From my last post, I talked about how great Yeoman is. I have found one issue with Yeoman but there is a easy solution. Yeoman comes with its own built-in server which is very convenient, but if you’re working on a application which requires access to an API this becomes an issue due to cross site domain. For some time I’ve been making a symbolic link of my Yeoman app folder into my Tomcat’s webapp folder which would allow me to access the API running on the same server.

I’ve been working on more and more web applications both at work and for myself and I have been using a great tool to help me do this, it’s call Yeoman. Yeoman is a set of tools that work really well together when building Web applications. It’s been made by some of the leading people in the industry with considerations for best practices. Yeoman is made of, Yo - Which is used to generate a scaffold for your projects Bower - Which is for package management Grunt - Which is the build system With some simple commands Yeoman will layout your project and install all the JavaScript libraries you need.

Update: Popcorn.js is no longer maintained I have removed by Mozilla So personally, I’m not interested in using Dart for building web applications, I’m more interested in the Dart VM but after watching Vijay Menon’s video on JavaScript Interop. I was interested to see how well Dart would work with a JavaScript library that I have been working with for a bit now, Popcorn.js. Popcorn.js is a JavaScript library that is used for working with media, it will allow you to embed video and setup time-based interactions.

Riak is a database that I have read a good amount about but have not actually gone through fully taking the time to investigate it. (AKA playing with it!) What is Riak Riak is dynamo inspired database that is based off of Amazon’s white paper. As with a lot of NoSQL databases it’s easy to scale and it is fault-tolerant. Riak comes with a HTTP interface along with a Protocol Buffers interface.

Here is some Dart code for doing MD5, though at this point in time, MD5 is becoming obsolete in favor of SHA1. But as I have done code for MD5 in other languages I figured I would duplicate the code for another comparison. To look at the languages, checkout MD5 hashing in Python, Ruby and Groovy and MD5 hashing in CoffeeScript, Perl and Scala. I do like how you can use Method Cascades, this is something that I really wish Java had in it because the code is much cleaner in my opinion.

As with a lot of postings on this blog, when I look into learning a new language I copy something I have done before. I have decided to use the Battle.net API to pull World of Warcraft data. It’s an easy subject to reason about and show off parts of the language’s syntax. Also, as I have the same code in Ruby, Groovy, and CoffeeScript it’s a nice comparison. You can find the other code as part of the Updated World of Warcraft Armory code posting.

Yes, the title is a bit of a troll. I like Dart, I think it’s a great new language made for the web! But, I do have some issues with the focus they have. So one day a group of developers got together and declared that JavaScript is hard. It’s hard to write good JavaScript code, it’s hard to optimize it, and it’s easy to write crappy code. I do not disagree with this but I feel you can write crappy code in any language, trust me I’ve seen it done.

Well, if you remember my old site then you know that this is a big change from what I had before. I have fully redone the blog moving it from my old hosting to Amazon S3 using static files with the help of Jekyll. Why? I was using Wordpress before, which is great blogging software but a bit over powered for the way I was using it. It’s was written in PHP using a MySQL server to build dynamic pages.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to No Fluff Just Stuff Boston (in Framingham, MA). This was my 4th time going and as always I find this a great conference to go to. It’s focus is around Java based technologies but also gives you a look into newer technologies. You will find talks on noSQL, languages on the JVM like Scala and Groovy along with talks about lifecycle management for your projects.

In past postings I have shown you how to install things like Groovy, Grails and Scala on OS X. The postings are still a good resource to use to install what you want, but if you need to install tons of things on to your system there is a better way. This is where Homebrew comes in to play. Homebrew is said to be “The missing package manager for OS X”.