Announcement: Slickback v0.2.1

Version 0.2.1 of Slickback is now available. Slickback is a javascript library that makes it easier to use Backbone models and collections with the SlickGrid jQuery datagrid. New features in this version include support for displaying and editing Backbone model fields as text, integers, fixed precision numbers, and for selecting field values from dropdowns. Constructors for non-paginated Slickback collections are also new in this version. Slickback v0.2.1 is released under the MIT license and available on github or via npm.

Announcement: A Plugin Named Slickback

Slickback version 0.1.0 is now available on Github and via npm. Slickback is a javascript library that adapts Backbone collections to work with SlickGrid, a jQuery-backed datagrid. Extensions to Backbone include support for paginating collections and composing filtered queries using an interface modeled after Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord's "named scopes". Slickback, like Backbone and SlickGrid, is released under the MIT license.

Agile Software Development: The Good Parts

Like Javascript, Agile has become all but unavoidable. In Javascript: The Good Parts, Douglas Crockford briefly imagines the world as it might have been if Java applets had not been displaced by Javascript as the client-side web application platform of choice. "But Java did fail, and Javascript is flourishing, so there is evidence that Javascript did something right."

There are reasons, too, for Agile's popularity, and some of them are good reasons. As with Javascript, it pays to identify the bits that work and avoid those that lead to unnecessary problems.

Agile boils down to a series of tradeoffs. Some of the things that Agile sacrifices may not be dispensable in some or even most projects. And some of the things that it optimizes for may not figure into a project's viability.

Here are a few ideas associated with Agile that I have found to have broad application, and which, if they continue to prove useful, I hope will be preserved by future trends in the management of software development. This list isn't complete.

• Development is research and should inform design, not just execute it
• An incomplete implementation and the feedback it elicits is often a better guide to what users need than a priori requirements
• Tests make it easier to introduce new behavior while preserving the old
• Pay the cost of change on the installment plan