Saturday, February 16, 2008

Interfacing Erlang with C - explained by Joel Reymont

Great tutorial on how speeding up Erlang with linkedin C code. But hopefully you won't have to do it because it makes your software hard to maintain and the C part might crash your program. But if you have to interface with C, then first check whether a C-node (as for example done in ErlyCairo) has enough performance, a C-node uses it's own memory space and doesn't crash your Erlang program, in case things go wrong. But if your C code is very robust, and you really need the performance, Joel's tutorial is a great introduction to that topic.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Django Template Language - the dojo implementation

Beside of Erlang based ErlyDTL (by Evan Miller and myself) there exists (at least) one other non-Python project which implements the Django Template Language: the dojo Javascript version: dojox DTL (documentation) for creating dynamically and template-based HTML layouts inside the Web browser (opposed to traditional approaches of creating HTML layouts at server-side). Today dojox DTL reached feature completeness, implementing all original Django tags and filters, at least that is what I guess from reading the SVN changes for the README:
--- This aims to be a 1:1 match with the Django Template Language as outlined in
+++ This is a 1:1 match with the Django Template Language as outlined in
While dojox DTL is a very interesting concept and brings new possibilities to separate client-side logic and presentation, I haven't seen yet a killer example. Maybe I just haven't looked far enough. But one thing is sure: if you use a template language at server side and at Javascript client side, and it can be the same template language, that's a huge benefit.