I Don’t Like [Django] Class Based Generic View

John DeRosa has written a blog post detailing why he does not like class based generic views (which were introduced in Django 1.3). He is of the opinion that generic views should be very simple and require a minimal amount of code to use. Class based generic views require you to subclass the generic view and override particular methods and properties (such the name of the template). This is in contrast to the old “function style” generic views where all you needed to do was call method and pass in the appropriate parameters.

jQAPI.com

The jQuery documentation is great, very complete, nicely written and with a lot of examples and demos. The only thing that bugs me is the way we have to find the right documentation for what we search for. Try to search for the .is() function for example. Over 100 matches before the actual function I am looking for?! And it is a fixed layout which means even on my big screen I have to scroll all the way down and have to scan for it. There have to be a better way, obviously.

Just to make it clear, I only coded the navigation and re-styled the documentation. The content is the same as in the official documentation and all credits belong to the jQuery team. Keep up the great work!

Symfony2 Beta 2&3 Released

Over the last week the Symfony project has released beta versions 2 and 3 of the Symfony2 PHP Framework. These releases have focused on fixing bugs and improving the documentation. The following tutorials have also been published:

• How to create Console/Command-Line Commands
• How to use PdoSessionStorage to store Sessions in the Database
• How to customize Form Rendering in a Twig Template
• How to minify JavaScripts and Stylesheets with YUI Compressor
• How to set External Parameters in the Service Container
• How to implement your own Voter to blacklist IP Addresses

Symfony2 can be downloaded from here.

Python Miro Community

python.mirocommunity.org is a video archive and aggregator for Python related videos. Currently they have videos from the last 3 years of Pycon, 2 years of Djangocon as well as other smaller Python conferences. You can subscribe to the RSS feed of latest videos added to the site here.

Heatmap.js

Heatmap.js is an open source Javascript library written by Patrick Wied that can be used to generate web heatmaps. “Heatmap instances contain a store in order to colorize the heatmap based on relative data, which means if you’re adding only a single datapoint to the store it will be displayed as the hottest(red) spot, then adding another point with a higher count, it will dynamically recalculate”. Heatmap.js is a standalone library (it doesn’t rely on any frameworks).