This summer, I’m working as a UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity) at MIT’s CSAIL. I don’t think I’ve ever made a post about my actual project, Timegrid, so I think I’ll do that now.

My task is to design and develop a client-side Javascript framework that takes event data in some format (iCal, XML, etc.) and renders it out to a number of different, configurable, dynamic views. What kind of views will Timegrid support? For starters, it will support all of the views that Google Calendar is currently capable of: weekly, monthly, etc. Timegrid is more flexible than Google Calendar though. Imagine that you want to render a table of events happening in various locations, and you want each column to represent a different room, and each row to represent a starting time. Timegrid will be able to handle that as well.

Timegrid is designed to be easily configurable, incredibly flexible and customizable, clean, and beautiful. Good thing I have all summer to work on it.

Timegrid Project Page

At work today, my boss asked me to write a tag library for Spring, and in the process, I found these two really neat Javascript libraries that reduce a lot of the tedium of writing an AJAX (Asychronous Javascript And XML) web application.

• Prototype - A fairly large (~50kb) Javascript library that defines several classes to make your life easier. There are many functions provided that simply reduce the amount of typing you have to do, and even Ruby-style closures for lists, through the Enumeration class. Of course, it also provides some great classes for AJAX tasks as well. However, be warned, there is very little official documentation for Prototype.
• script.aculo.us - A Javascript library that layers itself on top of Prototype and adds a plethora of eye candy. Some of the effects it includes are: drag & drop support, fading, sliding panels, and highlighting.

Working with either library is extremely pleasant, especially when compared to the task of manually coding all of the functionality that they provide for free. Also, I’ve seen the end results on many websites and they look great. Highly recommended.