Groovie

A friend recently brought to my attention that I seem to have a knack for insulting a language based on a quick overview without actually getting into it. After thinking about this awhile I’ve noticed it definitely seems to be more of a trend than I’d like.

The latest example of this was Ruby, but before that Python (Lisp before that). With each language, I’d find new things to nitpick on before really diving in (Which I always seemed to do anyways). As a result of this, I think its time for me to really grow up and stop picking on new languages till I’ve at least had the time to write a few apps in them and truly understand where they’re lacking.

As a quick side-note, here are the things I found to nitpick on before actually learning these languages:

• Objective-C: God, wtf is up with these [] all over the place?
• Lisp: God, wtf is up with these () all over the place?
• Python: God, wtf is up with these _ all over the place, and who in their right mind uses white-space to designate blocks?
• Ruby: God, wtf is up with these {|| } things all over the place?

Obviously I had issues with syntax, I hope to have purged myself of these issues as of this writing. Remember, sometimes a language has a damn good reason to have crazy characters all over the place.

Myghty is a powerful web application framework that builds on the strengths of Perl’s Mason using my favorite language, Python. While Myghty also handles page templating, it has some very powerful features that make it a full fledged framework in my opinion.

Wondering if Myghty is something you should check out?

I would highly recommend looking into Myghty if you’re looking for any of the following:

• Clean, unobtrusive templating language for integrating Python data and HTML
• An easy way to write pages that inherit their look/feel without needing .include statements
• Re-usable code that you can carry from one project to the next
• MVC programming paradigm , or page-driven paradigm (Myghty doesn’t care, it can be anywhere in between as well)
• Advanced caching ability, tunable to just the time intensive sections of a page
• Run as WSGI, FCGI, SCGI, mod_python, or stand-alone with hardly a single change to your code (to switch between them)
• Architecture that scales, from a single developer’s personal project, to a multi-developer’s company website

A friend alerted me the other day to some useful sites for tracking packages via RSS. There’s one for FedEx and one for UPS.

While these are quite cool, and nice to have in NetNewsWire, the same friend told me its even cooler to have updates to the feeds sent to Growl. That way you get a nice little pop-up window when one of your packages has moved on.

I decided the other day for a variety of reasons, to switch from the mod_perl web-app style to using Fast CGI with HTML::Mason. I only found one application out there that uses Mason with Fast CGI, which was the RT Ticket tracking system. However, the way it was setup didn’t match my requirements, nor the way their handler was configured.

After scouring the Internet some more, I hobbled together a working config section for my Apache+mod_fastcgi along with a template for the mason handler. Since I haven’t seen anything going over these basic steps anywhere else, here’s how I did it.

How often have you seen those sites with a form, and after you miss a field, it pops up a little message in red under the text box indicating what went wrong? I’m guessing a lot, and when writing web applications this can be a pain to code in.

Typically in Perl/PHP, you’d add this by going through your form, adding little bits of code under each and every form element to display the error on invalid input. I quickly got tired of this, and decided to simplify the process.