Blue Sky On Mars

I am taking preorders for the TurboGears Ultimate DVD, with more than 2 hours of new screencasts. Rather than copying the whole description here, or writing some new, less-useful description, I’ll just say “head on over and check it out”.

I’ve also got to comment on the new TurboGears merchandise. The tin TurboGears Toolbox is going to be quite the desk accessory:

But, I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on the new MarbleGears:

I’d imagine a lot of folks will be more excited about the DVD, which is great because it’s information I want to get out there. But I suspect that I, personally, will spend more time playing with my marbles than watching the DVD once it’s off to manufacturing

Richard Standbrook’s excellent looking site design that we’ve been previewing at TurboGears.org for a while has finally taken center stage: TurboGears: Front-to-Back Web Development. It seems like lots of things that have been brewing are bubbling to the surface now. Stay tuned!

IKEA | DREAM KITCHENS FOR EVERYONE is possibly the coolest, entirely upper case ad on the net. Amazing rotating picture effect.

While there are folks routing around JavaScript to implement in their native languages, there are folks like Joe Hewitt turning JavaScript development (at least with Firefox) into a more pleasant experience. Firebug 0.4 debugger (breakpoints and all!)

Andreas Zwinkau will be giving a TurboGears talk this coming Monday at [Web Montag]. If you live near Karlsruhe, Germany, stop by and check it out!

Ten years ago, when Apple was busy flushing itself down the toilet, who would have predicted shoes for sale via Apple’s site? Nike+iPod

I had a cool idea for a mashup and the web answered: Placeopedia.com - Connecting Wikipedia articles with their locations. Fun stuff!

Oprius Software has just put up some screencasts showing off their in-development software. Oprius Foundations is a hosted, fabulously ajaxy personal information manager (contacts, calendar and todo right now). They make heavy use of TurboGears widgets and have created a beautiful interface. It’s cool stuff, and I’d link to them even if they weren’t using me as example data in the contacts screencast

Rob Gonsalves makes paintings like Escher’s metamorphosis on steroids. Most excellent.

The recent introduction of the Google Web Toolkit, which allows you to write your JavaScript in Java put a thought back into my conciousness: why are people going so far out of their way to avoid writing JavaScript today?

To their credit, the Google Web Toolkit provides some distinct reasons to choose it over hand-coded JavaScript: static typign (for those who like that kind of thing) and the ability to use the IDE you know and love.

And I’m certainly not opposed to encapsulating JavaScript into features that are native to your server-side toolkit’s language. Reducing the amount of code you need to write is always a good thing. (And TurboGears widgets do that very thing).

The part that I have trouble grokking is the various projects that implement Dynamic Language X (say Python or Ruby) to JavaScript conversions. Yes, JavaScript is prototype-based rather than class-based. But, otherwise it’s not a big leap to go from Python or Ruby to a language like JavaScript. Adding a layer that converts Python to JavaScript seems to me that it just introduces another place to fail, and a somewhat difficult one to troubleshoot at that since the execution environment is quite different from the environment in which you’re writing your code. If you run into problems with that conversion, you’ve got to learn the JavaScript and the JavaScript debugging tools and then also figure out what’s wrong with the translation!

For a dynamic language user, I just don’t see the benefit as being with the risk at this point.

You should certainly use a JavaScript library of some sort to ease common programming tasks. JavaScript-the-language is easy enough to follow, but there are certainly inconveniences in the built-in library and pitfalls in browser compatibility which any one of a number of great toolkits will help you deal with.

This is not a rant, by the way. I’m genuinely curious to hear why people who are already using a dynamic language feel that it’s a big leap to go to JavaScript. Or, if you don’t feel it’s a big leap, what other reasons are there to use Language Foo -> JavaScript translators.