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Showing posts from May, 2017

JSON Feed - The New RSS?

SON Feed is a new take on the web syndication format, but unlike RSS and Atom it's in JSON, not XML. So what does it try to do better? Mainly overcome the perils of XML; it's complex, heavyweight, difficult to parse and not in sync with the current trend wanting web data exchange happening almost exclusively in JSON document representation. In contrast, JSON is easier to both write and parse, manipulate and consume, especially given that its data types are exact reflections of their native Javascript counterparts. Devised by Brent Simmons, the original developer of the popular  NetNewsWire and Manton Reece creator of  Micro Blogs , both with a great background on publishing with RSS, it's a certainty that JSON Feed will emerge as a strong competitor to both Atom and RSS, being based upon their decade long experience on decentralized formats. On top of that it also tries to tackle a few other issues plaguing RSS, mainly the lack of realtime client notificat

Graphcool Eases Your Way Into GraphQL

GraphQL, dubbed by many as REST's successor, is a query language in which you can query database driven, JSON schema-exposed APIs. The problem is that because it is so different from REST, getting the hang of GraphQL when starting out is not that easy. But why go the trouble now that there are cloud-based FaaS (Framework as a Service) services such as Graphcool which take the pain out of the process of setting up, configuring, running and testing your GraphQL backend? Graphcool is a newly established GraphQL backend for mobile and web developers that lives on the AWS cloud: Data is persisted in a high-availability cluster of AWS Aurora databases combined with a Redis-powered caching layer. Files are securely stored in Amazon S3 and can be accessed through a fast CDN. Business Logic is implemented as serverless functions and deployed to AWS Lambda. Website Hosting uses Netlify's CDN. and lowers the entry barrier in getting into GraphQL. With Graphcool you don

Perlito - 4 Years On

Perlito, the open source compiler collection that implements a Perl5 and a Perl6 compiler has just launched a brand new Java backend. It seemed a good time to catch up with the project by talking to its lead contributor, Flavio Glock. Last time I interviewed Flavio Glock about Perlito  was back in 2013 when the project was in its first steps. At that time Perlito could compile Perl 5 or Perl 6 programs into various backends,  including JavaScript, Python, Ruby and Go, but it was also designed with extensibility from the ground up so it could be further extended to other backends in the future. Well this time has come, with Flavio just announcing a brand new Java backend! In those 4 years the project has really taken off, a lot has changed, and given the opportunity of this new and great development I thought that a follow up was in order. Flavio was once more deeply insightful and provided links to three very interesting video presentations on the topic that took plac

AWS and Ionic Team Up In Starter Project

Amazon is quick in recognizing that just offering support for a number of popular programing languages is not enough to lure hoards of developers to the platform. That's why we are seeing a move towards wrapping its AWS services with greater user-friendliness. The start was made with the introduction of CodeStar, which aimed to simplify the setting up of a project's AWS infrastructure, especially  with regard to policy and authorization, as we examined in CodeStar to Simplify Development On AWS.  It continues this trend with the release of the open source Ionic AWS starter project Mobile Web and Hybrid Application which aims to act as a skeleton, or boilerplate, Ionic application tweaked in such a way to give developers a headstart in configuring their mobile Ionic front-end applications in relation to an AWS backend. full article on i-programmer

Three Tips for the Linux Shell Addict

This time around we have three great tips for the Linux shell addict, three sites that will increase your productivity and save valuable time in your daily interactions with the shell. The first one is  ok-b.org . It's a shell snippet search engine where you get to  describe the task you are after in natural English and in return be presented with closely related snippets. For example, in looking up "How to list only files?" , will bring up: Bash: How to list only files? find . -maxdepth 1 -type f ls -l | egrep -v '^d' ls -l | grep -v '^d' List only common parent directories for files read -r FIRSTLINE DIR=$(dirname "$FIRSTLINE") while read -r NEXTLINE; do   until [[ "${NEXTLINE:0:${#DIR}}" = "$DIR" || "$DIR" = "/" ]]; do     DIR=$(dirname "$DIR")   done done echo $DIR How to list files in directory using bash? for file in /source/directory/* do     if [[ -f $f

Codetracer - Have Your Code Peer Reviewed

Codetracer is a new free service for coders who seek wisdom through brainstorming when stuck in writing their code. Here's how it works - you post the snippet of code that puzzles you on the forum, annotate with inline comments the specific lines that give you the trouble, provide a general description of the problem and wait for help from the hosts or any peers, i.e. any interested member subscribed to the service. Let's see an example. The member a.osman had the following issue: "What i want to do is to create static method in a class that convert any json type to any HashMap. More details on lines comments."    full article on i-programmer.info

Who to blame? Scapegoating Encryption

Blaming everything on encryption is a recurring event. Whenever something bad happens that the intelligence services have no control over, it's because the encryption is at fault. The latest outcry against it was UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd's take on What's Ups end-to-end encryption arguing that Britain’s intelligence services must have: “ the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp ” adding to the voices supporting the weakening of encryption or the planting of backdoors to popular consumer-level applications. In stark contradiction to the Home Secretary's fruitless political talk, consider the position of ENISA, the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security, and the centre of network and information security expertise for the member states, the private sector and Europe’s citizens. This was outlined in its  December 2016 essay on its recommendations on cryptography in the context of proposals to reduce its strength

Export your Wunderlist tasks with XPath

As brought up in this ProductHunt thread , the news is that Wunderlist is going to be deprecated in favor of the new Microsoft To-Do note taking platform. This is what Wunderlist support had to say in response to my inquiry on Wunderlist's future: " Now that the next evolution of Wunderlist is here, in the form of Microsoft To-Do Preview ( https://www.wunderlist.com/blog/... ), Wunderlist will no longer receive any updates or bug fixes and will eventually be retired. It won’t happen in the next few months and we’ll be sure to give our users plenty of notice beforehand. In the meantime, you can continue to use Wunderlist normally. Of course, we’d also love for you to try To-Do and let us know how you like it – and how we can improve it. While Wunderlist will continue to exist alongside To-Do for the time being, support for Wunderlist will eventually be removed. Not to worry, though! We will inform all Wunderlist users prior to shutting down service. You'll have ampl