Viraj's Weblog

It's been almost a year since I released a version of Movie Vote. In that time I had been rewriting the UI in Java with Google Web Toolkit off and on. That started out as an experiment because I hated Javascript so much. I liked GWT so much I went full-on with it. Now the server side of my app is mostly JSON interfaces, and the UI is AJAXy without any Javascript written by me. I was glad to 'svn rm' the horrible Javascript I had in my previous versions. With GWT and Java, type checking is done before I deploy and I no longer have to worry about variable misspellings and other stupidness when writing JS.

Anyway, just in time for the holidays, I give you Movie Vote v1.5.

In general, web programming is really not my thing. No matter what language I'm writing a UI in, I'm just not a UI developer. I can guess as to what I think is a cool interface but this is better left to UI designers. I now have a screenshot on the project page. That minimal-looking interface involved a lot of code!

Occasionally I show movies for team-building and just plain taking some stress out of the week. I'm an avid movie watcher and have tons. So what I usually do is send out a proposed list of 5 or so movies and let people vote on them. I was using a PHP script called LittlePoll. If that link is broken, try this one. Anyway, it did the job, however I got really tired of picking out 5 movies to show. Wouldn't it be better if I just listed all of my movies and let people vote on them? Sort of like a Digg/Reddit interface to a movie list. Also I had no form of authentication and relied on the honor system (and I found out early not too many viewers deserved such honor).

I figured this would be a good learning experience to do some web programming in Python. So I sat down and wrote one using Django. I picked Django as we use it a lot at work and it seemed like a good thing to learn. In general I like it, however I feel all of these SQL abstraction frameworks just make it more difficult to get the queries you want in the most optimized fashion. In fact I had difficulty trying to do a simple task via the SQL abstraction. You'll notice that thread is gathering cobwebs due to its silence. The end result? Screw the abstraction and use raw SQL, sigh. I feel these web frameworks concentrate too much on getting things up as fast as possible more than functionality.

Other than that Django is pretty nifty to work with. It is indeed very simple. In no time I had a SQLite database-backed site with authentication setup. We even built in a weighting system so that people who consistently show up for the movies get a higher weight applied to their vote. This was a problem because we'd have users voting but never showing up, thereby affecting the viewing for others. Now new users get a zero weight until they attend one screening. It seems to be working well.

I say we because a co-worker has helped with some of the coding. The main problem we currently have is the slowness due to it running on a very old Thinkpad laptop. But we've optimized it pretty well. In fact, working on such low end hardware really teaches you to do things as efficient as possible. I know if I were to move it to a high end server it would fly. Oh and there is the problem with UI design, which I am horrible at. It is simple and functional though.

Now we have a pretty good system for deciding what to watch at our movie showings. I encourage you to setup something similar and give me feedback/patches .

Neat little Ajax real-time translator.

I came across Meebo, which is a web-based IM client. It's a rather amazing AJAX application. Check it out.