buddycloud blog

Where?

The location is finally confirmed.
The hackathon will be at:
coworkingmunich.de
Sonnenstraße 32
80331 München

To get there:

• take a subway from the lines U3, U6, U1 or U2
• take a tram from the lines 17, 18 or 27
• take a bus from the line 152

to Sendlinger Tor and you should see the coworking space where the hackathon will be already.

Those are the ideas that came from the buddycloud team for the hackathon, but your ideas are highly welcome as well.

• internet2 project ideas
• email content into my channel
  • checks from address and matches it with a channel name
• email me when there are posts in my channel
  • watches channels that I produce and emails me updates
• feed a channel with an RSS feed.
  • New posts in RSS-land are fed into a channel as a topic
  • users can comment/rant on topics
• auto channel spinup
  • If I run a news website and want to add a channel for each new news article, having a way to auto-create channels would be nice.
  • could be a spam-haven.
• Extend buddycloud-server by an HTTP server
  • Serve feeds
  • Implement PSHB
  • Implement WebFinger & Salmon

Join the hackathon. We’ve got mate!

Send a mail to frontdesk@buddycloud.com or just put yourself on the list of participants

Prepare for the hackathon

• keep up to date on all buddycloud public events in the buddycloud calendar (Also available in XML and HTML)
• Trello will help you track the buddycloud development
• access the buddycloud documentation
• reach out to other buddycloud developers on our mailing list and in our chat room.
• buddycloud code is ready for your forking on GitHub.

One of the big problems was with the webclient.

The problem

The buddycloud webclient is incredibly dynamic: the buddycloud server sends events such as new posts, follow requests, message resyncs etc, to the buddycloud webclient in real time. These events need to be displayed rapidly and update only those parts of the DOM only those parts, that need to be updated and no more.

CC-BY Steven Depolo

Other templating libraries started to choke when all these events hit the browser.
The buddycloud webclient processes a lot of events (to see a demo try clicking around a channel). Whenever anything is updated the entire DOM needs to be updated and reloaded. This meant that users were waiting and overall user experience suffered.

A better solution was needed.

Introducing Δt (dynamic template)

Δt is a dynamic templating engine. Like other templating engines it uses web templates and content information to produce web documents render-able in a browser.

CC-BY cod_gabriel

But unlike other templating engines such as {{mustache}} dodo’s Δt is a dynamic templating engine that is fully asynchronous. That is, it can be modified even after rendering a web document and it doesn’t contain all the surprises of other templating engines.
Indeed Δt:

• offers abstraction and separation of functionality and design
• runs server side and browser side
• offers streamable output
• is completely asynchronous
• is modular
• is smart
• avoids it’s own template-language
• avoids scope breaking
• avoids the evilness of eval

The solution

This code demonstrates how Δt works:

    class View extends Backbone.View
        template: (api) ->
            new dynamictemplate.Template schema:'html', ->
                @div class:'item', ->
                    @text 'default'
                    api.bind 'type', (type) =>
                        @attr 'class', type # changing the class to the new type
                    api.bind 'content', (content) =>
                        @text content
                    @end()
 
        render: () ->
            api = {}
            _.extend(api, Backbone.Events)
            @model.bind 'change:type', (model, type) ->
                api.trigger 'type', type
            @model.bind 'change:content', (model, content) ->
                api.trigger 'content', content
 
            tpl = @template(api)
            tpl.on 'end', -> # when the rendering is done
                @el = tpl.jquery # fresh build dom element by jquery
                $('body').append(@el) # add it to the dom

Implementing a template

tpl = new Template ->
    @$tag 'xml', ->
        @$tag 'child', "content"

@html ->
    @body("content").end()
    @end()

@$html 'xml', ->
    @$body "content"

The buddycloud code is on GitHub. To see it in use check the buddycloud webclient source.
Feedback to dodo is always appreciated.

PS: we’re holding a buddycloud hackerthon in Munich on 3rd and 4th of March. To join please sign up on the buddycloud hackerthon wiki page.
Come and hack on buddycloud’s webclient using Δt.

Things to do after checking out Δt

• keep up to date on all buddycloud public events in the buddycloud calendar (Also available in XML and HTML)
• track the development on buddycloud’s Trello page
• access the buddycloud documentation
• reach out to other buddycloud developers on our mailing list and in our chat room.
• buddycloud code is ready for your forking on GitHub.