News Items

I played it backward and only heard "Khaaaaaan!"

“Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” for data.

Solving the pair-programming problem with the world's most obtuse editor.

Yet another consequence of the divide between the math and engineering sides of computer science.

Well it seemed like a good idea at the time, but look what's happened.

If it's too complex to keep in your head, it's not lightweight any more!

Check the comments for neckbeard-compatible alternative tools.

What do you wish OS developers would break new ground on?

The thing's hollow — it goes on forever — and — oh my God — it's full of data!

There's nothing sadder than a puppet without a ghost...

That's no mean feat for the average coder.

Even if you keep using jQuery, it's always good to know how it works under the hood.

It's a picture book for nerds. Some Haskell required.

throw new boilerplate exception;

Is the whole philosophy behind current Linux development wrong?

Look, look; who's in here? No one.

Last week, Microsoft "announced on the Blink mailing list that it's planning to write a version of its Pointer Events technology" for Google's Chrome browser. Pointer Events are already built into Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and IE10 to enable touch-enabled web browsing, and the W3C recently gave "candidate recommendation" status to the Pointer Events spec. Looks like touch browsing is going to be a thing.

There are many tools these days to enable quick and easy unit testing for web app components, but functional testing of the entire app with external dependencies such as a data processing back end can be a complicated endeavor. Drew Stephens explains how his team tested a hybrid Ruby + Java app using Selenium, Jenkins, Maven and Cucumber. This cocktail makes sure your app runs correctly before pushing to production.

"With any complex system there is always a conflict between intent and implementation, and with protocols there is a always a mismatch between specification and reality." In the case of HTTP, Tef takes a look at the differences between how RFC 2616 defines HTTP and how popular browsers and web servers actually implement the requests. It's not pretty.

While we're on the subject of HTTP implementation details, Kyle Young digs into the details of how caching allows you to store web assets on remote servers or even in the browser cache, and how HTTP cache headers let you take advantage of local and CDN-cached data. Kyle takes you from basic header components to advanced caching features. A must read.

Canvas is fine for the web, a native app is going to be faster, right? Wrong, says Adrian Holovaty. "Here's what I've learned: canvas is not slow. In fact, I've been continually surprised by how fast it is -- as long as you take care to do things right." Read on for Adrian's take on what you should be doing for better canvas performance. (Some great counterpoints in the commments as well.)

Are you using Twitter's Bootstrap web development framework? Bootstrap provides a treasure trove of free code snippets you can use to quickly add new features to your site. From forms to navigation elements to 404 pages, you're sure to find something useful in this growing collection.

If you want to build cross-platform desktop apps using the HTML/CSS/JavaScript web technology stack, CEF may be part of your solution. Horia Olaru explains how CEF uses Chrome's Blink engine, the different implementations of CEF being developed today and how Adobe is contributing to the effort. An interesting development in standards-based app development.

How complex? I don't understand a word of it.