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

• Running WordPress on Microsoft's Azure Public Cloud - The Series: A series of posts on running WordPress on Windows Azure.

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