Thanks to Eugene’s hard work in the weekend, dojox.gfx3d is landed in the TRUNK, you may fetch it from the anonymous repository:

And here is an updated diff for Pie3d.js against r10696:

Area chart is not as popular as Column though, it is still commonly used in the business world to demonstrate the contribution from different categories, for example:

And further more, I decided to migrate the broken pie3d.js and bar3d.js to dojox.chart.Chart framework. The calcLayout of Column3d is still quite experimental, we may refactor it when theme concept is introduced:

The implementation of Pie3d is far less bullet-proof, and the BSP scheduler is quite computation-extensive; but I am impressed by the beauty of lighting effect, the color of Firefox is really gorgeous:

In the next step, we would normalize the calcLayout using theme. Here is the code snapshot.

Logarithmic axis is quite important for the scientific plotting to demonstrate the exponential growth like infection of virus, possible a good candidate for viral marketing as well. Here is two examples based upon XYLine: XLogYLine with linear X axis and logarithmic Y axis and LogXLogYLine with logarithmic X,Y axes. Grid is added to help readability:

Here is code snapshot.

Basic 2D charts include the following types:

• Column, the traditional chart to show the growth of the profile
• Bar, the sister of Column
• Pie, the favorite of marketing salesman
• XYLine, commonly used in scientific computing

Just as the following screenshots demonstrates:




There are quite a few variants of the basic graphics:

• Stacked Column/Bar, either normalized or not
• logarithmic axes
• 3D versions of all the above

The dojox.chart.Chart is the work horse behind the scene, there are only couple of functions that need to be overrided to support new chart:

• constructor, binding the axes
• getSeriesStyle, generate the styles for series if the user do not specify
• _render, the ultimate method to visualize the data

You can fetch the code from here, it depends on dojo-0.9; and we are planning to migrate the 3D chart into this framework, you may bypass the bump of the road if you stick to the dojo-svn from the very beginning.

In the last four section(1, 2, 3, 4) ,we have been familiar with the environment, it is time to do some real work.

I will add more fresh to models.py , linking eBook file and its meta data, thumbnail of the cover, regular size cover etc. Two other models are added for eBook:

Book to File is one-to-many as one book may have more than one formats, a PDF version for print, a CHM version for reference.

To server the images of book covers, , we need to setup the MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL:

and setup the url mapping as well:

To save an image file, we can easily call save_FOO_file method, it works with two drawbacks: first, you need to read the image into the memory; second, it is synchronous function call aka it is blocked until the file is fetched, read and written. urlretrive is preferred in this way:

A further optimization may introduce Twisted or asyncore.

More work needs to be done in the UI side: the Book objects are populated in brief or detail modes. Brief mode just highlight the title, cover, authors and ISBN of the book, commonly used in general listing, search results, my favorite and so on; while detail mode shows more detailed information like editorial review, related book, tags etc. It is worthy extracting the code snippet of brief mode to a template, so we can reuse it later by {% include book_item_brief.html %}. Detail view would fetch the editorial view from Amazon using the same AJAX hack as discussed before.

With stylesheet, it looks much better, Brief view:

and Detail view:

Check r30.