Tim Child

I have been using the Yahoo YUI Javascript library for more than a couple of years now (perhaps about 4) and although I really like it, I have never felt particularly productive using it.

Over those years I have also dabbled in other frameworks, including:

• ExtJS (mainly from my old work looking at theming it – and its heavily based upon YUI.) – I dislike the licensing on ExtJS so it really isn’t an option for me any more
• Looked strongly at Cappucino, but there was no real productivity gains to be had, and I wasn’t writing my current application as a solely Javascript app
• MooTools – Seems nice but never really gelled with it and I haven’t liked the documentation
• SproutCore – Love it so far, but again I am not writing a pure Javascript App.
• JQuery – have implemented some solutions over the last 6 months, and loved the productivity

Anyway, what I am currently developing really needed some strong enhancements, such as AJAX calls, better table views, nice widgets for date and time picking – the usual enhancements and I just felt that YUI was taking too long. My wishlist was:

1. A Very productive library
2. Good support from a community of active users
3. Good documentation.
4. Doesn’t impose made CSS changes
5. Speed of implementation and download

YUI 3 was a consideration, after all the Javascript team at Yahoo are among the best in the world, but it was too new and so didn’t have the community I was looking for.

I ended up with JQuery. After spending a day or so getting to grips and training myself properly with it, sure enough my productivity using it has reached heights to which I never got near with YUI (2.7 was the latest version I was using).

Another thing that I noticed was that I am actually writing a lot more productive code, rather than implementing bits of script that I change from all over the web. All the functions I need seem to be in the core library.

So right now, I am making many progressive enhancements to our App and it feels all the better for it.

It was just announced that Django 1.2 will be released on May 17th, which is in 3 days time.

Been waiting a while for this one to go to production release so I am really glad. The new messages framework looks much better, and I also love the date i18n features – something that really helps on a project at Cantemo where we have to deal with ISO formatted datetimes.

Now the users will be able to choose how their dates are displayed on individual systems.

I always have this problem when moving VMWare images of Ubuntu, the most recent of a 10.04 LTS Server. Whenever you move or copy a VMWare image it assigns a new Mac address and Ubuntu starts without properly bringing up the interface.

Really annoying when you are using VMWare server without a console.

To make it grab the IP Address again, simply remove the rule:

Then restart.

Of course before you move the image you could remove the rule and not have them problem.

Really interesting slide show by Drew Houston on what they have learnt about starting up Dropbox.

http://www.slideshare.net/gueste94e4c/dropbox-startup-lessons-learned-3836587