Dashboard Widgets are Great with Prototype

One of my commercial projects this year was to build an online ticket sales system for a large bar and venue company in London. The run up to Christmas was the big live test of the system, so they needed statistics on ticket sales.

Just for fun, I decided to make a Dashboard widget that used curl to fetch the current data from a script on their server. But you know what made this task 100% less painful? My old friend Prototype.js.

Using Prototype allowed me to build the widget in literally minutes, since it was a simple case of displaying the result of a system call run with PeriodicalExecuter. Most of the time was spent looking up how to enable system commands in the documentation: AllowSystem must be added to your plist file, which takes a boolean value. I haven’t yet noticed PeriodicalExecuter doing anything strange when the widget isn’t visible, and it didn’t have any CPU–draining side–effects.

By the way, I’ve written 14163 lines of code in the last year, across 9 projects that I work on outside of my day job. I can’t easily produce a count for my day job code. So, I hope no one will mind if I disappear for a week and sleep?