majordojo

Recent Entries in Programming

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  Creating plugins in Movable Type, with NO PERL REQUIRED

  Not to long ago I began work on a very cool new theme, or Template Set, for Movable Type. I had built out all the templates and nearly completed all of my work without having to write a single line...

• Is mod_php falling out of favor with hosting providers?

  Recently I received a comment on a post about modperlite alleging that modphp, an Apache module mod_perlite is modeled after, is falling out of favor with hosting providers. That is quite an allegation - one that I initially shrugged off...

• mod_perlite working!

  I have had a theory for a long time that perl based CGI scripts could be sped up considerably by simply by keeping the interpreter resident in memory. Not only that, but the module that makes that possible wouldn't be...

• How to Fix CGI

  Over the many years of their coexistence, the terms CGI and Perl have become virtually synonymous. This perception that CGI and Perl are one and the same has contributed to some small degree to the perception that Perl is outdated...

• 

  The Story Behind TypePad and MT4's iPhone Apps

  Today we (Six Apart) announced support for specially crafted versions of TypePad and Movable Type for iPhone users. It will be easy for commentators and critics to get wrapped up in the design and features of these applications, and...

• Single Sign On with Movable Type

  Last week I was in New York participating in a Movable Type Hackathon and Blogging Summit I helped to organize. While I wasn't planning on presenting at the summit, fate had another opinion on the matter. In the end I...

• My Hackathon Hacks

  Last week I went on a whirlwind trip to New York. I was there attending and presenting at a Blogging Summit I helped organize at the Affinia Hotel in midtown Manhattan. It was a two day event for developers and...

• Agile QA Practices: A Better Way to QA

  The past several years the Internet has been transformed by a slew of new web based tools and applications. A key success factor in all of these applications is adherence to a development methodology in which product teams release fewer...

• How to Dramatically Speed Up Your Web Application: An Introduction to memcached

  Six Apart often speaks of how its technology and contributions to open source help many of the most popular Internet applications scale to unprecedented levels. One of these tools is memcached, yet as important and ubiquitous as it is, it...

• Powered by Perl

  About eight months ago when Harper was born I got a surprise package in the mail from a friend, and ever since I have been waiting for the chance for Harper to be big enough to wear it. He...

• Programming Language vs Programming Language

  Tim Bray offers a wonderful analysis of the three most popular programming languages out there right now: PHP, Ruby on Rails and Java. Here are some highlights and some thoughts. Good apps, once built, tend to be in production for...

• Announcing "My PHP Google Checkout"

  I bet for many people looking to start an online store think of PayPal first. I remember when PayPal first debuted in 1998 when it fueled a renaissance in Internet commerce by enabling the long tail of retail - second...

• Join me at the Global Movable Type Hack-a-thon!

  This coming Tuesday I am organizing a Movable Type Hack-a-thon at the Six Apart offices. A "hackathon" is an event in which a bunch of engineers get together and each commit themselves to build something. Anything. Whatever they want. And...

• "Agile Story Development"

  My job immerses me in the world that has helped popularize the concept of “Agile Software Development” among software development teams. The premise of Agile development practices encourages product development teams to think big, but build small. In other words,...

• I will never implement a pagination control again. Period.

  Do you know how many times I have been working on an application that has to allow users to paginate through a list of something? 1,259,041. Give or take a few of course. Well, I finally had enough. There should...

• See the Tag Widget in action

  Arvind just sent me a link to an updated screencast of one of his many Movable Type plugins called MTProtect. In this plugin Arvind utilized a Javascript widget/control that I created a while ago, the screencast he created shows it...

• Google Calendar and OpenSearch

  Seeing the new features in Google Calendar spurred me to dig a little deeper into Google’s Atom documentation, because the last time I checked, they hadn’t yet published any. For a geek like me, their documentation was actually fun...

• Boy, do I love the sound of my own voice!

  It seems that in recent weeks I have had several opportunities to do what I love to do: talk. This next week I will be presenting to San Francisco's Perl user group known as "SF Perl Mongers." I will be...

• Updated PHP and Perl Tools for Salesforce Developers

  Yesterday I had the pleasure to speak at Salesforce.com's user/developer conference: dreamForce. I spoke to update developers on the progress being made on SOAP::Lite, and on the updated Sourceforge modules I maintain for sForce developers. Several people came up...

• Something to show for all my time off

  When I started getting into contributing to open source software, I never anticipated just how much work it might be, and for the discipline it requires. Programming is one thing. Publishing software is quite another. It gives me a new...

• WSDL 2.0 Primer

  Thanks to the WebServices.Org Newsletter which clued me on this excellent Introduction to WSDL 2.0. WSDL is one of the core standards behind Web services - providing a platform independent way to describe the interface to a service. This primer...

• Perl is the Dark Side of the Force?!

  Exterior:

  Dagobah -- Day

  With Yoda strapped to his back, Luke climbs up one of the many thick vines that grow in the swamp until he reaches the Dagobah statistics lab. Panting heavily, he continues his exercises -- grepping, installing new packages, logging in as root, and writing replacements for two-year-old shell scripts in Python.

  Yoda:

  Code! Yes. A programmer's strength flows from code maintainability. But beware of Perl. Terse syntax... more than one way to do it... default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

  Luke:

  Is Perl better than Python?

  Yoda:

  No... no... no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.

  Luke:

  But how will I know why Python is better than Perl?

  Yoda:

  You will know. When your code you try to read six months from now.

• Introducing a Web Services Directory

  This weekend my company released the latest version of its product. We have talked a big game up until this point about delivering "Integration-as-a-service"™ (yes, I used a trademark symbol), and with this release I think finally we are getting...

• New SOAP::Lite web site released!

  It has been 6 months since the SOAP::Lite developer community was promised a new web site and resource center. The site has been in limbo ever since. But last night, it was officially released. Yet another site I have volunteered...

• Web Services Iron Chef - COMDEX 2003

  It has been over a week since COMDEX 2003. It was the first COMDEX I have ever attended, and I must admit, in all of its enormity, it was pretty disappointing. I guess I really don't care about the latest...

• Open Source Web Services and Salesforce.com...

  Today I am presenting at Salesforce.com's dreamForce Conference in San Francisco. I am presenting on using PHP and PERL to access Salesforce's API's to build simple applications. These code samples will serve as a starting point for other Salesforce...

• Hibernate - Object/Relational Mapping DB

  Hibernate is a powerful, ultra-high performance object/relational persistence and query service for Java. Hibernate lets you develop persistent objects following common Java idiom - including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the Java collections framework. Extremely fine-grained, richly typed object models are possible. The Hibernate Query Language, designed as a "minimal" object-oriented extension to SQL, provides an elegant bridge between the object and relational worlds. Hibernate is now the most popular ORM solution for Java.

• SSH and SCP taskdef for Jakarta Ant

  Many moons ago I hacked up an SCP and SSH custom task definition for use with Apache's Jakarta Ant project for my office. It utilizes a Java SSH API called MindTerm provided by Mind Bright. Enough people have learned of...

• Test Shows 99.99% of High School Seniors Can't Read Perl

  The four hour test had 2 sections, a simple translation section and a project section. The first part asked students to translate easy Perl phrases into their standard English equivalent, and the second section required students to produce a simple MP3 player in Perl.