Pie in the Sky (March 14th, 2014)

The web is 25 years old this week. I remember my manager asking me (back in the early 90's when the web started going mainstream,) if I thought this World Wide Web thing would take off and whether it was worth investing time in learning about web pages or how to use a browser. :)

Cloud

• Azure plugin library: Plugins for Windows Azure Cloud Services

• Oracle database, WebLogic server, and JDK are generally available on Windows Azure: These were previously available in preview

• Using Chef to manage Windows Azure resources: Including a video

Client/Mobile

• Corona SDK coming to Windows devices: Looks like support for Windows Phone 8 now, other Windows devices in the future

• Windows 8 store open for openFramework applications: Another MS Open Tech project, which opens up the possibility of using openFramework with Windows 8 store applications

• Cocos2d-X performance enhancement: I think this might just be for Windows 8 & Windows Phone 8

• Sass 3.3 released: Some nice updates in this release

• InstantClick: Preloading based on what the user is likely to click on

• jQuery cheatsheet: Almost always useful

• Introducing web components to control authors: Or, reason #56 as to why you should like the idea of web components. Now if we could just get support in all modern browsers today...

• Building engaging web apps with game mechanics: Gamifying the web

• Responsive design toolkit: There's a lot of useful stuff in here

• Freestyle: Create your native app (iOS/Android) look and feel using CSS

• SignalR for Android/Java: A Java client for working with a SignalR back-end process

JavaScript/Node.js

• Top overlooked security threats to Node.js web applications: A good read, even if you're not developing using Node.js. Many of these apply to web applications in general

• Licensing: A utility to figure out the licensing footprint of your project

• Promises and error handling: Some lessons learned and guidelines on handling errors when using promises

• How to reconnect websockets without flooding the server: Hint - it involves exponential backoff

• Marc: Markdown as a dynamic template engine

Ruby

• Rails 4.0.4.rc1 is out: If you're interested in the bleeding edge

• Using Sinatra to implement a REST API: Playing Uno with Sinatra, via REST

• BigBroda: ActiveRecord adapter for Google BigQuery

Misc

• Vagrant supports Hyper-V out of the box: Wow, it was only about a week ago that support for Hyper-V was added, and now here's Vagrant 1.5 with support for it out of the box

• Bing Code Search: Searches code repositories like StackOverflow, and it has a plugin to let you search, copy & paste code directly in Visual Studio. Sort of like Google Code Search (which shut down around this time last year)

Enjoy!

-Larry