Monday, July 11, 2005

Out with the WICK

... in with something people will actually look forward to work with.

i had the sneaking feeling it was a matter of time before the real skill would come out of the woodwork to throw me in the deepest pits of irrelevance :)

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Butt ugly? That's a low blow. Man, that's the disadvantage of open sourcing your code: you put yourself out there for free and people wwalk all over you if they don't like it!

Anonymous said...

O_o

Butt ugly? It is pretty easy to step through.

-------------
new Insertion.After(this.update,
'<iframe id="' + this.update.id + '_iefix" '+
'style="display:none;filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=0);" ' +
'src="javascript:false;" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>');
this.iefix = $(this.update.id+'_iefix');

because THAT's beauty. elegant!

Anonymous said...

As I explained to Chris, I wasn't trying to be too offensive -- but that really isn't anywhere near extensible, clean code.

bofe, don't be silly. You pasted just about the only obscure segment in the entire scriptaculous autocompleter, and one that is needed to fix IE braindamage. If there's a cleaner way of doing that - patches are always welcome.

Chris Holland said...

hehe, yeah Ivan and I shared some good thoughts over e-mail.

I built WICK in rather rapid increments without much thought put into "top-down" design. It's indeed possible to extend WICK for anybody with enough determination and nothing better to start from (a couple of developers have privately been sharing some of their work with me).

But I'd basically much rather see people contribute to a framework that was built from the ground-up with extensibility in mind, and that's unfortunately, admittedly not what WICK is. Ivan's object-oriented approach is.

With all this said, the "butt-ugly" comment did sting a bit, but Ivan did qualify it in our e-mail exchange as a "technical qualifier" for a necessity many developers face, heh heh :)

Ivan also mentioned his framework isn't quite ready to be a drop-in replacement for WICK.

We'll see. Some developers might still elect to extend WICK just to get something out the door quickly, others might go for Ivan's code for a foundation they can build upon.

I'm a big fan of the foundations laid out by prototype.js and script.aculo.us, and very-much wish for client-side coding to to keep heading that way.

As I've mentioned to Ivan in our e-mail exchange, i've been hacking javascript for the better part of a decade, there are a number of bad/less-than-ideal habits i need to shed, and new methodologies i need to adopt.

Here's to sustained productivity in applications development :) GO RAILS.