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 using callbacks.

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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 of America.

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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 actively supported libraries available.

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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 article summary states:

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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.

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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 percent of sales across UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain

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• Feed: The Disco Blog
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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) provides data redundancy as well as data availability.

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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, lacking in HTMLish clutter.

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Today, Amazon announced that their Appstore for Android now supports the submission of HTML5 apps.

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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 for factories, become a nuisance for a framework like Mockito, however, with the inclusion of PowerMock, you’ve got yourself a proverbial hammer.

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I recently found myself writing some code to integrate two disparate platforms. One of these systems is Java based and the other, while not written in Java, offers a Java API. I’ll call these systems Foo and Bar, respectively.

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I find that swipe gestures for navigating between screens in a mobile app quite nice.

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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 easily things work out.

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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? The query select email from user where user_id = 1; is far more efficient for the database and the corresponding application that issued it, because there is less data to fetch and consume.

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We run a farm of Redis instances for storing real time analytics. Because Redis stores objects in memory, it happens to be an extremely fast way to retrieve data; thus, most of our charts and graphs pull data from various Redis instances that contain desired data.

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