Today, APIs play a bigger role in software development than ever before. The evolution of computing has been dominated by ever-increasing levels of abstraction; the use of higher-level languages, of course, but also the development of platforms, libraries, and frameworks. Professor Douglass C. Smith claims the progression of this second category far outpaced the development of programming languages.  Developers are also noticing that difficulty has shifted from designing algorithms and data structures to choosing, learning, and using an ever-growing set of APIs. Yet, many developers may b...

What is the difference between a Java Library and a framework? The two concepts are essentially important for a Java developer. The most important difference between a library and a framework is Inversion of Control. It means that when you call a library you are in control. But with a framework, the control is inverted: the framework calls you. (This is called the Hollywood Principle: Don’t call Us, We’ll call You.) This is pretty much the definition of a framework. Basically, all the control flow is already in the framework, and there’s just a bunch of predefined white sp...

If you’re one of those hipster programmers who loves Clojure, Ruby, Scala, Erlang, or whatever, you probably deeply loathe Java and all of its giant configuration files and bloated APIs of AbstractFactoryFactoryInterfaces. I used to hate all that stuff too. But you know what? After working for all these months on these huge pieces of Twitter infrastructure I’ve started to love the AbstractFactoryFactories.Let me explain why. Consider this little Scala program. It uses “futures”, which are a way to schedule computation to be done in parallel from the main flow of a pro...

Alexa is a service acquired by Amazon which offers a web traffic report for websites. They retrieve the data from toolbar that can be installed in different browsers, centralize the data and display reports to anyone. The most important indicator is the Alexa Rank. It represents the rank of a webpage in a list of all the websites. It’s not the 100% accurate but it gives a good indication.Alexa does not offer any free API to obtain Alexa Rank. However there is a simple method to obtain it in the same way the Alexa Toolbar does. All you have to do is to invoke the following url(replacing ...

We could all be more productive. There are many things we can do — some big, some small — that will enhance the way we work and improve the outcomes of our activities.Although I can’t promise that I’ll be able to help you cure all your productivity ailments, I do hope that I can provide you with a few useful, solid tips on streamlining your web development workflow and making every part of the development cycle move quickly and smoothly.Follow each one of these tips and I can almost guarantee you that you’ll save time, be able to create more and/or better wor...

I wrote a post about how to install MySQL++ and I thought I will write a quick tutorial on how to use it too.This is a very basic MySQL++ program and it’s very self explanatory:#include <mysql++.h>#include <stdlib.h> using namespace std;using namespace mysqlpp; int main() { try { Connection conn(false); conn.connect("DB NAME", "DB HOST probably localhost", "DB USER", "DB PASS"); Query query = conn.query(); } catch (BadQuery er) { // handle any connection or // query errors that may come up cerr << "Error: " << er...