Chicken Scratches

Welcome to the second part in my series of posts about creating a Facebook application. I am using Django as my web development framework, but this post doesn't have much to do with Django, since it deals with the front end. In particular, it talks about how to write JavaScript that can work both in and out of Facebook.

As I mentioned last time, Facebook lets developers use a subset of JavaScript, which they call FBJS. The FBJS is transformed on the fly into JavaScript as the page is loaded. All variables and functions you define or reference are prepended with a string like "a123456789_", including calls to document.getElementById and setTimer and the like. This is done in order to restrict what you can do with DOM elements, to avoid cross-site-scripting attacks and unwanted user-hostile behavior. FBJS is fairly well documented, so if you plan to do some Facebook JavaScript development, you should start there.

The biggest restriction that FBJS imposes is that you can no longer access the attributes of DOM elements directly, but must go through an abstraction API consisting of a series of setters and getters. For example, instead of saying something like imageEl.src = myImageUrl, you instead need to call imageEl.setSrc(myImageUrl).

Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook made a splash a year or two ago when they opened up their API. Now developers could write applications that integrate with the site. Instantly, users -- many of whom had fled to Facebook from a spam-filled MySpace -- were inundated with Requests to battle ninjas and News Items bearing obscene pictures. To Facebook's credit, they did clamp down and put some restrictions on what apps can do. A few entertaining or useful applications have risen to the top, and the potential of the API is ready to be exploited. It's not an easy task for a developer, however. In the next few Chicken Scratches posts, I'll talk about my experience developing two Facebook apps from scratch: The Limerick Book, a site that works both in and outside of Facebook and allows users to share and rate Limericks, and Play Scopa, a traditional Italian card game that users can play against each other in realtime (this one is not yet launched to the public). This first post discusses some of the difficulties I have run into. In the next couple posts, I'll discuss how I dealt with them. First, to set the scene:

My setup

I am using the Django web framework for my backend development, the latest SVN version running with Python version 2.4 on a shared host at Dreamhost. In fact, it's the same server I use for this site and weblog. To connect Django to Facebook, I am using the nice PyFacebook library, which is pretty mature, though I had to modify the code to support some of the latest features of the Facebook API. And now, on to the perils. Read the rest of this entry »

I have written two previous articles about how I edit Django template files in Emacs and XEmacs. Here is How I edit Django templates. And here is More on editing Django templates in XEmacs. Here today is another little tip that can be used in conjunction with those two other posts or independently.

Django templates involve a lot of punctuation. Between the angle brackets and slashes of HTML and the curly braces and percent signs of the Django template language, it's enough to make your pinky fingers hurt just thinking about it. Therefore any little trick to reduce some of this typing burden can be helpful. Presented here is some Emacs Lisp code to provide auto-closing of Django template tags. So even if you still have to type things like curly-brace percent-sign space ifequal blah blah2 percent-sign close-curly-brace, you won't have to type the {% endifequal %}. (Of course, if you're using the abbrev tips I gave previously, you won't even need to type the opening tag very often, but sometimes you still do.)

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Air travel is in a downward spiral. Not literally of course, but clearly and consistently, and everybody knows it. The airlines know it, the airline employees know it, travel agents found out a while ago, and consumers sure as Hell know it. There are a lot of reasons for it, but this post talks about just one: Expedia.com.

Airlines claim the degradation in quality comes from increased competition. They say they are forced to cut corners and reduce features in order to stay competitive. Does this make sense?

Read the rest of this entry »

When writing web applications, sooner or later (usually sooner), everybody is going to need a template language. String-interpolation just doesn't cut it. We need a way to write something that is almost all text (or HTML, or XML, or whatever), but with some dynamic pieces thrown in.

Since this need is so universal, and the basic requirements are so easy to describe, many different groups of people have taken it upon themselves to create Yet Another Template Language. As developers, we can join the fray and roll our own, or we can wade through the myriad options available to us to find the one that meets our needs or philosophy. Those who use PHP or ASP pretty much have the choice made for them, since the languages themselves are glorified template processors. Python programmers have a lot more options.

Here I'm just going to focus on the two Python templating languages I have used in real applications: Cheetah and the Django templating engine. (Django, of course, is more than just templates, but the template subsystem can be used independently.) I use and enjoy both of these, but there are significant differences that are worth comparing and contrasting, when deciding which to use for your particular needs. There are other comparisons out there, including one by the Benevolent Dictator for Life himself (though that's a bit out of date and inaccurate). When choosing which to use, you should read as many opinions as you can, then make the decision yourself. Presented here are just my personal thoughts.

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This month's contest over at limericks.chickenwingsoftware.com is Basketball: In this, the NBA playoff season, young man's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of hoops. Plus, the Celtics wear green!

A typical entry:

There once was a girl named Christine
Who had gotten the gambling gene
She said with some sadness,
"I lost at March Madness
Before it reached the sweet sixteen."

Sure, it's no masterpiece, but it's fun. That's sort of the spirit of these contests. Head on over to read more, rate them, or write your own.

Student: I just learned CSS and I'm very excited about it! It seems like a nice clean and logical way to do layout. Look, I can just say color:red and my text turns red.

Guru: Oh yes, it's soo much better than using tables. Tables are bad, bad, bad! Never use tables!! You'll ruin us all!!!

Student: Um, ok. No tables. But say, I have a question. I'm trying to make my links look like buttons, but when I set a width on them nothing happens. What's that all about?

Guru: Duh! Don't you know, you can't set a width on an inline element? You have to set display:block .

Student: Ah, I see. So now I can set the width, but it just puts each link on a separate line by itself. What if I want three or four on the same line? They're not very wide after all. Could I maybe just use a ta-

Guru: Nooooo! No tables, I said! Look, it's very easy and logical. Just set a fixed width and set float:left on all the items you want on the same line. Why would you not think of that?

Student: Ah, of course, float:left . I guess that should have been obvious.

Guru: Very good.

Student: But wait.

Guru: Now what is it?

Student: Now my buttons are all squished up with the text that comes after them, even if I put a <br> tag after them. Why is it ignoring my <br> tag?

Guru: Don't you know? You should never use the <br> tag! That's mixing layout with content. It doesn't work after floated elements, anyway. You have to make an empty <div>, put it after all the buttons, and set clear:both on it.

Student: Ah, of course. Why didn't I think of that? We wouldn't want to have extra markup who's sole purpose is for layout, would we?

Guru: Of course not. Empty divs and wrapper divs don't count. At least they're not tables.

Student: Ok, now how do I center them?

Guru: What?

Student: I want to center my table of buttons. How do I do that?

Guru: Well, first of all, it's not a "table" of buttons. Don't ever let me hear you use that word again. It's a "list" of buttons. Turn them into a list. Then it's very easy to center them. Set list-style-type:none. Then set display:table, but only in Firefox. You need to use conditional HTML comments for IE. Then set margin-left:auto. That's how we center things, of course. Oh yeah, and you have to enclose the whole thing in another wrapper <div>. Then set text-align:center on the wrapper. See, easy as pie. Aren't you glad we're not in the bad old days, when we used to have to write hacky HTML just to make the layout work?

Student : Maybe I'll go into marketing. (exit stage left)

We've created an online contest
To see who can rhyme the bestest
So come to our site
And prove you can write
The limerick that rates the highest.

Sorry, that's what happens when you try to write a limerick after four hours of reading technical specification documents. If you think you can do better, come to our limerick contest website and make an entry, read and rate other entries, and waste some time.

For the developers, the contest site is hosted on Django with a MySQL backend.

There will be a new category of limerick writing contest every month. This month's theme is cheese. Enjoy!

• Go to the limerick contest.

Previously, I wrote about how I set up syntax-highlighting for Django template files using MMM (multiple major modes) in XEmacs. This entry builds on the previous one, so if you haven't read that one, I suggest doing so now.

This post addresses the age old question, "If (X)Emacs is so good, why can't it do the typing for me?" Well, the answer, of course, is it can. You just have to write a few lines of Lisp first. Or you can copy and paste the Lisp code off of sites like this one. ;)

Introducing dynamic abbreviations

Pressing M-/, (that is, holding down the Alt key and pressing the forward slash key), runs the command dabbrev-expand, which tries to finish whatever word you are in the middle of typing. For example, if as I'm typing this entry, I type the letter d, then press M-/, "dabbrev-expand" shows up, because that was the last word I typed that started with d. If I then type M-/ again, "dabbrev-expand" changes to "down". If I keep pressing it, the word cycles through different guesses for what I'm going for. If you've ever used VisualStudio, you may see some similarities to the Intellisense feature. I find I almost never type a whole word anymore, I've become so dependent on dynamic completion.

Templates and more abbreviations

dabbrev-expand is useful to avoid having to type long words over and over, but there are also longer patterns that seem to need typing frequently. Thats where the tempo package comes in handy, especially when combined with the abbrev library. Here is some documentation for tempo. Here is some documentation for abbrev.

Essentially, tempo allows you to specify "templates," or blocks of standard text that can be parameterized as they are filled in: the same concept as Django templates, but meant for interactive use. From now on, I will say "tempo template" or "Django template" to avoid confusing the two types.

abbrev lets you define your own pre-set abbreviations, which can be filled in automatically as you type or upon request. This can be combined with tempo to do some pretty powerful stuff very easily.

I have a few Django-specific tempo templates and abbrevs set up in my XEmacs initialization file. For example, as soon as I type "{% block" followed by a space, the entire framework of a Django template block is filled in for me. I've also added a special menu to the menu bar for tempo templates I use frequently.

HTML and templates can be very repetitive, so I've found this saves me a lot of typing.

My initialization file

Here is the subset of my ~/.xemacs/init.el file. This includes the mmm-mode stuff I discussed last time, as well as the tempo templates and abbrevs. I haven't put a tempo template for every possible Django template tag, just the ones I use most frequently. I'll leave further extension as an exercise for the reader.

Also, some people don't like the expansion to happen automatically as they are typing. To turn this off, comment out the line that says "(setq abbrev-mode t)" by putting a semicolon (;) in front of it. Then you can manually expand tempo templates by pressing C-\ (control-backslash).

Once again, this is known to work in XEmacs version 21.4 on Windows XP. It will most likely work in other versions of XEmacs, and possibly in GNU Emacs.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; CSS-Mode
(autoload 'css-mode "css-mode" "Mode for editing CSS files" t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.css\\'" . css-mode))
(setq cssm-indent-function #'cssm-c-style-indenter)
(setq cssm-indent-level '2)

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Use hm--html-mode for files that end in .tmpl (Django templates)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.tmpl\\'" . hm--html-mode))

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Multiple Major Modes.
(require 'mmm-vars)
(require 'mmm-mode)
(require 'mmm-sample)
(setq mmm-global-mode 'maybe)

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Custom MMM classes for Django templates
(mmm-add-classes
 '((my-django-expr
    :submode python-mode
    :face mmm-declaration-submode-face
    :front "{%"
    :back "%}"
    :include-front t
    :include-back t)))

(mmm-add-classes
 '((my-django-var
    :submode python
    :face mmm-output-submode-face
    :front "{{"
    :back "}}"
    :include-front t
    :include-back t)))

(mmm-add-mode-ext-class nil "\\.tmpl\\'" 'embedded-css)
(mmm-add-mode-ext-class nil "\\.tmpl\\'" 'my-django-var)
(mmm-add-mode-ext-class nil "\\.tmpl\\'" 'my-django-expr)
(mmm-add-mode-ext-class nil "\\.tmpl\\'" 'html-js)

;; Use different colors for different sub-modes.
(setq mmm-submode-decoration-level 2)
;; Make the code submode a little more readable.
(set-face-background 'mmm-code-submode-face "#EEEEFF")


;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Tempo templates and abbrevs

;; Control-backslash to expand a tempo template manually.
(global-set-key "\C-\\" 'tempo-complete-tag)

(require 'adapt) ; Must be done before hm--html for some reason.
(require 'hm--html-mode) ; Needed for hm--html-mode-abbrev-table
(require 'tempo) ; Tempo templates.


;; Expands <span into an HTML span with a class defined.
(tempo-define-template "span"
                       '("<span class=\"" (p "Class? ") "\">" r "</span>" >)
                       "<span "
                       "Insert a template for a span with a class")
(define-abbrev hm--html-mode-abbrev-table
  "<span" "" 'tempo-template-span)

;; Expands <script into an HTML javascript block.
(tempo-define-template "script"
                       '(> "<script type=\"text/javascript\">" r "</script>" > %)
                       "<script "
                       "")
(define-abbrev hm--html-mode-abbrev-table
  "<script" "" 'tempo-template-script)

;; Expands a Django template block.
(tempo-define-template "block"
                       '("{% block " (p "Block name? ") " %}" p "{% endblock %}")
                       "{% block "
                       "")
(define-abbrev hm--html-mode-abbrev-table
  "{% block" "" 'tempo-template-block)

;; Expands a Django template if tag.
(tempo-define-template "django-if"
                       '("{% if " (p "Conditional? ") " %}" p "{% endif %}")
                       "{% if "
                       "")
(define-abbrev hm--html-mode-abbrev-table
  "{% if" "" 'tempo-template-django-if)

;; Expands a Django template for tag.
(tempo-define-template "django-for"
                       '("{% for "
                         (p "Variable? ") " in "
                         (p "List? ") " %}" p
                         "{% endfor %}")
                       "{% for "
                       "")
(define-abbrev hm--html-mode-abbrev-table
  "{% for" "" 'tempo-template-django-for)

;; Create a menu for inserting these templates.
(defun add-templates-menu ()
  (interactive)
  (add-submenu nil '("Tem%_plates"
                     ["{%% %_block %%}" tempo-template-block]
                     ["{%% %_if %%}" tempo-template-django-if]
                     ["{%% %_for %%}" tempo-template-django-for]
                     ["<%_span>" tempo-template-span]
                     ["<s%_cript>" tempo-template-script])))

;; When entering hm--html-mode, turn on abbrevs and add the template menu.
(add-hook 'hm--html-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (setq abbrev-mode t)
            (add-templates-menu)))
            

Every programmer has their favorite editor and mode of working. Some people have more than one. For example, I use Microsoft Visual Studio when editing .NET code, DrScheme for editing Scheme code, and XEmacs for pretty much everything else.

This post is about how I use XEmacs for editing Django template files, in the hopes that others may find this useful.

The "Other" One True Editor

It's rare that people will get passionate about something as pedestrian as a way of editing plain text, but the brief history of the internet is awash with flamewars and heated discussions with titles like "Emacs vs. XEmacs," "Emacs vs vi," and so on. I'm not about to go into the relative merits, but the fact that certain editors pop up time and time again in these debates must mean there is something special about them.

Early on in my college education I started using Emacs because it was all that was available on the school's servers. (Well, that or vi, but vi was and still is black-magic to me.) I got over the learning curve, and now I'm hooked.

At some point, I switched from Emacs to XEmacs, for reasons I can't remember. At the time, it had some feature which was to me essential. That reason no longer applies, but neither have I had a reason to switch back. These tips may apply even if you use GNU Emacs, but they've only been tested in XEmacs.

My current setup is Xemacs 21.4 (patch 20), running on Windows XP. *gasp!* Yes, I use Windows for Django development. Shocking, I know. I have my reasons. In any case, these tips should work equally well with XEmacs on other platforms.

Multiple Major Modes

I won't include a full XEmacs tutorial here, since there is already plenty of info on the web about it. The key point is that there is a "major mode" for each programming environment. There is a Python mode, a Java mode, and so on. Django templates tend to combine more than one language in a file, so that's when the mmm library comes in handy. It stands for "multiple major modes," and it turns out to be just exactly what we need. We can have html-mode for the HTML parts, JavaScript-mode for the JavaScript parts, css-mode for embedded CSS, and python-mode for the Django template filters and tags.

Which HTML mode?

As often happens in the world of Free Software, there are several options to choose from when setting up HTML editing in XEmacs.

• html-mode. This has the fullest support for HTML parsing and validation. The problem is, when dealing with templates, the HTMl will often not validate, so all kinds of error messages show up.
• sgml-mode. This is a more general mode for SGML (of which XML and HTML 4 are subsets).
• xml-mode. SGML mode specialized for XML.
• hm--html-mode. I have no idea what the HM stands for, but this is a lightweight HTML mode, with basic syntax highlighting and indentation.

I use html-mode for full-fledged HTML documents, and hm--html-mode for templates. So that XEMacs can tell the difference, I use the suffix ".tmpl" for template files.

One problem

I did run into some problems getting mmm-mode to work with XEmacs. It turns out the version of mmm-mode that is distributed with the XEmacs package system is ancient - from 2001. I had to download the newer version of mmm-mode and unzip it into my site-packages directory.

How it looks

Here's a screenshot of me editing an example Django template (borrowed from my beta-registration Django app). I've chosen fairly bright colors to make the syntax highlighting more obvious, but that's all customizable. Notice how the Django tags and variables are easy to find in the file. (Click on the image for a larger size.)

My initialization file

Here is the subset of my ~/.xemacs/init.el file dealing with setting up mmm-mode for XEmacs. I hope someone finds this useful. Let me know if you do, or if you encounter problems.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; CSS-Mode
(autoload 'css-mode "css-mode" "Mode for editing CSS files" t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.css\\'" . css-mode))
(setq cssm-indent-function #'cssm-c-style-indenter)
(setq cssm-indent-level '2)

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Use hm--html-mode for files that end in .tmpl (Django templates)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.tmpl\\'" . hm--html-mode))

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Multiple Major Modes.
(require 'mmm-vars)
(require 'mmm-mode)
(require 'mmm-sample)
(setq mmm-global-mode 'maybe)

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Custom MMM classes for Django templates
(mmm-add-classes
 '((my-django-expr
    :submode python-mode
    :face mmm-declaration-submode-face
    :front "{%"
    :back "%}"
    :include-front t
    :include-back t)))

(mmm-add-classes
 '((my-django-var
    :submode python
    :face mmm-output-submode-face
    :front "{{"
    :back "}}"
    :include-front t
    :include-back t)))

(mmm-add-mode-ext-class nil "\\.tmpl\\'" 'embedded-css)
(mmm-add-mode-ext-class nil "\\.tmpl\\'" 'my-django-var)
(mmm-add-mode-ext-class nil "\\.tmpl\\'" 'my-django-expr)
(mmm-add-mode-ext-class nil "\\.tmpl\\'" 'html-js)

;; Use different colors for different sub-modes.
(setq mmm-submode-decoration-level 2)
;; Make the code submode a little more readable.
(set-face-background 'mmm-code-submode-face "#EEEEFF")