• Make a TODO application that I actually like (I’ll post about it some other day).
• Learn Merb and DataMapper… and jQuery.

The experience have been roughly half frustrating, half rewarding. It’s fun learning new things, but the documentation for both Merb and DataMapper sucks big time so sometimes I spend much more time than I would like figuring out how to make things work. Don’t get me wrong, the reference documentation looks very complete… but there’s no single source of consistent documentation to learn how things are done. And that’s painful. Moreover, apparenly the API has changed several times (at least before 1.0.0, but it hasn’t been that long since), so a lot of recipes or solutions you find on the internet are simply not valid anymore, which just adds up to the confusion and frustration.

Anyway. The client-side piece of the puzzle, jQuery, has proven to be a very handy, clean, easy-to-use-even-for-non-Javascript-wizards, natural way of writing Javascript. I admit I’m a kind of Javascript-phobe, as I don’t really know more than the basics and never has had the need or inclination to actually learn the language (yeah, my bad, but whatever). And yet, I really like jQuery, so there has to be something there. My favourite feature is the selectors: they’re a very clean way to access elements in a page, and add event handlers or otherwise manipulate them. Also the jQuery Ajax features feel really natural and comfortable to use.

The only problem I have had was using the autocomplete jQuery UI feature. I read the documentation, downloaded the appropriate bits from the jQuery website, included everything in my application, but it just wouldn’t work. After a lot of trial and error (and more frustration), I finally could make it work… using the Javascript files from the demo page (js, css) instead of the latest version from the jQuery download page. I think the problem is that the API has changed (the API apparently documents the older version that they use in the demo page), but I couldn’t figure it out reading the source code, so I just used the older, known-to-work version.