Elasticsearch in a box
Are you looking to get going with Elasticsearch as quickly as possible without having to worry about installing Java or Elasticsearch itself? Are you looking for a repeatable and automated mechanism for bringing up Elasticsearch...
Book review: Instant Mockito
Recently, the good folks over at Packt Publishing gave me a copy of their newly published Instant Mockito , by Marcin Grzejszczak . Packt’s Instant series are really enjoyable. The premise of these books is that they’re short and...
Provisioning Ubuntu with Java in 3 steps
As I’ve written about before , Vagrant is handy tool for creating localized VMs . It’s a lot like firing up EC2 images, but, for the most part, things are localized (you can, by the way, use Vagrant to fire up EC2 images ).
SSH & Vagrant
Vagrant is a handy tool for creating VMs. It’s a lot like firing up an EC2 instance, but in Vagrant’s case, everything is localized. And best of all, it’s free.
AWS EBS in 4 steps
When you fire up an AWS AMI, you are given a small partition of disk space that survives reboots. For example, the base Ubuntu AMI I tend to favor comes with an 8GB primary partition; however, 8GB is often not enough, especially if...
All other metrics are useless
When it comes to queues, whether they’re implemented as JMS , database tables (i.e. what Ruby’s Delayed::Job uses for a queue), or even Amazon’s SQS , the most common metric used to evaluate the state of a queue is its length.
The significance of HTML5
HTML5 is important for three reasons. And its importance starts with the end of browser plugins. That’s right. With HTML5, rich media aspects that were formally handled by plugins (think Flash), are now built-in. That’s why there are...
Ahoy there callbacks!
Because it’s my bag, I like JavaScript . In fact, I’ve grown to love JavaScritp’s asynchronous callback oriented style of programming . Consequently, when I find myself in a non-JavaScript environment, say, like Java , I tend to miss...
App signing: iOS versus Android
Apple’s app signing process can be a real pain-in-the-neck; nevertheless, it works to keep apps trusted. You know when you download a Bank of America app from iTunes that it’s the real thing. You know that the app comes from the Bank...
I like my ElasticSearch a la Node.js
While ElasticSearch is easy enough to work with via its RESTful HTTP API, there are myriad client libraries available in almost every conceivable programming language. If Node.js is your language of choice, then there’s at least two...
Mobile for the masses: Sign, seal, and deliver your Android app
The fifth article in IBM developerWorks ’ series Mobile for the Masses has been published! This hip article shows you how to add a multiple-choice quiz to your Android mobile app, then sign it with a secure digital certificate. As the...
Understanding ElasticSearch analyzers
Sadly, lots of early Internet beer recipes aren’t necessarily in an easily digestible format; that is, these recipes are unstructured intermixed lists of directions and ingredients often originally composed in an email or forum post.
8% is itty-bitty, but it matters
I saw some news related to Microsoft Windows Phone that gave me pause for thought. Specifically, I read an article that stated: Microsoft’s mobile platform reached new heights in the three months to July 2013 in Europe, making up 8.2...
Effortless ElasticSearch clustering
ElasticSearch supports clustering ; that is, you can have a series of distinct ElasticSearch instances work in a coordinated manner without much administrative intervention at all. Clustering ElasticSearch instances (or nodes)...
Whiskered Node views
As we draw closer to the glorious month of Movember , I find myself pondering the myriad template engines available for Node apps. The most popular is still probably Jade as its syntax is Haml -like and results in quite clean views,...
Why Amazon Appstore's support of HTML5 matters
Today, Amazon announced that their Appstore for Android now supports the submission of HTML5 apps .
Sometimes TDD requires a hammer
While there are myriad mocking libraries available for the Java platform, only a select few of these nifty frameworks is capable of mocking the non-mock-friendly modifiers of static and final . Static (or class) methods, while handy...
Swipe gestures in jQuery Mobile apps
I find that swipe gestures for navigating between screens in a mobile app quite nice .
Introducing Android migrations
Have you ever worked with Rails’ migrations ? They make database changes a breeze , don’t they? While every software release doesn’t necessarily involve a migration, when one does happen to make use of one, I’m always pleased on how...
MongoDB pro tip: field projections
Did you ever learn that select * from table in RDBMS-land is bad? Of course, you did! If you’re only looking for the email address of a user and not the other 15 columns worth of data, then why ask for that data and incur a penalty?...
