Kagi is pretty good at surfacing high quality third-party reviews. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html

This looks really great, solves a lot of big problems.

There isn't really a mapping between backbones models and protorpc. Backbone.js assumes the model layer is RESTful where protorpc assumes you will make method calls, each via a POST call.

I'm interested in what a model layer would look like using protorpc. One idea is to take a similar path of abstraction as the underlying appengine datastore api does: use protocol buffers to express an "entity". So you might have:

    { 
      entity_type: 'Book',
      entity_fields: [ 
        { 
          field_type: int,
          field_name: 'title',
          required: true
        }
      ]
    }

This would be a proto definition called, "Entity". From here you could build procedure calls that send entities for doing common routines, such as updates, or deletes. If you can make a structure like this work, you can build an api with javascript which hides the protobufs from you all together.. When you call Model.get('Book').create({title: 'My book'}), it constructs the Entity protobuf and calls the remote call for creating a new entity.

Just an idea! Also - protorpc is in fresh development, so it's a good idea to join the discussion group and make suggestions: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/google-protorpc-disc...

I don't see it mentioned very often, but google's closure-library has some really phenomenal patterns for building maintainable javascript. Its worth checking out Michael Bolin's book, Closure: The Definitive Guide, which goes in depth of the Component and Control frameworks.

I've been using the library for 2 or 3 years now, and I am always surprised to see it has such a small community.

Exactly. I see closure as an ambitious effort to make JavaScript a better language for real complicate applications.

It does look like an interesting library. It's weird that the community seems so small.

Here is Michael's blog: http://blog.bolinfest.com/

And the HN discussion from when it was first open sourced: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924426

Compiler : http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/

Library : http://code.google.com/closure/library/ (UI / widgets)

Templates: http://code.google.com/closure/templates/

You can also create a 'bind' that returns a function that when called applies the context you desire.

  function bind(fn, selfObj) {
     return function() {
        return fn.apply(selfObj || window);
     };
  }

  callback = bind(function(){ alert(this.hello); }, this);

Yeah - this is a great addition. I get a lot of email from developer mailing lists, it's really great insight!

Me too! However, a few weeks ago I dropped in at gates and it appears they moved it to huang.

Congrats cloudkick! Rackspace is getting an awesome product and even more amazing team.

I don't think the intent is to really be a reference for javascript methods, at least for now. Apple releases "Coding Guidelines" as more of a style guide and suggested patterns.

From the toolkits: "JavaScript toolkits enhance productivity but often carry a significant memory footprint that may slow down your JavaScript application. When using a toolkit, try to reduce the toolkit’s footprint to just the APIs that you use in your application."

This somewhat hints to me that Apple will come out with a framework that allows more modular includes or compiles similar to closures system. This is somewhat a hit to jQuery's "all-in-one" setup.