Top Five Reasons to Try Java 8
Java 8 is a substantial improvement over Java 7. Here are Java developer John Shepard’s top five favorite features.
Getting Chatty with Angular, Socket.IO, Node/Express and Bootstrap
Now that we’re well into the client/server age of the web with client-side frameworks such as AngularJS and Ember, it’s time to start revisiting those typical sample projects and reviewing how they’ll change with a more intelligent client. In this tutorial we’ll wire up an AngularJS single-page web application to communicate with Web Sockets using Socket.IO and host the application using NodeJS for an all-Javascript stack.
JavaScript's Modern Tools – Grunt – Ant for the Browser?
In our prior JavaScript build tools posts, we already discussed bower and npm, two tools that help you download and install dependencies. But what about tools to build your application, run tests, distribute minified versions and run quality checks? Enter Grunt.
Order Out Of Chaos – Maintaining ordered processing of messages in AKKA actors
The reactive paradigm is a wonderful thing. The basic idea is that a reactive application, as much as possible, is asynchronous from beginning to end. It should be event driven, fault tolerant, scalable and responsive. Writing an asynchronous application, however, has it’s own set of unique challenges. In this post I’ll demonstrate an approach we took to solve the challenge of maintaining a definite order, specifically when performing database updates in asynchronous code within an actor.
Twilio SMS Receive – Crazy Simple
Twilio is a cloud based service that enables you to programmatically make and receive phone calls and SMS messages using their simple API. We’ll see how to receive and send SMS messages using Twilio and a simple Django app.
Effective Testing: Don't Read the Spec First!
By acting like a first-time or uneducated user of a system, I’m more likely to come across errors not found on the system’s “happy path”, often turning up more “page not found” or “an error has occurred” messages.
Google's new Mobile Chrome Apps framework, what is it?
Google has announced and released a preview for porting Chrome Apps to mobile devices. Tentively called Mobile Chrome Apps the whole thing can be found over at Github. What this does is bring most the Chrome Web app API to Android and iOS. It does that by wrapping up cordova/phonegap with some custom plugins in a tool that allows import of those existing web apps.
Using Node.js and Charles Proxy to Mock a Server API
In this post, I’ll walk through the steps to create a simple iPhone app that interacts with a public API, using Node and Charles to simulate an error response. This post assumes some experience writing iOS code, but all the source code will be available on GitHub…
ANTLR4 Grammar
Charioteer John Shepard recently wrote about ANTLR4 Grammar on his blog. Read more inside.
Android Data Sync
If you have an Android app that 1) reads and/or writes data from a SQLite database and 2) needs to update that data periodically from another source, say a RESTful web service then one approach you can take is to hook into the Android Sync Service. I recently created an Android project with a Sync Adapter to consume and publish data to a simple Go RESTful web service and I’d like to share what I’ve learned.