Refactoring Launchpad's lazrjs widgets

Just landed (r12285 on devel) is some refactoring I've been doing on the lazr-js widget wrappers. After hacking on the picker at Dallas, I felt the other editor widgets needed some attention as well. The primary documentation can be found in the source tree at lib/lp/app/doc/lazr-js-widgets.txt, in fact this is probably the best thing to read.

This new changes did several things:

• fixed the multi-line editor so you don't need extra HTML tags surrounding the widget in the page template
• changed the widgets to actually use page templates to render the content instead of fiddling with string substitution
• refactored the class inheritance - the multi-line editor no longer inherits from the single line editor, but instead they both inherit from a common base
• it changed the way the editable attribute is defined - from being the name of the attribute, to being the field from the interface
• the initial text for the multi-line editor is now determined from the object itself, not a parameter passed through to the constructor
• the permission checks were unified, which fixed a problem with the text editors using mutator functions exposed through lazr.restful
• you now have to be explicit about the id used for the HTML tag surrounding the editor - this wasn't much of an ask as all call sites were already doing this

All in all I'm pretty happy with this change.

Code Blue at the Thunderdome

I am sitting in the hotel at the end of the Launchpad Thunderdome. Really this was just a sprint for all of the Launchpad developers, but someone decided it needed a neat name, and Thunderdome stuck.

It is at this sprint that the Launchpad team is transitioning away from the old application based teams to "squads". There are five squads, each given a colour for now: Blue, Green, Orange, Yellow, and Red. So my "Code" team has been split up and I have a new squad "Blue". Before we even switched to the squads, on of my new members resigned to move to something new, so I have an opening. Actually right now we have two openings. One squad is primarily based in Australasia (with one in New York) and the other has people from North America and Europe.

The majority of our time has been spent getting to know our new squads. Three of the squads are working on features, and two are on maintenance. The Blue squad (called "Code Blue" from now) is finishing of the recipe feature. This allows packages to be built automatically directly from a source package assembled from one or more branches on Launchpad. This feature was started over a year ago and needs to be finished off. Most of what we are doing now is just polishing the user experience and interface. The feature has been available since around the middle of the year, and we have almost 250 recipes that are configured to build packages automatically. Once we finish this off Code Blue will move on to maintenance until some other feature teams finish up.

We have done some pretty impressive work on the webservice this week. Primarily due to trying to make nice AJAX popups for changing the owner and PPA of a recipe. This resulted in much yak shaving, and refactoring. The work we did make it trivially easy to add an AJAX popup to any place on Launchpad where a single value is chosen from a list of options. We also fixed a number of bugs in lazr.restful and very soon there will be a release that will add a 'web_link' property to the entries in launchpadlib that will refer to the actual object on Launchpad.