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Blogs » Archive for April, 2008
Is Measure Map Abandonware?
Measure Map was a great blogging stats tool; very simple and yet able to communicate a large amount of information. I think it’s really odd (and sightly rude) that it has simply been abandoned—perhaps they’re waiting for all the alpha account holders to give up and go away?
Ruby On Rails Linkage: GitHub, Passenger and more…
The Rails core team is inching towards version 2.1 of Rails which adds a myriad of new features including named scopes, gem dependencies and native timezone support. The official launch of GitHub has seen an explosion of articles on how to use Git, and it looks like Rails can finally become a first class citizen on shared hosts. Here are some links where you can find out more:
- Geoff Buesing goes through the new Timezone support
- Ryan Daigle explains the new named_scope functionality and how Gem dependencies work
- Peter Cooper runs through some more resources for working with Git
- Phusion releases Passenger (AKA mod_rails), that allows Rails applications to be deployed via an Apache module, in a similar manner to PHP.
More on Passenger later.
continue - the forgotten statement
I’m a big fan of continue, partly just because it’s a positive and encouraging word (carry on, everything’s fine), but mostly because it can reduce code and improve efficiency, and that’s almost always a good thing.
Here’s a quick precis: the continue statement can be used within an iterator, such as a for loop, and means continue to the next iteration; this is contrast to the break statement which means abandon this loop entirely.
So, whenever the code inside an iterator is finished for that iteration, we can use the continue statemtent to prevent the interpretor from reading unecessary code, and to reduce the actual amount of code we have to type.
For example, this code:
for(var i=0; i<ary.length; i++)
{
if(ary[i] == ‘foo’)
{
//something
}
else
{
//whatever
}
}
Could also be written like this:
for(var i=0; i<ary.length; i++)
{
if(ary[i] == ‘foo’)
{
//something
continue;
}
//whatever
}
I’m also a big fan of continue as a means to jump past conditions we’re never interested in, such as ignoring external prototypes when iterating through the properties of an object; so rather than this:
for(var i in obj)
{
if(obj.hasOwnProperty(i))
{
//whatever
}
}
We can do this:
for(var i in obj)
{
if(!obj.hasOwnProperty(i)) { continue; }
//whatever
}
So what’s the real difference? Well, we’ve avoided the need for a braced condition, which can make the code more efficient (since the interpretor doesn’t …
The Week in ColdFusion: 2-8 April: updater overload
Obviously the big news this week was that the first ColdFusion updater, 8.0.1, was released - and was subsequently re-announced by seemingly every blog in MXNA and Fullasagoog! In between all the announcements were some posts exploring the new features:
- Ray Camden shows how it’s now easier to add PDF watermarks
- Brian Rinaldi and Barney Boisvert debate the best way to create dummy recordsets
- John Beynon discusses EULA changes, which will be of particular interest to those interested in virtualisation, and Vince Bonfanti of New Atlanta responds with the differences between ColdFusion and BloueDragon’s licensing models
- Adobe’s Manjukiran Pacchhipulusu writes about taking advantage of the new 64-bit support
Fortunately, I also managed to find some more material NOT related to the update. There’s new features at Fusion Authority, home of the print journal FAQU. The first of a number of CFUnited video interviews has been posted, where Paul Vernon interviews New Atlanta’s Vince Bonfanti about - guess what! - BlueDragon open source. And I attempt to highlight some of the best CF-Talk mailing list threads from the previous week in my new ColdFusion-Talk Roundup #1.
Short and sweet code cuts:
The Changing Face of Web Hosting
Earlier this week, Google announced the preview release of Google App Engine, a service that lets you build and run web applictions (in Python only for now) on Google’s own server infrastructure. This latest move continues a trend away from self-managed hosting and extends it by offering a fully managed application environment.
First of all, let’s be courteous and set aside the fact that Google botched the launch of App Engine—first by tripping over its own quotas and then by succumbing to a rudimentary cross-site scripting attack. We’ll just assume the preview was rushed out the door before it was entirely ready. We’ll also overlook App Engine’s striking similarity to competitor AppJet.
Google App Engine joins the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in providing instantly scalable hosting. In these uncertain times, it can be incredibly reassuring to build your site on a hosting service that will remain inexpensive if your business never takes off, but which can also keep up with a runaway hit without breaking a sweat.
Where App Engine beats EC2 is in friendiness for beginners. You can deploy a new application to App Engine with a single command. …
Google Adsense Trialed on Yahoo!
Yahoo! is currently running a two week trial of Google’s Adsense on 3% of its US search results. The trial is seen as an investigation into the prospects of a long term partnership between the two companies. The core idea, (according to Yahoo!) is to exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value, but is it really?
Or is this just game playing with Microsoft? Perhaps to boost perceived company value or to allude at the creation of an advertising monopoly with Google. What ever the aim — Microsoft’s General Councel, Brad Smith has responded by posting this comment:
Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo! We will assess closely all of our options. Our proposal remains the only alternative put forward that offers Yahoo! shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.
Interestingly — Microsoft are complaining about the market becoming less competitive. Surely that’s a case of the pot …
.NET on the ‘NET April 2 - 8 : All your Yahoo are belong to us!
The continuing story of Yahoo and Microsoft opened another chapter this week. Microsoft set forth an ultimatum regarding their acquisition offer [WARNING: Humorous Ballmer Photo] and Yahoo issued a response. I personally hope that this all gets resolved in a nice civilized manner. It’s become pretty clear that the acquisition will probably happen; at this point it’s in Yahoo’s court to decide how it goes down. On the MSDN blogs, Ashish Thapliyal laid out a roadmap for SilverLight 2.0. It looks like your SilverLight 2 Beta 1 apps won’t necessarily work in Beta 2, which should be out in the next few months, and we can expect a release of SilverLight 2 this summer. Finally, How Software is Built posted an interview with Brad Wilson regarding Codeplex and some general discussion about Open-source and Microsoft.
As for tutorials, Bob Familiar posted a good overview of some of the best SilverLight 2.0 tutorials around. Your Websites, Our Passion posted some resources for setting up IIS7 to cooperate with Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, which is key for those of us working on Vista. Custom server control developers can also get some help from Bipin Joshi, who …
Write For SitePoint And Win The Adobe CS3 Web Premium Suite
We’ve extended the deadline for this competition by two weeks.
You asked for more competitions, so here’s another one!
We’re giving away two copies of Adobe CS3 Web Premium (kindly donated by Adobe) to the authors of the best articles about Adobe Flex and AIR submitted over the next four weeks.
That’s right — you could WIN a copy of the ultimate graphics package for web developers, Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium, just by submitting an article about Flex or AIR. Worth USD $1,599, the package includes the latest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver and a host of other tools that form the industry benchmark for creating web graphics.
How To Win
- Write an article for publication on sitepoint.com about Adobe Flex or AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). We’re mostly looking for tutorials (either standalone or multi-part series). The article(s) must be original and must not be already published online elsewhere. We’re interested everything from beginner articles to intermediate and advanced topics. Also note that we’re looking for quality content (first-time authors might want to run their article past a friend or colleague before submitting).
- Submit the article before Sunday May 4th May …
Google Reveals App Engine
From their secret techno-lairs the Google developers have revealed a preview of their latest creation: App Engine:
Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it’s ready to serve your users.
The features include:
- dynamic web serving, with full support for common web technologies
- persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
- automatic scaling and load balancing
- APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
- a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer
App Engine currently supports Python, but apparently other languages are coming. The free account (the only one offered during the preview) is limited to “500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day”.
The App Engine blog is also up and running.
These certainly are interesting times! Thanks to @lachlanhardy for the news!
Microsoft To Follow Apple’s Lead on Backwards Compatibility
Microsoft are planning on following Apple’s lead on backwards compatibility with the next version of their Windows operating system, referred to as Windows 7, to be launched as early as next year.
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