Jason Champion

The first “web 2.0″ site I have built from scratch, Got-It-Done.com, has just gone into public beta today.  It is a web-based task and to-do list management application with the ability to set up email reminders.  It’s free to use for 2 lists with up to 25 tasks per list — plenty of room to keep track of the things you need to do.  It’s quick and easy to use, so give it a try.  It may just help you get things done.

It was written using the Django web framework and the jQuery Javascript framework.

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes writing JavaScript knows that dealing with cross-browser issues is far more trouble than it’s worth.

It’s also really not a good idea to roll your own widgets for common things such as date pickers, tabs, and other UI elements.

That’s why JavaScript frameworks exist — they exist to solve the same problems every web developer must face.  If there wasn’t a need for them there wouldn’t be more than a dozen: Dojo, Echo3, ExtJS, Google Web Toolkit, jQuery, Midori, MochiKit, MooTools, Prototype, Pyjamas, Qooxdoo, Rialto, Rico, script.aculo.us, SweetDEV, YUI, and ZK.

These frameworks have varying levels of maturity and popularity.  I like to judge them by the number of books have been written.  A good rule of thumb is that a technology is mature if it’s been around long enough to have a how-to book published.  For the other thumb, you can judge a technology’s popularity by the quantity of books that have been published.

By this standard, it looks like Dojo (7 books), ExtJS (3 books), Google Web Toolkit (10 books), jQuery (9 books), MooTools (2 books), Prototype + script.aculo.us (4 books), YUI (1 book), and ZK (2 books) are all mature.  Since Dojo and jQuery are among the most popular, I decided to try using both and sticking with whichever works better.

It turns out that Dojo and jQuery have a very similar set of capabilities.  The ones I were most interested in were tabs, streamlining of AJAX calls, a slider, and a date picker.

After spending a bit with the docs, all of those tools were easy to implement in both frameworks.  I liked the way Dojo used attributes on page elements (dojoType=”dijit.form.HorizontalSlider”) more than the way jQuery creates elements (in the document.Ready() function).  It turns out that jQuery’s method results in smoother page rendering.

After I finished figuring out how to use each of them, I compared the rendered pages in a few browsers.  Dojo’s tab control doesn’t quite work right with IE, which makes it a deal-breaker.  jQuery’s the winner, at least for my future projects.

This week I attended the first meeting of the International Bootstrapping Association as a guest.

The topic of the meeting was “legal issues” and it had an interesting interactive format.  It was definitely not one of those “sit back and watch the action” type of things.  I had to think and I had to listen, no way out of that.  I didn’t learn as much as I had hoped to (I must admit, I’ve probably over-studied legal issues related to business), but I did take home a bit of useful information.  The best part was that things were set up in a way where people were encouraged to find solutions to help you with whatever situation you were concerned with.

The meeting was ran by Kevin Gadd from TechColumbus.  He makes a great MC and does a very good job of moving things along.

I haven’t yet joined the IBA, but I’m very likely to in spite of the fact that I’ve never been much of a “joiner”.  For those curious about the IBA meetings, you do get to attend one meeting as a guest before you have to join up.

Not long ago I spent a few weeks learning ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, and the Django web framework. The idea was to get deep enough into each to figure out whether I wanted to spend more time building things with them.

First was ASP.NET MVC. I was a bit apprehensive about diving in because classic ASP is the most disgusting thing ever to hit the web, and ASP.NET isn’t much better.

ASP.NET turned out to be quite usable. In fact, I would even say that it makes web development with Microsoft technologies not totally suck. It takes away almost all of the clunky ham-handedness that is inherent to ASP.NET, gets out of the way, and just lets you build a site.

I used it to build a DMOZ-like link directory site (yes, I know link directories are completely obsolete and the web doesn’t need another one — don’t worry, I built it to throw away). All I used to learn the basics was the “nerd dinner” sample book chapter from Scott Guthrie.  That’s all it took.

Next up was Ruby on Rails.  I took out a library book (can’t remember which one) and started working through it.  It was pretty straighforward and I built a simple blog-type site with it.  After spending a while with it I came to the conclusion that Rails is awesome but I don’t particularly care for the Ruby language.

After that I tackled Django.  I worked through the tutorial to build a polling site and it was also fairly easy to work with at first.  Although the database integration wasn’t quite as buttery-smooth as Rails, I really like working in Python, so that’s a major plus.  It also integrates very well with PostgreSQL, which is my favorite database engine.

Ultimately the winner for me ended up being Django, with ASP.NET MVC being a close second.  The deal-breaker was the fact that I use Linux as my primary web hosting and don’t care to switch to Windows.  All in all, scripting languages  and web frameworks are so similar as to just be a matter of personal taste anymore, and my taste runs to snakes and jazz rather than gems and trains.

I might like to try a Java framework, but I have no idea where to start in the world of Java.  I can write Java code (it’s almost identical to C#, which I’m a ninja at), but I have no idea what’s “out there” for Java.

I’ve been known to (in)frequent StackOverflow.com, a Q & A site for programmers.  It’s pretty handy, but doesn’t seem to have results turn up in Google too often, so I can’t imagine they get all that much organic traffic.

So, here’ s my badge, piece of flair, whatever ya call it: