Pie in the Sky (March 8, 2013)

It's almost the weekend, so here's some links for your Friday reading:

Cloud

• Windows Azure Mobile Services adds Android support and extends availability to East Asia: There’s a new Mobile Services SDK for Android developers, and the service is available in new regions now.

Node and JavaScript

• Node.js v0.8.22 released: Another week, another Node.js release.
• Building Backbone.js apps with Backlift Part 1: Views and Templates: Backlift is a service that handles all the web server bits for you, and you just to the client-side. Part one of this series talks about views and templates.
• Building Backbone.js apps with Backlift Part 2: Collections and Forms: Part two in this series, where you’ll create a Pintrest inspired website.
• Build a Street Fighter Demo with CSS Animations and JavaScript: Learn how to animate sprites by recreating Street Fighter.

Ruby

• RubyGems 2.0.2 released: Fixes some potentially annoying certificate issues.
• Strong Parameters in Rails 4: A discussion about the mass assignment vulnerability that went on a while back, and how this is solved in Rails 4 through strong parameters.
• A Practical Guide to Using Signed Ruby Gems – Part 1: Bundler: This article covers using signed gems and using Bundler’s new –trusted-policy flag.
• Method Signature You Can Sink Your Teeth Into: Might be a little too introductory, but goes over different ways to pass values to methods, finally arriving at the improvements in Ruby 2.0.
• CoffeeScript Rails Source Maps: Adds support for CoffeeScript source maps to Rails.
• IdentityCache: Memcache based caching for ActiveRecord.

PHP

• Setup WordPress on Azure Web Site with GitHub Publishing: Continuous publishing of a WordPress blog to a Windows Azure Web Site using GitHub.

Big Data

• Microsoft's Data Research Lab Conceives PolyBase to Easily Join Relational Data With Data From Hadoop: PolyBase looks like an interesting project to bridge the gap between the non-relational Hadoop world and RDBMS.

Misc.

• Programming’s not for you? How about thinking? Be empowered: Great read from Scott Hanselman as usual.
• What's the difference between Currying and Partial Application?: If you're wondering about this, read on for enlightenment. Uses JavaScript examples, but the concept cuts across multiple programming languages.

Thanks,

- Larry