Paweł Sołyga posted an excellent overview of the new
code review features over on Google Project. And if you want more details, head over to google's own support project (which I never knew existed) and read
How to use Google Code's code review tool.
"I’m personally a big fan of code reviews. Proper code review habits can really improve the quality of a code base and help you find bugs or design problems in your project. I also believe that a good tools for code review can improve developers life, so I’m always glad to see new tools or integrations in that field."
Anyone writing a javascript heavy web application, or heck if consider you're a web developer, you should watch this very interesting presentation from Joseph Smarr, the Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, Inc., where he's led the engineering of Plaxo's address-book integration application.
(
via)
"There is no such thing as information overload, only bad design."
— Edward Tufte
FLOSS weekly interviews Jacob Kaplan-Moss over at OSCON. Listening now but seems like a high level introduction to django, just picking Jacob's brain. They speak django concepts, architecture and django specifics. Good listen so far, always like to hear the creator's define their own project. I'd link to the FLOSS website but it seems down, so here's a nice
Wikipedia link. But the post links directly to the interview mp3 file.
"FLOSS Weekly is a free software / open source (FLOSS) themed podcast from the TWiT Network. The show premiered on April 7, 2006, and features prominent guests from the free software/open source community. It is hosted by Leo Laporte; his cohost for the first seventeen episodes was Chris DiBona and subsequently Randal Schwartz."
Django djblets it an interesting library of helper django code. It was created by the peeps behind the open source project ReviewBoard and the source for djblets can befound in the project's code base. Today they posted "Django Development with Djblets: Data Grids" which details a more intelligent table generation than your simple HTML table, including sorting, paging, highlighting, linking, data mapping, etc. Here's an example in action: user list.
Now, they have coupled the UI to the YahooUI library and ExtJS and that's the not too awesome part. Although those are both terrific and amazing libraries themselves, I just don't like being tied to an external js library when using a "reusable" app. Then again, if you were going to pick an external solution I suppose that one-two combo is one of the top contenders and they are looking for contributors to help support other libraries so I'll shut up. Anyhow, check it out. Here's the rest of the djblets source code and the post announcing the library with additional tutorials.
Djblet’s feature list currently consists of:
- Authentication improvements, making it easy to register and login in one step, seamlessly, handle password recovery, and more.
- Flexible datagrids for displaying data in a paginated list with user-specific column customization, ordering and sorting.
- Decorators to drastically simplify creation of simple and block template tags.
- Caching functions for calling a function and caching the result if the data isn’t already in the cache, and a special URL pattern matcher that prevents caching of any contained URLs.
- Unit testing utility classes.
"A common task in many web applications is to display a grid of data, such as rows from a database. Think the Inbox from GMail, the model lists from the Django administration interface, or the Dashboard from Review Board. It’s not too hard to write something that displays a grid by doing something like..."
Eric Holscher is a new(?) blogger I've been following. He's an employee over at The World Company (think LJWorld, the birthplace of django) and he's joining the few people creating screencasts in the django community. His latest project is django-testmaker and what it does is offer a productivity boost by automating test generation.
Kudos to Eric for not only posting the code for the community to use and hopeful grow, but also tackling the often under appreciated task of creating a well executed screencast.
"At work lately we've been writing a bunch of tests for all of the work we've been doing. This is generally a good thing (tm). I was getting tired of manually having to write all of the code to test the views inside of my app. So I decide to write a little app that helps me automate the writing of tests.
"
If you don't know Disqus (pronounced discuss) it's a service for commenting. Sounds boring, but it's not. In fact, they kind of took the concept of comments and turned it upside down. They made their feature rich service easy to implement on any site and then made it even simpler to manage your comments - both the ones you've submitted around the web yourself, and the ones other people left on your site. Oh, and the did this all using python, django and well... a lot of client side javscript I'd have to assume.
Just recently they announced in "Testing Django Applications" that they released a patch 7936 for implementing in browser testing using Selenium.
"This is a deal breaker. It makes Selenium tests much harder to write and maintain. As anyone who’s done testing knows, the harder tests are to write and maintain, the more likely they are to be ignored... So we here at Disqus decided this would a perfect opportunity to give something back to the Django community and help out anyone else setting out to do testing similar to ours."
