On dependency management Like many (all?) developers, I have a list of thoughts and gripes about managing and developing libraries while working on a coding project. The experience that prompted me to finally start writing this post was trying to get the Selenium WebDriver Java libraries installed and ready to use on my system. I think I could have downloaded…

Advanced remedial Javascript I’ve been using bits of code written by Douglas Crockford for years now. As you may know, as author of “Javascript: The Good Parts” he is quite opinionated about the language. Crockford refers to some of these concepts as “remedial” Javascript. On one hand, yes, we are dealing with the most basic concepts of the language, but…

Meteor, magic and n-tier applications I’ve been shouting about how cool Meteor is recently, but as I’ve been using it I’m wondering about a few things. As was pointed out by someone else in a blog post (which I can’t find at the moment), Meteor is essentially allowing us to go back to writing 2-tier applications like we did when…

Thoughts on UI frameworks I was playing around with Node-qt recently to see how difficult it would be to do a native-UI app using Javascript. I’m thinking of something along the lines of the Leo outliner which was done with Python and QT . I’m kind of interested in how using Javascript as a scripting language would look in something…

The future of Web development isn’t MVC, it’s MVM When Ruby on Rails hit the Web development world in 2005, it changed everything practically overnight by bringing a pattern rooted in Smalltalk to the Web. I’ve been playing with the recently-released Meteor Web framework and I think that an important and equally momentous shift is taking place in the Web…

Building mesh abstractions I’ve had a concept rattling around in my head for a while but I haven’t quite found the right way to describe it yet. The closest that I’ve come is the concept of a mesh as a metaphor. Abstractions are a tricky thing in that they are never perfect. In some cases we try to make them…

Text transformation with JSON and regular expressions Ever since I wrote the Jath Javascript XML processing library I’ve been thinking about ways to declaratively transform various things to JSON. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, I’ve been talking about ways to update the tools we use to pass around data structures rather than text blobs lately. Since I wrote that post, I’ve been toying…

Testing the Clojure way I’ve been through several iterations of testing fads already in my programming career. The bottom line regardless of any fads however, is that you need to test your code. Somehow, some way. Manual testing is bad, automated testing is good. 100% test coverage is impossible, and shouldn’t be a stated goal. Zero defects is silly, not…

Functional programming and the death of the Unix Way Small tools, each doing one thing well, has been the call of the Unix Way since its inception some 40 years ago. However, if you look at even the basic tools that ship with a modern Unix (Linux, BSD) many of them have an abundance of options and layers of additional…

Running programs as Linux daemons using Upstart In the Windows world, any long-running background process on a machine is handled as a Windows Service. This is a well-known programming interface that allows the system to coordinate startup and shutdown procedures and allows an administrator to use the service management tools to control and log details of the process. In Linux,…