Gibarian's Favorite Links on coding from Diigo

Hobo - the web application builder for Rails

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:03:06 -0000

Comments:

Hobo is a framework for the rails framework. It's frameworking a framework, if you can grasp that.
posted by gibarian

Tags: coding framework hobo rails

Posted by: gibarian

frevvo - web form builder Home

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:18:37 -0000

Tags: ajax automation coding forms muh

Posted by: gibarian

Django - Adding Authentication achinghead.com

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 06:42:12 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

As a shortcut, you can use the convenient login_required decorator.

Tags: authentication coding django muh users

Posted by: gibarian

The Standalone Programmer: Tips from the trenches - The Code Project - Work Issues

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 13:03:22 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Develop Good Coding Habits

Good coding habits are very important to the quality of the code produced as well as to the quality of the final product which uses the code. Nothing earth shattering here, just learned behavior. Some of the most important habits I have learned are:

Initialize all variables to zeros. If I declare an int I do this (int iValue = 0;) if I allocate a char array I do this (char szTemp[20]; memset(szTemp,0,20);).
Check the return codes of all function calls.
Catch all exceptions at an appropriate level and deal with them. One of the bad habits I had earlier in my career was to setup an empty catch block and think I was going to fill it in later.
When defining function prototypes consider error conditions. This means deciding whether to return a bool or an int (an int can return a set of predefined flags indicating what kind of problem occured. A bool can only indicate success/failute.) If there is additional info that a simple code can supply, consider passing in a string or other variable by reference to hold the extra error information OR consider throwing an exception.
Never pass objects by value unless ABSOLUTELY necessary. (I can't think of a situation where this has ever been necessary, but there might be.)
Use GOTOs wisely. The only place I have every used a goto (that I can think of) is in a lexical parser I had to write a few years ago.
Create more utility classes than program-specific classes.
Think about how a piece of code might be used in another project and go ahead and develop for that. (Don't take this to an extreme, though.)
Comment judiciously. When I write code comments I try to comment on the architecture and purpose of a function/class instead of on the lowest level of details.
The equality operator and the set operator are not the same DAMN@!#$# thing. I can't remember how many times I have done if (x=y). To avoid this I have created inline functions like FPSCompareString, FPSCompareInt, FPSCompareLong, FPSCompareFloat, FPSCompareDate, etc which have virtually eliminated this problem from my code.

I'm sure there are hundreds of other rules I could write up but that could take whole books. The bottom line for me is that there is no one to review my code or help me when problems arise. If I can eliminate the most common problems I can spend more of my time working on the more serious problems.

Tags: advice coding howto

Posted by: gibarian

AJAX for n00bs

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 08:51:09 -0000

Tags: ajax coding muh project

Posted by: gibarian

Django web framework search engine

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 09:55:57 -0000

Tags: coding django muh project search

Posted by: gibarian

SimpleJS --Javascript Frameworks light and accessible to the beginners

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 14:26:45 -0000

Tags: ajax coding framework

Posted by: gibarian

syntax across languages

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 03:23:02 -0000

Tags: coding languages syntax

Posted by: gibarian

Programmer Meet Designer - where web developers find web designers

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 07:44:03 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

You have found Programmer Meet Designer! This is a site for

programmers

web developers

designers

entrepreneurs

and

writers

to find each other and work together to create websites that look and function great.

Tags: coding collaboration muh

Posted by: gibarian

Seven Things Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax (Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog)

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 06:24:21 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

What Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax

The Browser Was Never Meant For Ajax. About a week into your first Ajax serious application you'll discover that Ajax pushes the browser nearly beyond its limits and there are definite lower engineering tolerances to get used to. The fact is, without powerful 3rd party development tools, designing clean Javascript software of any size requires some genuine discipline and effort. So too does Ajax debugging applications in multiple browsers (a real headache), and doing any serious background processing or threading can require heroic measures, particularly if you're mixing in other components that use the rather limited number of simultaneous timers available. The good news: Simple Ajax -- sprinkling in a little DHTML -- is much less daunting than Ajax In The Large. But be warned and be prepared to scale up your level of development and testing effort significantly with each doubling or trebling of your application size.
You Won't Need As Many Web Services As You Think. I used to think that going the Ajax route required the development of a bunch of new Web services in order to feed the application data and provide a backing store. In reality, I'm finding a great many projects are quite happy to scrape HTML and/or use plain old HTTP POSTs to existing service endpoints that have no formal Web service structure. This is further turning the tide towards Ajax by making it very, very easy to "dip your toe" into Ajax development and reuse almost any preexisting HTTP service on the back end instead of SOAP or REST/WOA. While this can encourage poor architectural choices, it does make very incremental conversion to Ajax almost effortless and turns out to be a natural thing to do, though it can certainly lead to headaches later.
Ajax Is More Involved Than Traditional Web Design and Development. The loss of HTML user interface conventions, the almost limitless potential for hidden or latent functionality, the programmatic creation of page elements instead of declarative, and other intrinsic aspects of the Ajax approach throw out much of what we know about Web design and development. Web designers must much more deeply understand the capabilities of the DOM, Javascript, CSS, and how the browser renders graphics, layouts, and elements. Developers find testing both difficult and tedious. Though tooling is continuing to improve across the board, it will take years for the industry to develop best practices, lore, patterns, and shared knowledge to make Web application development straightforward. Huge kudos to folks like Yahoo!'s Bill Scott for trying to fix many of these problems -- particularly the loss of GUI standards -- by actually moving the state of the art considerably forward with things like the Yahoo! UI Design Patterns library. The bottom line: Ajax development, at least for now, usually takes quite a bit longer than traditional Web development and requires a higher level of skill.
Ajax Tooling and Components Are Still Emerging and There Is No Clear Leader Today. Though Dojo is getting one heck of a running start, the race is very far from over. For instance, the Dojo framework itself is still just at version 0.3. And close at its heels are an amazing range of tools, frameworks, and component libraries. Though OpenAjax will make this mosaic of products play nicer, most developers will get deep experience with two or three of them and stick with them. For now, I would say deeply committing to a particular product is usually not the best idea. Innovation, competition, and market leadership is likely going to bounce around for a while. In the meantime, be sure to check out script.aculo.us, Prototype, Google Web Toolkit, Yahoo! UI Library, JackBe, Zapatec, Bindows, Nexaweb, General Interface, Backbase, ActiveWidgets, and last but not least Microsoft Atlas. There are many others and I encourage you to look at Max Kiesler's roundup of 50 Ajax frameworks, with many others in the comments (and growing). Finally, Microsoft's Harry Pierson has diligently taken me to task for my Ajax spectrum comments, noting that Microsoft actually has more serious experience fostering an interoperable component community than just about anyone else.

Good Ajax Programmers are Hard to Find. Zimbra's Scott Dietzen has lamented recently about the real difficulty in finding good Ajax talent. See point #3, but building sophisticated Ajax applications requires more computer science skills much more than it does Web design skills. And I find that experienced programmers tend not to enjoy Javascript programming and debugging. This too shall pass, but not for a few years, and not for a good while in the Bay Area. :-)
One Must Actively Address Ajax's Constraints of the Browser Model. Though the final result can be very rewarding, Ajax is not a perfect Web development approach and it has a few genuine weaknesses. One is that it tends to break the model of the Web including preventing users from bookmarking content, breaking the use of the Back button, and more. Fortunately, smart folks like Brad Neuberg have addressed much of this, as long as you're willing to put out the effort and understand why it's important to recover this functionality. Ajax also lacks much of what still makes desktop software a strong contender; the ability to run disconnected from the network and access to local disk storage, though Flash local storage and the upcoming Apollo platform can help address this.
Ajax Is Only One Element of a Successful RIA Strategy. As I've written before, the addition of RIA platforms such as Flex, OpenLaszlo, and WPF/E to a RIA strategy is virtually required to properly exploit the range of capabilities you'll want robust online applications to have. This is particularly true around rich media support such as audio and video -- which Ajax is virtually incapable of -- but even such mundane things as good printing support. These are all things that the more sophisticated Flash-based RIA platforms really shine at and are easier to program in to boot. Ajax will increasingly get a serious run for its money from these platforms, particularly as they provide back-end server support for things like server-side push, formal Web services, enterprise environments, and more.

Tags: ajax article coding reference webservices

Posted by: gibarian

The Django Book

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 08:50:29 -0000

Tags: coding django python tutorials

Posted by: gibarian

(24)slash7 - An article on tech writing

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 03:10:16 -0000

Tags: coding muh rails

Posted by: gibarian

Aptana Forums :: View topic - Linux Installation Issues

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 11:03:20 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

2) When launching the installer, the following errors appear:

grep: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory /tmp/install.dir.23446/Linux/resource/jre/bin/java: error while loading shared libraries: libpthread.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Solution:

This is suggested for Fedora Core 5 users and possibly SUSE linux users as well. Run the following commands on the installer:

Code:

cp Aptana_IDE_Setup.bin Aptana_IDE_Setup.bin.bak
cat Aptana_IDE_Setup.bin.bak | \
sed "s/export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/" > \
Aptana_IDE_Setup.bin

this may also need to be run on the uninstaller:

Code:

cp Aptana_Uninstaller Aptana_Uninstaller.bak
cat Aptana_Uninstaller.bak | \
sed "s/export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/" > \
Aptana_Uninstaller

And then continue with the installation.

A complete Aptana install on Ubuntu

Referenced from http://www.odrakir.com/blog/?p=382

1) Download the install file

2) Open a terminal window

3) Aptana has dependencies so you’ll need to install Mozilla and libswt3.1
3a) sudo apt-get install mozilla[/list]
3b) sudo aptitude install libswt3.1-gtk-java

4) Chmod the install file to make it executable - chmod +x Aptana_IDE_Setup.bin

5) Excecute the file - ./Aptana_IDE_Setup.bin

6) Now, the installation should be easy, just read and answer the wizard’s questions until it’s finished

7) Aptana needs a environment variable set for mozilla so we’ll have to code ourselfs a little script in order to set the variable every time we need to run Aptana and not just once inside the terminal window.

Code:

touch aptana
sudo gedit aptana

Now copy this

#/usr/bin
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/mozilla
~/Aptana/aptana

and save the file.

8) Chmodit so it can be executed. - chmod 755 aptana

9) Now you can copy it to /bin - sudo cp aptana /bin/

Tags: aptana coding editors linux troubleshooting

Posted by: gibarian

Aptana: The Web IDE

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 10:37:13 -0000

Tags: coding editors free

Posted by: gibarian

Catalyst - Web Framework

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:04:35 -0000

Tags: coding framework muh perl

Posted by: gibarian

Using kid with django

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 04:06:10 -0000

Tags: coding django kid mug python

Posted by: gibarian

Django, Or why I chose it over turbogears and ruby on rails

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 10:43:22 -0000

Tags: coding comparison django muh python

Posted by: gibarian

Python Programming for Beginners | Linux Journal

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 09:26:57 -0000

Tags: coding muh python tutorials

Posted by: gibarian

Learn Python in 10 minutes | Poromenos' Stuff

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 09:25:53 -0000

Tags: coding muh python tutorials

Posted by: gibarian

Global Module Index

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 08:51:13 -0000

Tags: coding modules muh python

Posted by: gibarian