February 2010
29 posts
5 tags
FOWA 2010: David Recordon on Facebook Open Source...
At Future of Web Apps 2010 in Miami, Florida; Senior Open Programs Manager, David Recordon sat with Ryan Carson for just over 10 minutes to talk about a few of the notable Open Source projects Facebook is driving.
The projects discussed were:
OpenID and Facebook Connect
Three20
Tornado
PubSubHubbub
OAuth 2.0
Facebook has been developed from the ground up using open source...
6 tags
Mongrations - migrations for MongoMapper →
Why would a schema-less database need migrations? Simple: to help you keep old data fresh as you change your data format. Recently added new columns to your MongoMapper model and need to update old values in your MongoDB collection? Terry Heath gives you Mongrations:
script/generate mongration update_followers_count_for_existing
You’ll get a new file with the familiar Rails migration...
6 tags
Episode 0.1.5 - Leah Culver on OAuth, Hurl.it,...
Adam and Wynn caught up with Leah Culver and talked about startups, APIs, and her open source work on OAuth, oEmbed, Hurl.it, Baconfile, and more.
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OAuth An open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.
oEmbed oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites.
90210...
4 tags
Delorean - mock Ruby's Time.now with style →
At The Changelog, we give bonus points for witty project names. How could we pass up a repo named Delorean.
Delorean is a smart way to mock Ruby’s Time.now method thereby allowing you to travel in time. Why is this helpful? Testing. Consider the following spec from the README:
it "should show latest created user" do
time_travel_to(3.minutes.ago) { create_user :name => "John" }
...
3 tags
Ajax.org O3: Collection of C++ components exposed... →
While at FOWA 2010, Adam Stacoviak caught up with the guys and gals at Ajax.org. And since we’ve been on this Node.js kick for a bit now, maybe it’s time we introduce you to the guys at Ajax.org and what they’ve been doing with C++ and JavaScript to make the Ajax.org Platform APF and Ajax.org O3 provide developers with easy to use libraries and tools in order to make the browser...
9 tags
Episode 0.1.4 - Andy Gross and Sean Cribbs on Riak
Adam and Wynn caught up with Andy Gross from Basho and Sean Cribbs, a freelance Ruby developer, to discuss Riak, the new Erlang-based NoSQL store and Ripple, Sean’s new Ruby wrapper for Riak.
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Items mentioned in the show:
Ripple New Ruby wrapper for Riak
Link walking in Riak
RadiantCMS Ruby-powered Content Management System
3 tags
Tip: Use filters when tailing The Changelog
It seems our settings icon on http://tail.thechangelog.com is a bit too subtle so we recorded a quick screencast to show you how you can filter the GitHub firehose to see only the open source events you actually care about.
5 tags
do - simple async JavaScript library →
At the risk of having to change our name to Changelog.js as some have suggested, we feature another cool JavaScript library. Do from Tim Caswell who brought us the How To Node blog.
So what does Do do? First, it adds higher level processing for continuables, the callback pattern for asynchronous processing in Node.js.
As Tim explains:
A continuable is a function that returns a curried...
8 tags
SimFinger - make awesome screencasts of your... →
SimFinger is a screencasting tool from Loren Brichter aka @atebits, author of popular apps like Tweetie for the iPhone as well as the desktop. SimFinger is a Cocoa app for the Mac that adds some polish to your mobile app screencasts by providing:
A frame that sits on top of the simulator and adds shine and an iPhone 3G look
A halo around the pointer to indicate touch events
Ability to set...
5 tags
cradle - A high-level, caching, CouchDB client for... →
Intended to be a higher-level API on top of Couch, cradle from Alexis Sellier tries to bridge what’s best about CouchDB and Node.js. Cradle comes with built-in write-through caching to boost speed and easier updates and deletes.
Most methods from CouchDB map one-to-one with Cradle although some like save can orchestrate multiple operations.
From the README
var cradle =...
4 tags
Rippin' off Python w/ Chris Wanstrath
A great talk from Chris Wanstrath (@defunkt) on Python from a Rubyist’s perspective.
We too favor awesome docs for the projects that we feature, peps seem like an awesome concept to support (seriously), and hacking side-by-side with two languages is a nice way to get started with a new language…
Great work Chris on your journey through the various languages you’ve been...
5 tags
Tradui: Civic Hacking for Haiti →
Across the United States there has been a gathering of people looking for ways to ease the suffering caused by the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on Jauary 12th, 2010. Three members of Intridea, Chris Selmer, Brendan Lim and Jonathan Nelson stepped up to help with the efforts towards those in need in Haiti by heading to DC to take part in Crisis Camp DC.
Their “civic...
4 tags
Fiber: A simple PHP interface to CouchDB →
Fiber from Luis Gomez is a simple way to add CouchDB storage to your PHP app.
Given a User class that extends a Fiber Document:
$user = User::find('john');
$user->email = "john@example.com";
$user->city = "San Francisco";
$user->save();
Fiber also includes some nifty chaining:
$user->set( array( "email" => "peter@example.com", "city" => "Caracas" ) )->save();
Check...
7 tags
aruba - Cucumber steps for testing your command... →
Terminal junkies rejoice! Now you can use Cucumber to test your command line interfaces just like you do for your web apps. Aruba from Cucumber creator Aslak Hellesøy provides familiar step definitions for testing output, exit statuses, and file system commands. Here’s an example feature file for testing exit statuses:
Aruba provides the exit status step:
To use Aruba just install the...
6 tags
WebFinger libraries emerge →
Less than 24 hours after Google broke the news of its take on WebFinger, its 21st century take on the Unix finger command, enterprising developers are releasing native libraries for the service.
In case you missed it, WebFinger is a way to get profile information for a user of a service based solely on their email address.
Ruby wrapper
Michael Bleigh at Intridea released Redfinger as a Ruby...
8 tags
Quicksand: Awesome jQuery plugin to filter/animate... →
Quicksand from Jacek Galanciak is a jQuery plugin to help you filter and animate items in an HTML list.
With code like this:
$("#content").quicksand($("#data > li"),
{
// all the parameters have sensible defaults
// and in most cases can be optional
duration: 1000,
easing: "easeInOutQuad",
attribute: "data-id",
}
);
You can get the eye candy in this video:
...
4 tags
storytlr - lifestreaming for geeks →
Open Source has its own Circle of Life. As we discussed in Episode 0.1.1, Open Source creates opportunities for entrepreneurs. Sometimes those businesses can spin off their own projects, paving the way for the next round of startups.
Sometimes commercial apps just don’t survive, but let’s not confuse viable with valuable. Take the case of Storytlr, a hosted lifestreaming service...
9 tags
firequery - jQuery love for Firebug →
Firequery from Antonin Hildebrand is a neat tool that adds jQuery features to Joe Hewitt’s FireBug add-on for Firefox including:
jQuery expressions are intelligently presented in Firebug Console and DOM inspector
attached jQuery datas are first class citizens
elements in jQuery collections are highlighted on hover
jQuerify: enables you to inject jQuery into any web page
...
7 tags
ripple - Ruby client for Riak →
Are you a Rubyist and want to play with Riak, the sweet new NoSQL distributed database we featured earlier? During our interview for upcoming Episode 0.1.4, Sean Cribbs gave us a scoop. Introducing Ripple, a hot new Ruby client for Riak.
An example from the README
require 'riak'
# Create a client interface
client = Riak::Client.new
# Retrieve a bucket
bucket = client.bucket("doc") # a...
9 tags
Episode 0.1.3 - Civic hacking with Luigi Montanez...
Adam and Wynn caught up with Luigi Montanez and Jeremy Carbaugh from Sunlight Labs and discussed their Python and Ruby projects, government transparency, and civic hacking - open source contributions as activism.
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Items mentioned in the show:
Real Time Congress - iPhone app for keeping tabs on Congress, built with Appcelerator Titanium
Anthill - Django-powered community...
10 tags
riak - high performance document store built on... →
Riak, REE-ahk, combines the power of Erlang with the ubiquity of JSON to deliver a highly scalable document store over REST. Hold on CouchDB fans, before you pounce, you haven’t heard this one before.
Master-less replication
Riak is architected for master-less replication from the GET-go. All nodes participate equally in the replication so scaling horizontally means just adding new...
7 tags
toto - Close-to-the-metal blogging on top of Rack →
Take a look around the small site web landscape and it’s clear we’re not in Kansas anymore. It’s no longer a foregone conclusion that a new blog or brochure site should be built on a CMS or even web framework. Toto is the latest in a rising breed of static page generators.
Toto dumps the database and stores its content in plain text files. Its built on top of Rack and is Heroku...
5 tags
Kohana - The Swift PHP Framework →
Kohana is a PHP MVC web framework that aims to be easy, lightweight, and secure. It has no dependencies on PECL or PEAR extensions and uses strict PHP 5 OOP. It uses what it calls “cascading resources” to allow developers to extend the framework without editing the core system.
There is an extensive list of [modules], even a MongoDB ORM, MangoDB.
[Source on GitHub] [Homepage]...
5 tags
TapkuLibrary - Beautiful iPhone UI class library →
TapkuLibrary from Devin Ross is a collection of UI classes for iPhone development. The README includes detailed installation instructions and is full of gorgeous screenshots:
[Source on GitHub] [Tapku]
5 tags
Rails 3.0 beta! →
After more than a year and over 4000 commits by 250 authors, the Rails 3 Beta is here!
The Rails 3.0.0.beta gem is now live on Gemcutter:
sudo gem install tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis mail text-format thor bundler i18n
sudo gem install rails --pre
[Source on GitHub] [Official CHANGELOG] [Ruby gem][Yehuda’s blog post]
5 tags
Facebook's HipHop leaves PHPers dancing →
When Twitter faced early scaling issues, much was made of decisions to rewrite large portions of the Rails site in Scala.
Facebook however has decided to double down on PHP, releasing HipHop, a PHP source code transfomer:
HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically...
11 tags
Episode 0.1.2 - Gordon is such a Showoff
Adam and Wynn continued chatting with John Nunemaker about some recent featured projects including Gordon, Showoff, jQuery Lint, JSpec, congomongo and more.
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Items discussed in the show:
Friendly NoSQL in MySQL
configliere - Simple Ruby configuration
twitter-node - Node.js tweetstreaming
Gordon - Pure JavaScript Flash replacement
jQuery Lint - jQuery validator
...
5 tags
FuseJS aims to improve the JavaScript frameworks... →
Hot on the heels of FuseBox, John-David Dalton releases FuseJS, a new JavaScript framework that aims to provide “one stable, efficient, and optimized core JavaScript framework.” FuseJS targets common framework features including DOM manipulation, event registration, and CSS selector engines and seeks to improve your favorite JavaScript framework.
In most cases a developer could...
4 tags
HotCocoa: MacRuby HotCocoa UI library →
HotCocoa is a thin & idiomatic Ruby layer that sits above Cocoa and other frameworks, developed by Rich Kilmer. MacRuby 0.5, which was recently rev’d, now supports HotCocoa.
HotCocoa used to be developed inside the MacRuby project, but we decided that it would have a better life on GitHub, where it is far easier for developers to submit contributions…
HotCocoa also has been...