adatapost

leaspensieve:

Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie. ―Russian Proverb

Are you already nodding in agreement and admiring the wisdom of the words above? Most of you just kissed yourselves with yet another lie.

When asked, we will all confidently proclaim we want to know the truth “even…

hjortureh:

Spine and Backbone are two Javascript MVC frameworks that look very similar on the surface but under the hood there are key differences. The purpose of this article is to highlight these differences and hopefully make it easier to choose which framework fits your needs.

The basics

…

thechangelog:

Background tasks are crucial for any non-trivial web application so it’s no wonder that the landscape of queuing technologies is rapidly evolving.

The latest entry is Octobot, a Java-based task queue worker from C. Scott Andreas designed to be reliable, easy to use, and powerful.

Reliable

Octobot uses best-of-breed tools for queuing, supporting AMQP/RabbitMQ, Beanstalk, and Redis (Pub/Sub) as backends out of the box. The architecture is extensible so additional backends can be added in the future.

Easy to use

Octobot tasks are simply classes with a static run method which accept a JSON object.

package com.example.tasks;
import org.apache.log4j.Logger; 
import org.json.simple.JSONObject;

public class TacoTask { 
  private static Logger logger = Logger.getLogger("TacoTask");

  public static void run(JSONObject task) {
    String payload = (String) task.get("payload");
    logger.info("OMG, GOT A TACO: " + payload");
  }
}

… or in Scala:

package com.example.tasks
import org.apache.log4j.Logger
import org.json.simple.JSONObject

object TacoTask {
  val log = Logger.getLogger("TacoTask");

  def run(task: JSONObject) { 
    val payload = task.get(“payload”)
    log.info(“OMG, GOT A SCALA TACO: ” + payload)
  }
}

Octobot also has a simple YAML-based config file format:

Octobot:
  queues:
    - { name: tacotruck,
        protocol: AMQP,
        host: localhost,
        port: 5672,
        vhost: /,
        priority: 5,
        workers: 1,
        username: cilantro,
        password: burrito
      }

  metrics_port: 1228

  email_enabled: false
  email_from: ohai@example.com
  email_to: ohno@itsbroke.com
  email_hostname: localhost
  email_server: smtp.gmail.com
  email_port: 465
  email_ssl: true
  email_auth: true
  email_username: username
  email_password: password

Powerful

Octobot is designed for high throughput, heavy workloads, and ultra-low latency. Early benchmarks using AMQP and MongoDB lookups demonstrate, task execution actually improves as the JIT optimizes execution paths.

[Source on GitHub] [Homepage] [Download Docs]

thechangelog:

Frank Sinatra was the Chairman of cool. Some fourteen years after his death, the crooner is still imitated.

Just like its namesake, Sinatra, the class Ruby web application DSL still inspires all sorts of projects from Sammy.js to Padrino to Denied.

Slim, a PHP5 project from Josh Lockhart is the latest project to cover the classics.

Setup

To get started, just require the script and call init

<?php
require('slim/Slim.php');
Slim::init();
?>

Routing

Slim supports the familiar Sinatra-style routes for all four HTTP verbs:

Slim::get('/books/:id', function ($id) {
    //Do something
});

Slim::post('/books', function () {
    //Do something
});

Slim::put('/books/:id', function ($id) {
    //Do something
});

Slim::delete('/books/:id', function ($id) {
    //Do something
});

Middleware and callbacks

Slim also allows you to run code before and after your actions:

Slim::before(function () {
    //Do something
});


Slim::after(function () {
    //Do something
});

Templating

Slim supports a variety of templates including Smarty and Twig.

[Source on GitHub] [Hompage]

thechangelog:

Even with the improvements @font-face brings to typography, web designers still don’t have quite the control as their print counterparts. Basic tasks like per-letter or per-word styling involves a lot of <span>’s and stupid markup tricks.

Dave Rupert aims to help with Lettering.js, a jQuery plugin for “radical web typography.”

How it works

In this example, Lettering.js takes over the tedious task of creating all of those per-letter <span>’s:

$(document).ready(function() {
  $(".fancy_title").lettering();
});

… which yields

<h1 class="fancy_title">
  <span class="char1">S</span>
  <span class="char2">o</span>
  <span class="char3">m</span>
  <span class="char4">e</span>
  <span class="char5"></span>
  <span class="char6">T</span>
  <span class="char7">i</span>
  <span class="char8">t</span>
  <span class="char9">l</span>
  <span class="char10">e</span>
</h1>

You’re now free to style each individual letter with the resulting CSS classes.

Don’t need that fine-grained control? Lettering.js can handle per-word options as well:

$(document).ready(function() {
  $(".word_split").lettering('words');
});

[Source on GitHub] [Blog post]