Posts

What is React React is a new library for building user interfaces (to steal it directly from their site) developed by Facebook. React is not a full featured JavaScript application framework. This means it is not competing in the same space as Angular, Ember, Backbone or <insert your favorite framework that I am not mentioning here>. It also means it does not care how you route, where you get your data, or any application plumbing.

Bower Bower is a package manager like npm. In much the same way as npm, Bower needs Node.js and runs on top of it. While npm focuses on packages for Node.js, Bower usually targets front-end libraries like jQuery and React. Managing front-end libraries is much better than the old way of just downloading a version and sticking it in our project. We now have full version control. Bower uses a configuration file named bower.

One of my most popular posts is about using Node.js, Socket.IO, and Redis to build a small voting application. It is also my most forked repo on Github. After finishing the book I decided to revisit this codebase and see how it has held up over time. Unfortunately it needed some improvement. There is a law of programming that states any code that is more than three months old will be viewed as crap.

I have not been updating this blog like I should have been for about the last year. That is unfortunate. Although I feel I have a good reason. I have been writing a book! You can currently see the pre-order page at Packt Publishing. This book is almost 300 pages that will start the reader from an empty folder to a working, scalable application that is published to Amazon Web Services.

This is just going to be a quick post. This blog is hosted on WordPress. I am making this post as I just updated WordPress just the other day. It’s nice to be able to do it right in the admin site. To do this you will need to change the file permissions of the WordPress install. Many times in the forum any questions regarding file permissions will have some responses to set the folders to 755 or even worse 777 with the webserver user being the owner.

Django Rest Framework is great for creating an API. It allows you to quickly create an restful API while still giving you a lot of power. It uses Class based views that you can then extend. This creates an issue though. You most likely already have an entry point for your data: forms. Your forms probably have validation on them right now. Adding a new entry point will allow users to enter invalid data.

Bad workflows suck. This post is going to be a little different than my other posts. It is going to be a partially fictional story. I say partially becuase all of the events I describe have happened to me in one form or another. You open gmail, to check over your email as Aptana is opening. Another Amazon email. You only searched once for some info on a TV that your friend posted about buying on Facebook.