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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Recently, a buddy of mine pointed me to an interesting tweet:

New tool converts your Apple #iOS apps to #HTML5 http://dld.bz/cejxz #appdev

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MongoDB supports a rich query language; in fact, its support of dynamic queries is one of its more distinguishing features compared to other datastores in the NoSQL world.

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Search is no longer an optional feature: it’s expected of most any application that consumes, produces, or stores data. And not everyone wants to be a search technology specialist, especially given the range of sophisticated algorithms underlying today’s complex searches (i.e. SQL queries are no longer sufficient!). Knowing about existing, open source search platforms could save you a lot of time and money and allow you to spend your time fine-tuning your software’s main functionality.

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We recently implemented a new feature that required two interesting aspects: storing a file in MongoDB using GridFS (think traditional Blob) and then pushing that file down to a browser.

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Every now and again, I find myself struggling to remember how to execute a single test in Rails. While I have Guard running the entire test suite anytime a change is detected, there are times when I want to focus solely on one test. Accordingly, Flavio Castelli has a great blog entry detailing the manifold ways one can execute a single test using Rake and/or Ruby.