Amazon CloudFront is a pay-as-you-go global content delivery network (or CDN) that provides high availability and high performance serving of static assets. Basically, it means users have to wait less time to view your web app regardless of their location on the globe.

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My second article in IBM developerWorks’ series Mobile for the Masses is out! This article covers how to go about designing a mobile interface from the standpoint of usability via gestures. In essence, eschew buttons and prefer the swipe!

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Wget is an extremely handy utility I use all the time when I find myself on a Linux box. It’s quite helpful, for example, for downloading files. Need to install Ruby? No problem, just download the binary like so:

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As if the JavaScript console in Chrome couldn’t be any more awesome. Check it out: Command Line API Reference. Yep, it’s legit. I’ve been using Firebug and the like for years and only just ran across this feature of Chrome’s JavaScript console.

My favorite: getEventListeners. Understanding how the DOM is augmented with listeners is amazingly helpful!

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The mobile development landscape is bursting at the seams with frameworks and tools that enable you to target two primary mobile platforms: iOS and Android.

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Why bother building navigation buttons in an Android app when you can easily capture finger swipes? But, if you’ve ever implemented gesture section in Android there’s the drudgery of implementing listeners and you also need to do some elementary Cartesian math. Save yourself the boilerplate bother mathematics and use a library!

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In case you missed it, InfoQ has an interesting analysis regarding hybrid mobile app development frameworks. They are profiling 12 tools and soliciting community feedback so as to make a ThoughtWorks-like technology radar. If you participate in the voting you are entitled to see the voting distribution.

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In SQL land, all databases support batch inserts. Batch inserts are an effective and efficient mechanism to insert a lot of similar data. That is, instead of issuing x insert statements, you execute 1 insert with x records. This is much more efficient because the insert statement doesn’t need to be re-parsed x times, there is only 1 network trip as opposed to x, and in the case of transactions, there is only 1 transaction instead of x. When compared to x inserts, batch inserts are always faster.

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Last fall, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion at MoDevEast entitled ”What Developers Love and Hate about iOS, Android, Windows and HTML5” with five super star mobile app developers.

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On March 25, 2013, I’ll be speaking at the Open Analytics Summit in Washington DC; specifically, I’ll be discussing how the App47 team has used MongoDB as the backend of

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A few short years ago when I started to explore Node.js, I remember the installation on my MacBook Pro required downloading the source, compiling and installing it, and then updating paths. And then you had to install NPM.

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Since joining App47, I’ve been lazer focused on mobility; consquently, I’m pleased to announce that a new mobile development series has debuted on IBM developerWorks!

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Let me ask you a question: do you want to build a mobile website or a mobile app? If your answer is mobile website, then HTML5 is good enough. But if your answer is mobile app then you had better think about user experience. You see, the user experience bar has been set extraordinarily high by a number of stellar native apps.

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Are you new to MongoDB? Curious to see what’s interesting about it? Document-oriented databases like MongoDB are vastly different from relational databases in that they don’t store data in tables; instead, they store it in the form of documents.

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I recently found myself searching Stackoverflow and Google for various techniques for automatically testing Rails migrations. I was surprised not to have found too much information though. While testing a migration is fairly straightforward (migrations are classes and you can easily invoke corresponding methods); the challenge can be setting models up properly.

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