JJinuxLand

I went to an OpenSocial talk at Google about a month ago. Sorry it's taken me so long to write a summary. Hopefully it won't be completely out of date ;) Here are a bunch of random notes:The talk was held in the same room that the Bay Area Python Interest Group normally holds its meetings. However, I knew right away that something was different when I got there a half an hour ahead of time, and the room was already filling up. During the meeting, I counted rows and columns, and estimated there were about 200 people present.

Google was making a big deal of the meeting. They were providing dinner, which they don't do for our group.

Looking at the JavaScript examples, the code looks strangely verbose.

Security is not defined in the spec. Dealing with third-party JavaScript is a challenge. Facebook's answer was FBJS. At least at that point in time, OpenSocial didn't have a well-defined answer to that problem.

One of the demos crashed.

They're taking the lowest …

I'm reading Isaac Asimov's book, "The Beginning and the End". I can't get enough Asimov, which is good, considering he's the most prolific author that ever lived.

"The Democracy of Learning" (Chapter 3 of "The Beginning and the End") is a short essay that appeared in "Know" magazine, which was a short-lived magazine that was put out by the makers of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica". It's ironic that Asimov was writing for the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" when he wrote:And I look forward to the time when computerization will place in every home a terminal connected to some central library which will place, in facsimile, or on the television screen, the resources of human generations at the very fingertips of even the least of humanity. But that, alas, was not in my time.Well, Asimov, you're right. Wikipedia is incredible, and I'm sorry you missed it.

Here are a few concurrency tricks if you're stuck using threads. I used these tricks years ago to write a Swing application in Jython, and I found them to be helpful enough to warrant a blog post, albeit a few years delayed.

First, let's suppose you have a UI and you want to talk to an external program written in another language that might occasionally block. Use the main thread for the UI and use a separate thread to coordinate with the external program. In general, most things that might block should have their own thread.

Name your threads.

It's likely that certain code should only be run by the UI thread and vice versa. At the top of each method, do an assertion on the thread name.

Avoid sharing data. Sharing data involves mutexes, etc. which is generally painful and easy to mess up. Instead, constrain each bit of data to a single thread. If you need to interact with that data from another thread, "ask the other thread for help".

The way I like to do this …

I overhauled the WSGI, Paste, and Pylons support for PyFacebook. Large portions of it had suffered from bit rot. Everything should be working now. I wrote a demo application in Pylons and it went smoothly. Best of all, I even documented my work ;)

This is a review of Ajax in Action.

It's amazing how much the JavaScript world has changed.

This book has a relaxing style, and it was enjoyable to read. However, it no longer represents what I think of as "modern" JavaScript. For instance, it doesn't cover closures until appendix B, and even then it tells the reader to avoid them. These days, having studied Dojo, jQuery, and Douglas Crockford's videos, it's clear that closures are at the heart of how modern JavaScript is written.

The copyright for this book is 2006, yet the index doesn't even mention Firebug, YUI, dojo, or jQuery which are now staples of the JavaScript community. Dojo is at least mentioned in the list of Ajax frameworks and libraries, but the others aren't.

This book is an interesting relic from that period when Ajax was first gaining popularity, before the major JavaScript frameworks had gained a foothold. These days, for those wanting to learn modern JavaScript, I recommend watchi…

Just in case you haven't seen this, this is frickin' hilarious:

It Had Too Many Functions

This took me quite a while to figure out, so I'm going to blog it for the sake of Google. To get Pylons to tell Genshi to output XHTML so that you can output FBML for Facebook, edit your environment.py and do:# Customize templating options via this variable
tmpl_options = config['buffet.template_options']

# Without this, all the FBML tags get stripped.
tmpl_options['genshi.default_format'] = 'xhtml'My templates now start with:<fb:fbml xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:py="http://genshi.edgewall.org/"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
xmlns:fb="fbml">