Browser Wars 2.0 - the Plug-in

March 23rd, 2010

If browser vendors believe he who has the most plugins wins BrowserWars 2.0 then make it easy for developers to write and distribute plugins. Chrome and Firefox do this:
• Both use javascript as the plug-in Lingua Franca.
• Both compete on providing the most powerful javascript engine in a browser;
• Both make it easy for developers to add plug-ins to browsers.

All browsers run javascript the difference being which runs it fastest. And Google’s hegemony is powerful – if Google is focused on plugins then you need to check it out.

Poor Man's Webspider

March 1st, 2010

Webspiders are fun, but the learning curve is awfully steep. Websites don’t like crawlers stumbling about where they’re not wanted, and barriers as simple as a login screen can stymie a beginner. Add in checks on user agents strings and javaScipt-heavy links, and your weekend is over before you’ve gotten anything to work—side project over! This blog post will show you how to turn your browser and lamp server into a spider capable of taking you straight to the fun.

The Basic Idea

A greasemonkey script will pull data off the pages we’re interested in and send them to a php script. The php script will then tell the greasemonkey script what to do next: either open an alert box telling the user something went wrong, or move on to another url.

YAJ: Yet Another Javascript?

October 12th, 2009

The exponential growth and popularization of “the internet” was helpfully fueled by a flawed ‘language’ – the HyperText Markup Language. HTML is a subset of SGML – the ‘Standard Generalized Markup Language’ standards for structuring and processing documents. HyperText are navigable references to other ‘text’ (images, video, tabular data, stock quotes, etc). We ‘click’ hypertext ‘links’ to navigate from website to website.

Javascript dependency management made easy like Sunday morning

October 5th, 2009

Javascript does not have any kind of dependency management built into the language; rather you have to use external tools to do the management for you. We have a rather large Javascript code base, and Rake is our build management tool, so the natural choice for me was to investigate available Ruby solutions; unfortunately, none of them worked well for me.

The Many Flavors of Curry

August 31st, 2009

Many functional languages have this nifty feature called ‘currying’ or ‘curried functions’. The name comes from the logician Haskell Curry (son of Samuel Silas Curry — someone please hook me up with wherever they are getting these names!), for whom the Haskell programming language is also named. Currying is a technique for making partial applications of functions first class objects in an intuitive way.