Rich Waters

I guess I really ought to port it to Dojo and learn something about that particular library in the process. Whenever I’ve tried in the past though I’ve found it a bit like banging my head on a brick wall…

- Jake H (codestore)

Jack Ratcliff posted up the updated version of our slides to our OpenNTF project site for Ext.nd. Get them here

Also a quick update on our new release. We’re almost finished with everything, just down to some final testing and cleanup before we release it as I expect this version to see a whole lot more use than the prior ones

In case you didn’t notice, Ext released a new version yesterday fixing quite a number of bugs with the Ext 2.0 final release. Check out the blog entry for release notes and more information.

This also marks the first release containing code that I have contributed!

In case you haven’t seen. Check out BleedYellow.com. Lotus911 recently released this as a free public implementation of Lotus Connections. Blogs, Dogear, Profiles, and Activities are all supported and more will come.

To take a break from things for a bit I decided to see what it would take to hack up one of the WordPress plugins I use called Sociable. This plugin gives you a listing of more social web sites than you’ve ever heard of to simply checkmark those you want to include and place links at the bottom of each post (seen below). Wanting to support the new public Dogear offering, I wanted to add a button so that posts could be easily added to Bleed Yellow.

Since they all have nifty little icons, I first needed to find a picture of ‘the claw’ that I could use. Luckily someone had already created a favicon version. I downloaded it and simply converted it over to a PNG file to remain consistent with the other Sociable icons. ->

Next I needed to edit the sociable.php file to add my new site to their listing. Right near the top of the file they have an array containing all of the site definitions called “$sociable_known_sites”, within that array I added:

‘BleedYellow’ => Array(
‘favicon’ => ‘bleedyellow.png’,
‘url’ => ‘http://www.bleedyellow.com/dogear/post?url=PERMALINK&title=TITLE’,
),

Following the known sites array is an array listing all of the files Sociable uses. Within this ‘$sociable_files’ array I added a simple:

‘images/bleedyellow.png’,

(Which corresponds to the location that I put the image file)

After the quick hacks, my new site showed up in the options page and a simple check added it to my site. After hacking this up I thought I would try my hand at BlogSphere, but after searching for short while I wasn’t able to decipher where this would go. Perhaps someone more familiar will add it in.

Well I suppose we should make good on our promises from our session Tuesday morning. For those who weren’t there we announced that we would be releasing a new version of Ext.nd sometime this week or possibly next week depending on how things go.

I’m certainly excited to share everything that we’ve been working on and think the new release comes a long way in making things even easier on developers. Everything has also been converted over to the Ext 2.0 framework which alone provides vast improvements to performance and consistency.

Some things to look forward to:

• Simplified implementation – you no longer need to copy over design elements into your database
• Application Profiles – this is a bit more difficult to explain without going into a lot of detail, but the basic idea is that you will have an easy configuration form that will drive how Ext.nd deals with the various components within your application.
• Simplified HTMLHead/JSHeader – after filling out an application profile you can implement the Ext.nd code into a page or form with a single @DBLookup
• And More – There’s some other really cool stuff, but I want to leave some surprises