In a previous post, I provided a simple example of rendering an HTML list view using Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile. The code from that example ended up rendering a list like this: Notice that the list is presented in the order that came from the JSON. Also, when items are added to the list, they show up at the bottom. While easy, this isn’t the best. In this post, I’ll add sorting to the backbone collection and make a small…
If you are working on a JavaScript heavy application (think jQuery Mobile, etc.), you probably will want to look at some JavaScript libraries to help add structure, consistency and convenience to your applications. One of the JavaScript libraries I’ve used lately is Backbone.js. To quote Backbone themselves, it provides “models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful…
On Saturday, 12/17/11, SpringSource/VMware released version 1.2.0 of Spring Roo, the Spring rapid application development platform, to the public. There are a lot of good changes in this release to make Roo quite palatable to Enterprise developers, such as: Multi-POM projects – now you can create web, service, database, and functional tiers and tie them all together with a parent POM. You can even scaffold web interfaces based on models from other projects. Scaffolded service support and repository support – now,…
This is an opinion piece that represents the views of the author, and does not represent the official stance of Chariot Solutions. But sometimes it is fun to weigh in on the news of the day. There has been quite a dust up in the blogosphere about Yammer’s decision to switch from using Scala to Java. Google “yammer switching to scala” and you’ll get a sampling. You can read it for yourself, but the gist of story seems to be…
Groovy’s sugary syntax makes coding algorithms — dare I say it — fun. The shunting yard algorithm, invented by Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, is used to parse mathematical expressions. You might have picked up on this already, but computers and people think differently. We commonly use infix notation to write mathematical expressions. It is what you learned in school. For example: “3 * (2 + 3)”. Makes sense to you, but it is inefficient for a computer to process. …
I’m going to make a bold statement: Spring Roo is about to do for Spring developers what Ruby on Rails did for Ruby developers – make developer agility, and not mechanical, rigid architectural structures, the focus of daily developer productivity. There. I’ve said it. But I have to step back for a minute and disclaim a few things. First, as some of you may know I’ve been working with Spring and Spring-related projects for a while. I’m also the education…
Akka is an excellent platform for writing concurrent applications using the Actor model. Chariot architect Anatoly Polinsky describes the Akka scheduler and how you can use it to create a heartbeat for an actor. From Anatoly’s blog: AKKA Scheduler: Sending Message to Actor’s Self on Start Akka has a little scheduler written using actors. This can be convenient if you want to schedule some periodic task for maintenance or similar. It allows you to register a message that you want…
Kevin Griffin has been working with PhoneGap for some time now. In this new blog post, Kevin discusses new features in PhoneGap 1.0. With the upcoming release of PhoneGap 1.0 I thought I would point out a couple of nice additions coming for PhoneGap (Android) Plugin developers (and eventually PhoneGap as a whole). The first addition is the propagation of lifecycle events (onPause, onResume and onNewIntent) to plugins. Plugin developers are now responsible for reacting appropriately if the app has…
Recently, Chariot’s Director of Consulting, Don Coleman, participated in the Isobar Create 48 NFC Hackathon in Boston. Below is an excerpt from his blog about his experience and his team’s second place finish. My friend Chris Bernardi invited me to join his team for the Isobar Create 48 NFC Hackathon along with April DiMartino and Marc Neuwirth. The event kicked off on Tuesday around 3 PM at Space with a Soul. Before the hackathon there were some general Near Field…
John Shepard, one of our architects, blogged some interesting thoughts on what makes a document inspection. Most developers will tell you that code reviews are good, and also tell you they aren’t done regularly in their organization. But John goes beyond the scope of code to reviewing other documents such as requirements and technical specifications as well. “While there is an ongoing debate on whether or not document inspections are useful, my experience is that on larger projects, they are…
