About a week ago about 15 people were gathered in People and Computers offices thanks to Raphael Fogel.

Jerry Cheung, nice guy from Outspokes, told everyone how Outspokes was built from the inside and shared his view on building javascript intensive application with Rails as a backend.

Outspokes uses fancy javascript to allow in-browser collaboration of development/design/client teams to request changes, track progress and report problems on ongoing project. I definitely will try it out.

Boris Nadion from Astrails (that’s us in case you were wondering) told the story of our own MarkupSlicer - free to use project we wrote to simplify creating ERB/HAML layouts and partials out of HTML markup we get from our slicing team.

Vitaly Kushner, also from Astrails, made a nice intro presenation about Cassandra - our choice of NoSQL breed. We working with yet to be disclosed client on very technologically challenging project and cassandra is one of many interesting solutions we working with (You can expect a case study on this project in couple of months, as soon as it will go public).

Cassandra Intro presentation

This is going to be the first part of a blog post series about javascript widgets.

First type I’m going to cover is Popup Widget. Sometimes it’s called Popin Widget because there is no actually new window that pops up, instead the content is shown IN-side a current page. The idea is quite simple: you provide some html/js snippet to other sites. They put it into relevant place, and you have some functionality of your site running there.

I’m going to explain how exactly it works, what should be done to achieve this, and what common mistakes i see once and again.

At the end of the blog post you will get a link to complete javascript library, grab it, play with it, and use it for fun or profit.