Django-lawnchair
Lawnchair is a library that provides a client side JSON store and that's really cool. Since I'm going to be using this quite a bit in some of our applications, I started to build out some of the common uses into a library. This makes working with django models on the client side a little bit easier.
At the moment django-lawnchair contains a few utilities to do some work on the server, but to be honest, not to much. I'm hoping I can integrate django-piston a bit to make writing that easier.
There's a bit more on the client side of things, using django-lawnchair.js you can instantiate a database like this:
var todos = new djangochair('/todo/list');
Grabbing all the objects for a model (in this case Todo objects), populating the local database (or whatever backend store you choose) is as simple as:
todos.remote_get(add_row);
...as each Todo is added to the DB, the callback add_row will be called.
Users can interact with the objects. Each time you change a model in the local DB, we change the state. You can the push all the changed objects to Django:
todos.updated(function(r) {
todos.remote_save(r);
});
This will iterate through each changed object and push them to the server, where they will be saved. Got deleted objects?
todos.deleted(function(r) {
todos.remote_delete(r, function(r) {
todos.purge(r.key);
});
});
...and so on. There's a lot to do in this area, handling errors, handling syncing problems and so on. The library doesn't do much of that yet, it's trying to set a base line for this stuff. As we build this out for some applications, we'll be fleshing these cases out.
This is in a "works on my machine" state at: http://github.com/andymckay/django-lawnchair.