Simon Willison’s Weblog

REST worst practices. Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ thoughts on the characteristics of a well designed Django REST API library, from November 2008.

# 7:53 pm / django, jacob-kaplan-moss, python, rest

django-piston. Promising looking Django mini-framework for creating RESTful APIs, from the bitbucket team. Ticks all of Jacob’s boxes, even including built-in pluggable authentication support with HTTP Basic, Digest and OAuth out of the box.

# 7:55 pm / django, rest, restful, python, apis, authentication, oauth, digest, piston, jespernoehr, bitbucket

Loading Scripts Without Blocking. Steve Souders is publishing extracts from his new book, “Even Faster Web Sites”. Here’s a systematic study of different JavaScript loading methods, along with a decision tree for picking the most appropriate one for your application.

# 7:56 pm / blocking, javascript, loading, performance, steve-souders

Coupling asynchronous scripts. More from Steve Souders, this time discussing methods to cause externally loaded scripts to execute in the correct order, obeying dependencies. Surprisingly there’s no mention of YUI loader or the Dojo packaging system.

# 7:57 pm / dojo, javascript, loading, steve-souders, yui

Why I don’t love JavaScript’s Module Pattern. Jonathan Snook points out that the module pattern (where private functionality is hidden in a closure and only public methods are revealed to outside scopes) makes code a lot harder to debug. I use the module pattern for pretty much everything, not because I want to keep stuff private but more to avoid any chance of leaking out in to the global namespace. If I need to debug a value I temporarily assign it as a property on the global window object.

# 7:59 pm / closures, debugging, javascript, jonathan-snook, modulepattern