Category: Programming

Tinderbox to database publishing?

Right now I set up this weblog to be rendered on my laptop and upstreamed to the server with normal HTML pages. This somehow put the burden of organizing the site on Tinderbox. But somehow I get interested in the idea to let the server care for the public face of my content and rather use Tinderbox in a “freestyle” way. The server should only get a “content feed” from which it should construct a site.

One rather simple way would be to publish the Tinderbox content directly into a database on the server. The quickest (and dirtiest) way to do that would be to render SQL files and use a script on the server to import these. The HTML rendering would be completely the job of the server (and of course I’d need to set up templates & everything there).

A more sophisticated approach would be to render XML files that are parsed into the database. This would maybe allow to reduce the amount that needs to be uploaded per update.

Unfortunately I don’t think I am going to have the time to check this out. But somehow I hear a distant voice telling me that this would even allow several Tinderbox users to work on one site together (or at least publish into the same space).

PyObjC

“I tried out PyObj-C last night. PyObjC is a language binding/module that lets you use Python with Cocoa – somewhat like how AppleScript Studio lets you use AppleScript to write your Cocoa program.
Except PyObjC makes AppleScript Studio look like Apple took the worst bits of VisualBasic, layed a verbose language on top of it, and called it good.
I’m so very impressed by PyObjC. I used InterfaceBuilder just like I would if I was writing a Cocoa application in Objective-C – defining subclasses, instantiating them, linking them up to actions – and your Python classes are called just as if they had been Objective-C classes.”

[via Der Schockwellenreiter]

Processing

The Design By Numbers project from John Maeda seems to have a successor: Processing.

»The Processing project was created to introduce a new audience to computer programming and to encourage the audience of hybrid artist/designer/programmers. It integrates a programming language, development environment, and teaching methodology into a unified structure for learning.«

Unfortunatly it seesm to crash Safari/OSX once an example is closed. But yes, it’s Alpha code…

Flash Remoting for PHP

»Flash remoting for PHP enables objects in PHP to become objects in actionscript, almost magically! AMF-PHP takes care of all the data-type conversions, serialization, and other client-server details. This provides a great way of connecting rich media clients with data and logic living on the server. While at the same time allowing designers to design and programmers to program.«

AppleScript online language reference?

Does anybody know a good online language reference for AppleScript? Im mean something like DocServer from UserLand? I wanted to write a very simple AppleScript – and I completly failed. I found a lot of examples – none of which really helped much.

For instance: How can I encode a string into base64 in AppleScript? Do I really need to install additional software for this???