GrassrootsPolicy.com is a website I’ve been working on in Ruby on Rails, hosted on Heroku.  The idea of the site is that users post, vote, and comment on political ideas. If you feel passionate about an idea you can share the link with your friends, and encourage them to provide feedback and vote on the issue.  Top ideas might get the attention of elected officials who can do something about it.

So far, Rails has made a few features easy…

• User registration and login is implemented with gem ‘devise’
• Threaded comments are implemented with gem ‘awesome_nested_set’ and rails partial views.
• jQuery and jQuery UI are used in a lot of the default templates, tabs, and ajax postbacks for commenting, voting, and posting new ideas.

I’ve got a handful of features to implement, which I should probably start to manage on trello.com… but for now please Register, Vote, Comment and post your own Ideas!

PS, the code is messy, but if you feel like taking a look its out on github.com/recalde/grassroots.

Here’s a code snippet showing how to use the Chatter file-preview dialog from a Visualforce page.

Facebook photo album from the Bicycle Tour of Colorado

Another code sample to demonstrate the new jQuery Grid (pre1.9) widget on the Force.com platform. This sample hooks up paging and selecting.

References
- Salesforce AJAX Toolkit
- jQuery UI Grid (Github)
- jQuery UI Grid Planning & Development Wiki

This code sample demonstrates how to use jQuery Template Plugin on the Force.com platform. This sample uses a SOQL query to select user data. The rendered template is switched onclick to an editable row. The updates are then persisted back to salesforce using the .update() javascript method. 

References
- Salesforce AJAX Toolkit 
- jQuery Templates (Github)

I like that Microsoft is elevating HTML/Javascript, but I generally disagree that Windows 8 is signalling an end to silverlight… this article includes some supporting evidence that Silverlight hasn’t been abandoned, yet.

Note: this is not an endorsement of Silverlight as a development platform for large complex applications.

Nice article from Ted Neward in response to the question “I’m a new programmer, having moved over after 20 years as a systems guy. What do you wish somebody had taught you back when you were new?”