Pie in the Sky (April 19, 2013)

Quite a few links this week for your weekend reading:

Node

Unix philosophy and Node.js: A brief discussion of the Unix philosophy and how it relates to Node.js.
AngularJS: Let’s make a feed reader: With Google Reader shutting down, it’s all the rage to build feed readers.
Nodyn: I’m not sure whether to list this one as Node or Java. It’s Node, running on the JVM. So you have direct access to Java from within your Node application.
The state of Node and Relational Databases: A good read if you are interested in using RDBMS with Node.
Error handling in Node.js: This should probably be required reading for new Node developers.
Using the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js to create a Table Service Explorer: Jeff Wilcox goes through the steps of creating a service to explore data stored in Windows Azure Table Storage.

PHP

Python

Django is now available on Windows Azure Web Sites: Django is now available in the Windows Azure Web Application Gallery.

Ruby

Let Nunes do it: Easy instrumentation for Rails using Nunes.
Detecting faces with Ruby: FFI in a nutshell: What FFI is, what it does, and some examples of using it.
Chef cookbooks for busy Ruby developers: Two new cookbooks that automate creating the Rails environment and database environment.
MRI’s Method Caches: Details about how MRI does method caching and some patches that may improve performance.

Windows Azure

Moving a Windows Azure Web Site between data centers: Video of moving a web site from the West US data center to North Central US.
The Power of ‘And’: Windows Azure Infrastructure Services (Iaas) is GA, price reductions, larger memory sizes for VMs.
Using Windows Azure Storage with a Jenkins Continuous Integration solution: Walks through the process of setting up Jenkins with Windows Azure.

Misc.

jQuery 2.0 released: Be sure to read the notes, as support for some older browser versions has been dropped.
Selfstorage: A client-side JavaScript library that makes it easy to cache other JavaScript resources in localStorage.
JavaScript programming resources: Great collection of resources.
Introducing TowTruck: A collaborative service for every website: This is pretty impressive. With just a few lines of code you can add collaborative features like chat, seeing the other person’s cursor, etc. (even experimental voice chat) to a web page.
A comparison of Angular, Backbone, CanJS and Ember: If you’re looking for a JavaScript MVC framework, here’s a rundown of the features between these four.

Enjoy!

- Larry

Additional resources