Leap On!

Last lecture about scaling up was pretty cool, and it's very exciting to think that some of us might actually need to scale up that far! Maybe not in the near future, heh. Sadly as someone that does web development most of the time, the topic was already quite familiar and I could totally relate to the remark to Drupal. (Before MySQL tweaks, a rather-loaded-with-modules Drupal install requires about 1 sec in localhost to serve a page! Are you frickin' kidding me???) I hope I would ever have the chance to implement some of the performance tuning strategies explained. (Must chant "premature optimization is the root of all evil" 100x first to make sure.)

LimeJS is the library that we use for our final project development, and up to now it has been quite impressive. Initially I didn't really like the smell of a Javascript framework having a dependency to Python runtime (for the build system) and Closure (a gigantic Javascript library that gives birth to Gmail). However now all is well and we begun to appreciate the goodness. Size matters.

Closure provides a Java-esque platform on top of Javascript. I have never ever used the "new" keyword in Javascript before (I didn't even know that Javascript has that!), but Closure uses plain old object instantiation liberally. There is also Java-esque module declaration and import, and even Java-esque (fortunately optional) compilation step. But Closure is like a giant that slowly grows forever but never talks to anyone else. There are a huge number of Javascript libraries/[micro-]frameworks that posit their own colours like jquery, backbone, underscore, zepto, require, modernizr, angular (please put -js suffix to facilitate your googling). And using Closure means that you're going to miss all of those (or add more Kbs to the total page size).

Next is about Trello, a web app among those few that I can foresee I use and root for. Just click on that link if you want to find out more. It's a really really good way to manage all your stuff in one place, and they are all easily viewable in one screen (if you have one big enough, that is) -- a helicopter view of your projects (or your general life), if you will. The drag-and-drop gestures will kill you. It's still fairly new so expect some rough edges, I'm anticipating an Android version, and currently evangelising to my group mates to use this for the final project (haha).