Model-View-Whatever

A pretty fascinating look at the philosophies (dare I say the semantics?) behind MVC, MVVM, MVP, Model-View-Whatever architectures. Thought-provoking.

Chef

Here's a neat how-to about using Chef to provision a server (Rails and PostgreSQL).

Serving Django statics

Serving Django statics, from SendHub.

UI patterns

So I've come back quasi-full circle, finding myself thinking of Wx-enabled smart widgets based on the wftk (seriously, it's like it's 2002 again), and last night after the laptop was off, I scribbled down the following note:

Basic mail UI against repo. Define mail-like queues as a thing.

The first sentence is a UI pattern (basic mail reader, with groups, then messages, then a document view for the mail itself), and the second is the data pattern it presents to the user (the concept of a message queue, possibly with threads, certainly with some kind of topic grouping).

This kind of pattern-based "architectural" programming could and should be carried down to the lowest possible levels of programming. That's a semantic mode of conceptualizing software.

Anyway, so I looked up "UI patterns", thinking that would get me that Yahoo effort (YUI, already noted elsewhere on this blog) - but instead it turned up UI-patterns.com, a short-lived effort by Danish web developer Anders Toxboe, an attempt to develop a UI pattern gallery/database/article focus site that seems to have gone on for 2010 and 2011 and stopped. Plenty of spam in the comments sections, but otherwise a ghost town.  Too bad, because it's pretty much what I'd like to start from in this attempt to come up with a language of UI pattern design.

Some good grist for the mill, anyway.

Filed under UI design, patterns, and architectural patterns, because I suspect the UI design has to be based on some conceptualization of the data that would be reflected in the system architecture.

Game Programming Patterns

Another book.

AnyYolk: example HTML5 game

Here's an HTML5 game example written on Backbone and Parse. Interesting architecture.

Do people actually use UML?

Survey says ... not really.

IMAP architectural patterns

Here's an interesting concept in terms of architectural patterns: synchronization between multiple IMAP servers with OfflineIMAP.  Again, yeah, structural database application, yadda yadda.

Hmm. Zapier to move data between dozens of Web apps.