JavaScript - Ninja Series
Dylan, one of our web developers and hard core JavaScript Pro, has started a nice series about various JavaScript topics that are related to his current web development tasks. In these very easy to follow tutorials he gives insides into how to code common tasks without any library in native JavaScript. This might be necessary in case, in which you need full control of every aspect of a process and you are looking for best performance. I found the series very enjoyable and worthwhile reading. Below a list to the different articles on our sociomantic blog.
The JavaScript Disciplines
Discipline 1: AJAX with XHR
Discipline 2: Dynamic JS with PHP
Discipline 3: Include External JS
Discipline 4: Cookies and Variables
Discipline 5: removeNode vs. removeChild
Discipline 6: Native Javascript Ninjutsu: DOMinating iframes
Eclipse code formatting
After reinstalling Eclipse lately I was having trouble setting up a proper code formatting for tabs. Despite setting 'Preferences | General | Editors | Text Editor | Insert Spaces for Tabs' I still got tabs in my code. You can check that by enable 'Preferences | General | Editors | Text Editor | Show whitespace characters'. I really couldn't figure out why this happened and it was driving me nuts. It turns out that there is another setting in the code formatter options that overrides this setting. The Descent (D programming language plugin) default code formatter setting 'Preferences | D | Code style | Formatter | Indentation | General option | Tab policy' was set to 'tabs only'. It needs to be set to 'spaces only'.
Twitterverse
It's a long time since I posted something here, but I just came across the Twitterverse illustration from Brian Solis and Jess3. I didn't pay much attention to Twitter since my first signup. I randomly posted some tweets, integrated it into my facebook profile, but thats it. Then I saw this illustration. I was amazed about the number of different applications that have been spawned through the availability of the Twitter API.
Installing Tokyo Tyrant in custom directory
In the process of testing Tokyo Cabinet and Tokyo Tyrant I just came across some small difficulties setting both up. Although the installation and configuration is almost straigth forward I stumbled about some small issues. The documentation on Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant is not very comprehensive so far apart from the extensive API documentation. Installation and operations information are rare at the moment. There I've just written down my path to a running and manageable installation, which can easily deployed to several linux servers (OpenSuSE).
Key/value database storage engines
I recently dived into the world of distributed Key/Value database stores. Although key/value storage engines are nothing particular new, distributed implementation seem to gather some attention lately due to high scalability demands of current online services. Below are interesting reads about this topic together with some links to project I found particular interesting.
Articles
A very good overview article about different storage engines has been written by Richard Jones from Last.fm, in which he compares the different engines with the needs of last.fm in mind.
The following articles are more about specific implementation of a certain storage engine, but interesting to get to understand the whole principles more deeply.
- http://www.igvita.com/2009/02/13/tokyo-cabinet-beyond-key-value-store/
- http://bytepawn.com/readings-in-distributed-systems/
- http://push.cx/2009/rules-of-database-app-aging/
- http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql/
Bob Ippolito gave a very comprehensive talk at PyCon 2009 on "Drop ACID and think about data", where he summarizes his experiences with different storage engines while implementing the service at Mochi Media. He presents the different storage engines and shows how their are being used for different purposes:
