It does have a very nicely featured demonstration set.

I've mentioned this to some friends and colleagues, and instead of thoughts or experiences with this toolkit, I got back a whole bunch of comments about why I chose to work with Dojo and not "my favorite toolkit, x," where X is either a larger distribution that includes Dojo, or a smaller, more specialized distribution that I've never heard of. The other suggestion I keep hearing is "Prototype".

That I've never heard of 'x', shouldn't be surprising. While I've been doing web pages and light web programming for some years, I've only done very lightweight JavaScript. I've never done anything with Ajax, for example. I've done pre-load and post-load things, but none of this requires a toolkit.

Anyway -- it's not that I don't want to hear about toolkits, but there is a certain undeniable power to a decent demonstration set -- not just a verbose description. And THAT is what got me to actually give Dojo a serious look.

http://dojocampus.org/explorer/

Once I get what I'm trying to do fully functional, I'll be sure to post it here. So, far, I've only played around on my home computer.

Twitter by Proxy

So, I'm done with twitview.

Twitview uses the web server (vollink.com) to pull my twitter data feed. Once pulled, I turn links into links.

The twittering view at the right side of this blog now uses twitview, as does the open-social app that I wrote for my iGoogle. I also added twitview to my main homepage.

Another advantage of this, is that my twitter feed is now also proxied, so will be visible in places where twitter may become blocked or banned.

Google Apps, iGoogle and Facebook

I've added Google Apps to my domain. I had already started handing pieces of my domain to Google when I started letting them host my blog. At the same time, I'm starting to take pieces back. More on that later...

I started playing with the Open Social API today. Really simple thing -- I realized that I wanted to put some basic, static HTML in a box on both my Facebook page and to my iGoogle page. So, it took me about an hour to create an XML container application that would work within Google's open-social specification.

Facebook's developer framework is far more complex, but - thankfully - there's an application for Facebook called "Open Gadget" that allows me to wrap my Open Social xml format into an application format for facebook. It's not perfect (it makes the user click to "activate the gadget"), but it does what I want it to do.

TAKING IT BACK

Second -- I have decided to "proxy" my own blog, locally. I'm doing this because my friends in China are not able to see my blog. So, if you are not already reading this through my proxy page, try it out...
http://vollink.com/cgi-bin/blogview/.