Who Is The Antichrist?

I know it's been a long time since I've written anything here. A really long time. I figured I'd break this silence with an overview of a project I've been working on lately that will hopefully prove interesting.

It's a site called Antichrist Watch. It's a site that attempts to answer this article's titular question who is the Antichrist? in a Web 2.0 sort of way using a fun mix of AJaX technologies.

I recently realized that much of the work that I do ends up buried within various intranets and extranets and is thus invisible to the world at large. While I've worked on all sorts of dynamic systems that do all sorts of things (both server-side and client-side), I really don't have any that I can show people. Most of the public sites that I work on tend to be simpler sorts of things, and people viewing them tend to mostly remember the graphics design elements (which in most cases I didn't actually work on anyway). With Antichrist Watch I have something that I can show both curious acquaintances and potential clients. The dynamic properties of it are fundamental to how the site works, and even people not all that familiar with the Web can get it.

Under the hood it uses a somewhat unusual combination of key technologies that not too many others use together: the Dojo Toolkit, Zope, Twisted, Python, and PostgreSQL. While people familiar with my company Saugus.net will not at all be surprised with Zope, Python, and PostgreSQL (we've been using them all pretty prominently for years), Dojo and Twisted may be unexpected. We've actually also been using these off and on for quite awhile too, but not in too many public projects. In fact, thinking back, there are currently only two public areas of Saugus.net sites that utilize Dojo, and no public areas at all that use Twisted. While we are hoping to change this in the relative near future, Antichrist Watch demonstrates how these technologies can work together in harmony now.

While I'm still working on the site fixing bugs and adding new minor features, all of my originally planned core features are in place:

1. The ability to vote on one's own choice of Antichrist, whether or not he or she is already in the list, with autocompletion based upon the live list of everyone's past choices.
2. Charts and tables showing current leaders for the past day, the past week, the past month, the past year, and all time.
3. Additional charts and tables showing votes as they come in with individual votes mapped to rough geographical areas, and the recent levels of voting activity over time.
4. A way to drill down and see the numbers for any particular Antichrist candidate.
5. A facility that allows one to argue for or against the likelihood of a particular Antichrist candidate being the Antichrist, respond to others' comments, and display it all in a tree.
6. The means to moderate the aforementioned comments.
7. A login system allowing people to establish identities within the site and voluntarily add personal information that will be displayed along with their comments to add personality.
8. Support for various icon types to go along with login identities, including at minimum PIcons, Gravatars, and .Mac icons.
9. Support for OpenID to ease the whole login process.
10. Basic support for forward and back buttons within the site.
11. A reasonably semantic design including a fully populated external RDF metadata file boasting appropriate Dublin Core terms and DOAP information (plus a few other useful nuggets).
12. Cleanly handle the full UTF-8 character set throughout.
13. Proper validation of pretty much everything according to the W3C's respective validators.

It does all of this in a way that almost totally avoids page reloads (the only exception is with OpenID authentication which by definition requires a redirect offsite and back). It also heavily makes use of lazy loading within its tables and trees, so that although access is provided to all data all the way back to day one, only data actually required for the current view gets downloaded keeping things fast on both client and server side. Of course, through the magic of Dojo it also works pretty well in all major browsers.

There are still lots of little details that need to be added. A means for automated password recovery quickly comes to mind, as well as more styling (what's there now is pretty close to being bare Dojo tundra), some more selective refreshing of data based on user input, better error handling (both in terms of weird user input and HTTP type errors like the dreaded 404), some friendly help for new users, and some more intelligence added to certain buttons and dialogs already within the site.

I'll post some more articles here discussing some of the key technologies and how I put them to use within the site. If anyone has any particular areas of interest, don't be afraid to speak up.