• I learned QUnit, which I used to write some really useful unit tests. It’s quite nice to be able to write Javascript unit tests easily.
• I made some heavy refactoring (see above) which made me learn some more Javascript and made the code much more flexible, so now the widget is not limited to a single Kiva API page of results, but to as many pages as needed to fetch whatever number of loans the user wants. Not to mention that the data source need not be a URL.
• Now the widget actually has some configuration. Namely, the number of loans to show in the map. It also stores it persistently using the preference store, which is quite nice.

As I said, I used Git for it. I don’t “hate” it anymore, but I still find some things annoying, like the horrible, confusing names some options have (I’m thinking about “git checkout ” to revert the local changes, or “git diff —cached” to see the contents of the index/staging area; seriously guys, W-T-F?). I used to be skeptical about the “git add” for changes and then “git commit”, but I actually find it quite nice: it’s easier to plan a commit that way, and if you don’t want to plan it, you can always just “git commit ” directly. Also “git add -p” is really nice to commit just parts of a file (at last, someone copies some of the good stuff Darcs had had for ages!). Apart from Git itself, it’s cool that there is GitHub, so it’s easy to share your repositories without having to rsync to some web server or similar… not to mention that your project is much more visible that way.

But the World Loanmeter wasn’t the only pet project I was working on these past weeks: I also wrote a simple sudoku solver, demisus, in Ruby. The reason? Writing a prototype of a sudoku solver in a language I’m fluent with, to play with the design and get something interesting and easy to maintain… to rewrite it in Haskell. I have been trying to learn some functional language for some years now, but I never find a “project” that is interesting enough to write some “real world program” in the language and I end up not learning anything. After starting reading Real World Haskell, I really felt like trying to learn the language once and for all, and I figured that a sudoku solver was easy enough to write, something I know enough about, and something math-y enough to be reasonably easy to implement in Haskell.

So, if you’re interested in any of them, you can have a look in Github and even contribute ;-)

I couldn’t resist the temptation to have a look at the documentation and start thinking about some application to use it. Soon after I started reading I came up with the idea of writing an Opera widget. There were a couple of reasons for that:

1. I had never written a widget, so it sounded like a good excuse to learn how to write them.
2. Widgets use Javascript, and that felt like a natural fit (as the API returns JSON).
3. I didn’t really know that much Javascript (just enough to write a couple of event handlers), and that seemed a good opportunity to start learning the language “properly”.
4. A widget in http://widgets.opera.com had more possibilities of actually being used than a random pet project of mine lying in some obscure repository of some obscure version control system (well, actually I ended up using Git for it, so it’s not that obscure in some sense; but you get the point).

So I started by learning a bit of Javascript. After asking around, the best thing I found to learn quickly was a very good series of videos by Douglas Crockford hosted in Yahoo! Video.

Then, I had a look at the excellent articles in Dev Opera about creating widgets and started creating one. As I had the idea of creating something that would show loans around the world, I started looking for HTML and Javascript for building maps, and found a very good article in A List Apart about accessible maps. The sad part is, once I understood how everything worked I destroyed the whole accessibility of the solution, but it was for a widget anyway (you have excellent support for CSS and Javascript in Opera, no need to have a fallback to show textual data in a widget) and my code ended up much much simpler and easier to maintain.

Finally, for Git, I had a look at the screencasts hosted in GitCasts. I already new some basic Git things, but I think I started to feel more comfortable with it after watching a couple of those videos. Still, too many references to the obscure objects and SHA names and whatever, but clear enough to understand your way around it.

In short, I have to say that creating the widget was easy enough, and it was lots of fun to write it. I had some frustrations debugging it, but things worked fairly well in general. When I finished it, I uploaded to widgets.opera.com and after a couple of days it was already approved and public for everyone.

So, if you want to give it a shot, just go to my widgets page and download the World Loanmeter! Enjoy it! :-D