The Canvas API essentially allows the developer to draw on a web page using a JavaScript API. Now you might think, what is the point of this? If you want to show some artwork or animation why not create this first and then send it to the browser as a file? The main benefits of [...]
I decided during a holiday last week to read “Pro HTML5 Programming – Powerful APIs for Richer Internet Application Development”. It was my first real dive into HTML5 and I have to say I am very impressed. Sure, I had heard about all the goodness in HTML5 before reading this book but I had never, [...]
I wanted to find out more about using Value Objects in ActiveRecord. Value objects are conserned with the value of their attributes over other identifiers (as opposed to Entitiy Objects which are concerned mainly about a unique ID). I decided to create a stand alone Active Record project (i.e. without using Rails). This became a [...]
I sometimes run free Rails courses locally here. One of the things that I have learnt is that it seems to be best to teach Rails ‘backwards’. What do I mean by that? Well it depends on how you define ‘forwards’! If you practice TDD then a high level process would be to: Write your [...]
I recently migrated a basic PHP website to Rails 3. The job went smoothly and this is my first Rails 3 app so I thought I would write about my experiences. Getting Started In this situation I would start directly at database level. Get the database ready so that you can create simple ActiveRecord classes [...]
Actually, the title of this post is mis-leading a little so blame Google for bringing you here if this is not what you wanted! What I will do is tell you this – Bundler is really slow on my machine! It takes more than 40 minutes to install just a single gem! I have heard [...]
Today, while installing Rails 3, my computer suffered a power outage. This does not happen very often, in fact, this was actually due to the computer overheating! After pouring cold water over the keyboard, I restarted the computer and continuing the Rails 3 installation the process, but to my shock and horror, it failed with [...]
I recently decided to move a website of mine from Apache to Cherokee. Why? Because Cherokee is fast and Google likes fast sites. Apparently, Cherokee is the fastest web server in town. I first read about Cherokee in Linux Format magazine and decided to give it a shot with my AdFlickr site which I have [...]
First stop, grab and parse the list from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes. Getting language meta data by url dereferencing This is the easiest method but has less control over the data that is returned (by default all data about the language is returned). Simply replace the [language_name] part of the following url with the value in “Language [...]
I am in the process of building a semantic web application. Since the application I am building will be used globally, I wanted to start with including a semantic collection of all countries in the world. It turns out to be rather simple thanks to the GeoNames API. I am a big fan of JSON [...]