jQuery is fun

So I spent a deliciously nerdy weekend working with jQuery and the new jRails plugin that transparently inserts it in place of Prototype/Scriptaculous. The framework itself is much smaller (by about half), and it is a dream to write in, since the syntax is downright simple. It actually kind of reminds me of my original love of Scheme. I just have a thing for simple (yet flexible and powerful) syntax. It looks nice, and just Feels Right™.

The UI elements show particular promise, but seem to have a ways to go. For one, the release versions are way behind the latest development versions, and the dev versions are definitely what the demos on the jQuery UI site uses. This is only really a problem because the dev versions aren't packaged for you, so you have to run around grabbing files if you want to use them. There is also enough difference between the release and dev versions that the docs (which are up with dev versions) are often unhelpful if you are trying to use the release code.

Whew. So basically I learned to just go find the bleeding edge stuff, and ignore the 1.0 code.

There also seem to be a lot of IE related issues. When I tried to open Lorebroker using IE7, I got some strange Operation Aborted error, with basically no graceful failure from which I can debug. It literally acts like the website is down or something. Not entirely sure how to tackle that, short of just giving IE the finger and ignoring it for now. Why can't Microsoft make anything work?

In work related news, I was thinking about the overall goal of this project we are working on, and it seems like we'd save an awful lot of time just using Rails for it. They made it pretty clear to me that they are a Java shop though, so not much hope for that. However, today as I was pondering, I remembered our early efforts to make a page builder at my last job. This project would be much simpler to do, and there is no need to get fancy and make a meta-circular editor, so I think I might work on writing a bit of code generation stuff to automate a lot of what I am doing. Any reduction of copy and paste would be swell.

That has been an ongoing process all week (reduction of copy and paste). I have always been against anything that felt kludgy, and copying and pasting code so you can change class names and database columns seems kludgy to the max. I've already abstracted a bunch of the DAO operations and shortened a few other files, but when it comes to the xsl files, they really need to be generated. Thankfully, they are fairly simple, so I have lots of hope for easy success.

I tell you what... I really miss macros right now. Darn Java.