Andy McKay

Mar 25, 2010


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); 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) {

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) {

...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: