Over the past decade of finding myself staring at innumerable Ant build files containing a JUnit task, I’ve come to realize a subtle, yet powerful flag, that when not set properly, almost always leads to random and confusing test catastrophes. The JUnit task supports a number of attributes, but the most important is the fork one. This flag controls whether or not the tests being run are invoked within the same JVM instance of Ant itself or within a new one.

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Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of speaking at MoDevTablet where I gave a presentation entitled “Mobile Web Realities” and the good folks who put on the conference recorded it.

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I recently spent time evaluating various mobile browsers’ HTML5 compatibility in an effort to understand the state of the mobile web. Along the way, I discovered that the good folks at Facebook, who happen to have quite a lot of experience with HTML5 and mobility put together a handy website called Ringmark.

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While starting out with MongoDB is super easy, there are few things you should keep in mind as you move from a development environment into a production one. No one wants to get paged at 3am because a customer can’t complete an order on your awesome e-commerce site because your database isn’t responding fast enough or worse, is down.

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In the early days of the desktop computing, software delivery was a matter of going to a store and buying a box. Subsequently, you then went home and manually inserted install disks into a computer. It was, in retrospect, a real pain in the neck. Accordingly, for most people, the software that was loaded on the PC they bought was basically what they only used for the life of the machine. Adding new software to your home PC was an event.

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MongoDB supports rich documents that can include, among other things, embedded documents. This feature embodies a has-a relationship quite nicely and can, if modeled properly, reduce the number of finds required to ascertain certain data as there are no joins in Mongo.

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The Great Mobile App Debate rages on; in fact, it seems of late, the debate has been heating up dramatically. And interestingly enough, some intriguing people are joining this lively discussion including Martin Fowler.

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Without a doubt, one of the quickest ways to build an application that leverages MongoDB is with Node. It’s as if the two platforms were made for each other; the sheer number of Node libraries available for dealing with Mongo is testimony to a vibrant, innovative community. Indeed, one of my favorite Mongo focused libraries these days is Mongoose.

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Redis supports master-slave replication and it’s extremely easy to setup. And the beauty of setting up replication is that all you have to do is fire up a slave instance and have it point to some other Redis instance (which then becomes the master node).

Accordingly, open up the redis.conf file for an intended secondary (or slave node) and find the section containing a slaveof phrase. Uncomment it and add the IP address & port of the master node:

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In a recent conversation with my friend Jonathan Stark we talked about how much has changed in mobile web development since he and I chatted about cross-platform mobile development in November of 2011. Of particular interest was how much adoption mobile web sites have achieved in less than a year – yet, the adoption hasn’t always been smooth.

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