I have been having fun with jQuery for a while and found it a truly state-of-art Javascript library. It’s got many good non-intrusive designs and incredible behaviour predictability. I figured one day that I was reluctant to do DOM manipulation when I was asked to do some SIMPLE proof-of-concept javascript hacks. I certainly hate jQuery in a way that it makes me so lazy, you know, people sometimes feel more secure with better knowledge of the underlying mechanisms but I just can’t help forgetting them.

Anyway, while I am lovin’ jQuery, I always thought I had an reliable omnipotent library, the mighty Dojo Toolkit (”Hallelujah“!) , and that really made me feel secure as if I am backed with it so that if I ever found something can’t be tackled by “lightweight” libraries like jQuery, I can go and grab Dojo and attack the problems with Dijits and Dojox.

“…Maybe the team lead is travelling in a space shuttle between galaxies…”

However, as the title of the article suggests, it doesn’t seem to be the case any more. I haven’t looked into Dojo for a year, but last time I used it it still had one of world’s most promising cross browser dynamic graphic feature, with a lot buzz on a higher level charting engine as well. Yet after year, I figured the current chart engine doesn’t even support custom labelling meaning it will only show 1 - oo on the x axis. What can you achieve with such a limitation? Is it really hard to add a feature simple as that in?  I didn’t give up right away but rather googled for related discussions, and I did, cool, you may think just like I did. Well I found too very similar ones, both of which one of Dojo’s team lead had replied to promising the issue will be written in a few weeks, doesn’t sound too bad eh? The posts were 1 year apart in time, i.e. the first one was in 2007 with the promise that it was going to be done in a few years yet it’s still not there by now. Maybe the team lead is travelling in a space shuttle between galaxies so the time he sees is slower. That’s fine and cool but I certainly won’t be able to live to the pointer when he returns.

Okay, so I can’t use Dojox charting now, but I did some low level dojox.gfx before. How about we go and check that out? Go to the API tool, it’s got a much better interface now with eye-comforting dark gray and nice gradients. It also lists class properties, methods and namespaces in separate sections prefixed by type specific icons. Nice. Yet for most of the classes, there weren’t a single line of words describing what do the functions do or how they should be used, basically in the same state as years ago. Dojo had been behind in documentation since the beginning however it’s not improved after ages. Even the Ajax bubble is about to break yet they still haven’t done their job.

I also checked out Dojo Spotlight, a showcase of projects which adopt Dojo to implement front-end effects. I see few really inspiring ones and many had terrible look and feels.

I am not so sure about what happened to the organization of Dojo but I was pretty disappointed. I felt kind of lost because it doesn’t back me up that well as it used to be so I think I shall take it off my list and hopefully it can hit back sometime later.

This blog is more about reflection of realization of how I think I can keep up with the world technologies rather than Peppy itself.

When I first read about Peppy, yet another CSS selector, I was very reluctant to accept it. I’ve just become a fan of jQuery and now there is something new. Nowadays everyone is trying to impress others and nobody can tell immediately whose work will last for a long time. However with a bunch serious unit test the author provided and solid benchmark results, certainly some great work is done here. So I’d like to check out how to integrate this new selector with some of my other JS frameworks and will use it in my next project.

I am always easily fed up by having too many options, but this is the case more and more often in nowadays technologies world. And this trend will continue for sure because of the massive buzz and evolution of SOA. CTOs, Software Architects, and Software Engineers all need to wade through that software jungle to find out which meet the needs of the company, the product, and the component respectively. I have to give up my satisfaction with current technologies and software I am now comfortable with, and embrace whatever I find to be promising along the way. I may be wrong sometimes by passing on the best solution and choosing another, but at least I won’t be trying to stay in my comfort zone with the software I use from a decade ago.

So I’d like to write to myself, don’t hold any prejudice on new stuff.

SweetCron is probably the best thing I heard about in September. What it does is pulling off your updates from virtually all your web services supporting RSS and allow you to easily mix them together.

The Problem

It’s not hard to understand why this is useful. You now have accounts on so many great services, each of which is often extremely specialized in only one area and therefore reflects only one part of your life. Overtime you will want a centralized point where your friends can go and keep up with your updates in a single shot. Yet it’s probably out of anyone’s power to create a whole new website which allow you to do everything well: upload images and browse other people’s photo; save bookmarks and see what’s hot; upload videos and watch funniest vid today; and write a quick note and save it on server etc. During the first 2 years of Web 2.0 these services survived in tough competitions and established huge barriers for others to conquer. So you still need to keep those services separated not only for their exceptional usability, but also for their mature social network features. But the goal of having a one-stop shop for all of your footprint on the web is still unsatisfied.

SweetCron is a Solution

SweetCron deals with this. It allows you to add RSS of your pages on those services and it will retrieve them automatically and put those updates into your own database. It only tackles retrieval of your contents as oppose to supporting content creation, except the built-in blogging feature. This covers the most general use case in my mind, pretty much anyone who host their own website or blog. We see people displaying their flickr images on the sidebars everywhere, and it is often done by using some programming language specific library. If you need to display contents from another web service, you would need to find another library for it. Not only do those third-party libraries lack of support, their qualities often vary greatly too. They also often breaks when remote services are down, for example, and you will see many weird messages on your website.

SweetCron depends almost exclusively on RSS of your contents, which should be available on any web services today. If succeeds it stores them in your own database, which is usually as reliable as your website. This makes it very robust and compatible with most web services out of box.

More Info about SweetCron

I wasn’t sure about exact release date of the beta version but seemed it was at least a month or two back. After a little research I figured it was August 28th as blogged on ReadWriteWeb (Woah, exactly a month ago). The interface is as primitive as Twitter’s but it got the features right.

The work of SweetCron is led by Yongfook, a Japan-based “Web Producer” as he quotes himself. I came across with his website early in the year and found his “boxy” design, now a standard theme of SweetCron, quite inspiring. It’s great that someone would package his work and make it available to the public and let everyone get their hands all around it. It is very generous.

The official web page of SweetCron is http://sweetcron.com/, but it doesn’t provide a direct download link to it. You may choose to sign-up by email, or go to Google Code directly. http://code.google.com/p/sweetcron/

Buzzword - SMOGIE

With the new Google browser so suddenly hitting the industry, I think we’ve got something spelled out.

Now the future of web development just became SMOGGIER than ever as the web giant entered in the field.

IE Killer?

When it first came out some people would first think about eliminating IE with it. Yeah IE is now the most blamed browser and is playing devil as many have imagined. So maybe we will see only SMOG in a few years? But IE’s solid market share since the mid 90’s will still keep it the most popular browser for another decade, as long as it’s still bundled with future releases of Windows. So it get to take on some one weaker than IE.

On a second thought, who is  the real victim? Whereas Safari comes with Mac OS X, Firefox is the orphan who only (pretty much) get OEMed by Linux OS-es. So the best case is that both Firefox and Chrome are included by future Linux OS releases. And then Windows and Mac OS users will select ONE from the two as the secondary/primary browser on  their machine, but not both, except web developers maybe. If Chrome works great, it will drain Firefox’s users first. So I think we will more likely see a SOGgIE situation sooner than SMOG if either situation ever happens.

I came across with this video when I was checking out the Facebook API.

I think he looks nervous, somewhat at the time…..even though there were stories of how he overslept the meeting with Yahoo! last year, but there is nothing to blame.