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  Building a Modern Web Stack for the Real-time Web

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this cen...

   Web design,Real-time web,web stack     2012-02-15 05:54:41

  RAM is the new disk...

Jim Gray, a man who has contributed greatly to technology over the past 40 years, is credited with saying that memory is the new disk and disk is the new tape. With the proliferation of "real-time" web applications and systems that require massive scalability, how are hardware and software relating to this meme? Tim Bray, in his discussions about grid computing before it became such a hot topic, pointed out how advances in hardware around RAM and networking were allowing for the creation...

   RAM,Flash,Memory,,Future,Disk     2011-08-12 07:34:27

  Best practices of front end optimization

1. Use DocumentFragment or innerHTML to replace complex elements insertion DOM operation on browser is expensive. Although browser performance is improved much, multiple DOM elements insertion is still expensive and will affect the page load speed. Assume we have an ul element on our page, we now want to retrieve a JSON list using AJAX and then update the ul using JavaScript. Usually we may write it as : var list = document.querySelector('ul'); ajaxResult.items.forEach(function(item) { // ...

   JavaScript,Front end,Optimization,Tips     2013-07-06 11:26:27

  Android Tutorial: Creating and Using an SD Card in the Emulator

In a previous post, I mentioned how user-friendly Android is for developers. There’s extensive documentation and information on the architecture, the different components and best practices. However, the documentation has a few blind spots. Many of the tools have little documentation and no usage examples. The information is there, it’s just hidden behind a few layers of Android theory.So I’m going to try and document a few of the basic things that you’ll probabl...

   Android,Emulator,SDCard,Load,Create     2011-04-13 12:08:41

  How to be jQuery-free?

jQuery is now the most famous JavaScript library. There are around 57.3% websites in the world using jQuery, i.e, 6 out of 10 websites are using jQuery. If we only consider those websites which use libraries, then the percentage is even higher which is 91.7%. Although jQuery is very popular, its size is still a headache to many websites maintainers. The uncompressed jQuery 2.0 has a size of 235KB, the size is 81KB after optimization.The jQuery 1.8.3 which supports IE 6/7/8 has a uncompressed si...

   jQuery,JavaScript,ECMAScript,CSS3     2013-05-13 11:53:20

  What's Wrong with the For Loop

Closures in Java are a hot topic of late. A few really smart people are drafting a proposal to add closures to a future version of the language. However, the proposed syntax and the linguistic addition are getting a lot of push back from many Java programmers. Today, Elliotte Rusty Harold posted his doubts about the merits of closures in Java. Specifically, he asks "Why Hate the for Loop?": I don’t know what it is some people have against for loops that they’re so eager to...

   For loop,Basic,Problem,Efficiency,Java     2012-02-24 05:06:15

  XMLHttpRequest Level 2 user guide

XMLHttpRequest is a web browser interface, it makes it possible for JavaScript doing HTTP(s) communication. Microsoft's IE5 first introduced XMLHttpRequest, because it's so useful that many other browsers also adopted this. AJAX came to the front since. However, this interface is not standardized, implementation among different browsers is different, with the emerging of HTML5, W3C is considering to standardize this interface. In February 2008, they proposed a XMLHttpRequest Level 2 draft. This ...

   XMLHttpRequest, progress, upload, binary data     2012-09-19 11:51:50

  A String is not an Error

I decided to write a little article to discourage an unfortunately common pattern in Node.JS modules (and browser JavaScript, to a lesser extent) that can boil down to these two examples: // A:function myFunction () {  if (somethingWrong) {    throw 'This is my error'  }  return allGood;} and // B: async Node.JS-style callback with signature `fn(err, …)`function myFunction (callback) {  doSomethingAsync(function () {    // …    if (...

   JavaScript,Node.js,String,Error object     2011-12-23 08:00:32

  Why I Still Use Emacs

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questions about configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they often come and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all? Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio much better? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and have intellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right? I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I still c...

   Linux,Emacs,Editor,Advantage,IDE     2012-02-20 05:30:41

  Misunderstanding about Android UI design

A few days ago I wrote a post trying to correct a lot of the inaccurate statements I have seen repeatedly mentioned about how graphics on Android works. This resulted in a lot of nice discussion, but unfortunately has also lead some people to come up with new, novel, and often technically inaccurate complaints about how Android works.These new topics have been more about some fundamental design decisions in Android, and why they are wrong. I’d like to help people better understand ...

   Android,UI,Priority,Background job,Smooth     2011-12-09 02:30:25

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