Contributing To Website

[pnewhook]

Hello,

I've seen that Jaxer is no longer a priority for Aptana and I'm
assuming that ActiveJS won't be actively developed either. However, it
seems that Aptana are at least turning the projects over to the
community instead of killing them off, which is great. I was looking
at the ActiveJS site and saw that the ActiveController site is blank.
How could I contribute to the documentation?

[Morquan]

I'd also be very interested in seeing some ActiveController
documentation and samples posted. The code itself seems mature enough
to go on without the promise of maintenance, but it definitely needs
some usage hints.

[nlloyds]

On Nov 5, 12:51 pm, pnewhook <peter.newh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've seen that Jaxer is no longer a priority for Aptana and I'm
> assuming that ActiveJS won't be actively developed either.

Not by them, it seems.

> However, it
> seems that Aptana are at least turning the projects over to the
> community instead of killing them off, which is great. I was looking
> at the ActiveJS site and saw that the ActiveController site is blank.
> How could I contribute to the documentation?

You can build the API documentation with the build.rb script, but I
think it uses Aptana Studio's docs generator (http://github.com/aptana/
sdocgen) so that needs to be installed, and it probably only works on
a unix.

The website files are in extensions/website. You could probably host
your own copy by making a gh-pages branch on github.

Ryan Johnson did most of the work on the project. He's no longer
employed by Aptana and I've had trouble contacting him directly.

Perhaps Aptana could be contacted and asked to give some responsible
party access to update, or even host, activejs.org.

I'm also interested in keeping this project maintained and advanced so
would be glad to contribute any help.

Nathan

[nlloyds]

On Nov 5, 12:51 pm, pnewhook <peter.newh...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've seen that Jaxer is no longer a priority for Aptana and I'm
> assuming that ActiveJS won't be actively developed either.

Not by them, it seems.

> However, it
> seems that Aptana are at least turning the projects over to the
> community instead of killing them off, which is great. I was looking
> at the ActiveJS site and saw that the ActiveController site is blank.
> How could I contribute to the documentation?

[pnewhook]

Where would I be able to find some good examples of ActiveRecord JS
controllers?
-Peter

[nlloyds]

Peter,

On Nov 6, 3:09 pm, pnewhook <peter.newh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Where would I be able to find some good examples of ActiveRecord JS
> controllers?
> -Peter

I don't know if there are any "good" examples, but there is one in
extensions/jaxer/lib/rest_controller.js, though it is Jaxer-specific.
Another is in samples/binding/collection.html.

Nathan

[pnewhook]

I'll have to dig into the rest_controller.js file to take a look at
it, thanks. And I looked at collection.html. It throws me off a bit
because i thought ActiveJS was supposed to be an MVC framework, but
there's a lot of code and markup mixed together.

[nlloyds]

Peter,

On Nov 7, 8:50 pm, pnewhook <peter.newh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> And I looked at collection.html. It throws me off a bit
> because i thought ActiveJS was supposed to be an MVC framework, but
> there's a lot of code and markup mixed together.

ActiveJS doesn't enforce any structure, and MVC isn't really about
separating the code and markup, though that almost always is the right
way to do it.

It looks that example shows off the synchronization features of
ActiveRecord more than anything, but you can see how the controllers
in this example sort of act as intermediaries between the views and
models.

Like I said before, I don't think there are any good examples.

Nathan

[Ryan Johnson]

Hi all, I'm taking some time away from the tech world traveling in
Nepal and India until January which is why no one has heard much from
me and why no changes have been pushed from me into the ActiveJS
project for some time.

Regarding examples this project on github is now public:

http://github.com/aptana/aptana-tv

It contains the old aptana.tv website which was run entirely on Jaxer
+ ActiveJS. Ian Selby wrote most of the code here and did an excellent
job. It contains several examples of controllers, many are just rest
controllers (look at the rest controller code itself to see how they
are created), but some are not and should provide the examples you
need.

Also, BestBuy just launched a mobile sync service that uses ActiveJS
to run most of the front end.

http://miqlive.com/

You can sign up even if you don't have a compatible device and the
source is not obfuscated.

Regarding the future of the project, assuming something that suits my
JS development needs better doesn't come along before January I intend
to put effort into the code base and website in addition to putting
some time into getting more press for the project. This means
solidifying APIs (more on that in a minute), and creating ready to run
example apps for Rhino, Jaxer, Gears and a plain vanilla
Safari/Firefox/IE7 environment.

For context when Aptana put Jaxer on hold it meant that no one was
getting paid anymore to contribute to ActiveJS. For myself I began to
do other work that used ActiveJS in one way or another, but had little
time to contribute anything to the project. I got quite burnt out
earlier in the fall and decided to take some time off. My reason for
sharing is simply to say that the lack of attention to the project has
little to do from a lack of interest on my part. I've found quite a
lot of utility in the libraries and think others will too once they
are more developer friendly.

As it relates to why there isn't any documentation about controllers,
it's because I see it as a weak point in the stack that needs
re-tooling probably introducing backwards incompatible changes. The
ActiveController doesn't play nicely with ActiveRoute on a browser
based app, or at least as nicely as it should. There is also far too
much glue code that needs to be written to get going that isn't
included out of the box in the ActiveController component. Nathan is
right in saying that this is indeed an MVC framework that
intentionally doesn't provide much structure, but in this case more
structure is needed before finalizing the API and documenting it.

There will also likely be a ClientController class and
ServerController class (from which your ApplicationController can
descend) depending on which environment you are running in.

In summary with ActiveRecord I had a very clear pattern from which to
build on, with ActiveView I did not and in the context of building a
browser based app with it, I'm fairly convinced I've gotten it mostly
right, but the controller portion needs work.

Until January I'm open to anyone contributing to the website with
examples or more documentation. Just send me the changes you would
like to see up on the site and I'll post them assuming they are half
way sane.

Also, I'm looking for work and am available January 25th. My ideal
situation would be contracting 2 - 3 days a week so I can work on
ActiveJS for a while before diving into something full time. If anyone
has upcoming JavaScript needs please let me know.

And I apologize about the porn spam, obviously a much larger google
groups issue. Hopefully it will be fixed in time, but if anyone has a
better service they can point me at to run the group please let me
know.

Thanks - Ryan

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[pnewhook]

Very cool example. I'll be digging into it shortly. Any tricks to
building//installing/understanding?

Thanks,
Peter

[nlloyds]

Ryan,

Glad to hear you're able to get away from a computer for a while!
Thanks for the update.

BTW, (for Peter and whomever else) Tom Robinson's branch (http://
github.com/tlrobinson/activejs) has a narwhal/jack version, so, if you
have narwhal you can do:

tusk install activejs
activejs myapp

And it creates the directories to get an activejs-based jack
application going. It doesn't really work completely, but it's a very
cool start on making a Railsy narwhal/jack/activejs stack. It would be
nice to have this be a part of the main distro, but it might be good
to keep the libraries separate from the app generator thingy, or maybe
not.

Nathan

[pnewhook]

Thanks nathan. I've actually been following the Narwhal/Jack
development closely, but it's in such constant flux it's been hard to
keep up. That and I have yet to have much success with it on windows.

That said, it would be really nice to have Jaxer and ActiveJS
following the CommonJS spec, so I look forward to it's eventual
development.

For the time being, how do I install this the Aptana.tv example. I've
got Jaxer running fine, but can't quite figure out where to put the
example apps.

-Petet

[pjs67123]

Thanks for the update Ryan. I've been watching this project for a
while now and I think there are a lot of excellent ideas here.
Regarding the spam, the same issue was happening on another group that
I follow (http://groups.google.com/group/persevere-framework). The
group owner promoted some of the members to managers to help moderate
the group and lock it down a bit. There have not been any problems
there since. Until Google does something to fix the spam issue, the
group owners need to be proactive in dealing with the spam. In a
fledgling project such as this one, interested people visiting the
groups would see all the spam and may assume that the project is dead
and look elsewhere...that would be a shame.

-Paul

On Nov 16, 9:13 am, Ryan Johnson <r...@syntacticx.com> wrote: