The corrosion of Aaron Stone

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TWIG Hacking

For the first time in a long time, I spent a weekend hacking on TWIG! :-D Tons of things work now in TWIG 4, lots of code flow improvements, CSS and Javascript improvements for Web 2.0 (more on that in a minute), database cleanliness and efficiency improvements, Reservations feature checked back in for the first time in a very long time, HelpDesk works, and the guts of a totally new Mail backend based on the IlohaMail IMAP library.

Back when the world was about separation content from presentation, TWIG 2 was all about mixing them together in the early tradition weekend-hack PHP apps, despite TWIG being a very large and otherwise well organized framework. Now that we’re in Web 2.0 days, the point at which content mixes with presentation to form an output web page has moved from being entirely on the server to being partially on the server and partially on the client. This is the Ajax way.

When I first started working on TWIG 4, I thought I would need a structural mechanism to allow data to be mixed into the source HTML or to be retrieved via Ajax. But it’s been on the table for so long now that Web 2.0 caught up with us and every reason for not relying on Javascript – old browsers, mobile devices, screen readers – now support at least basic Ajax functionality. With this now nearly universal support for running Javascript and requesting data via Ajax, I’ve now worked it into TWIG 4 as a requirement and a basic part of the architecture.

Next time, writing your own mashups using the TWIG query API and native Wiki feature!