Category: OS X

Best Sublime Plugins

As you can tell from my lack of articles over the last several months I have been very busy. I’ve been in India and San Francisco working like crazy. I will be posting more about what I have been working on in the future, but because of work I have had no time to write any new or interesting articles.

So today I decided to share what Sublime plugins I use to be more productive, help unify my team’s standards, and help the overall collaboration in my team.

I’ve been using Sublime for several years but I was unimpressed when I first started using it. I later found out that the real advantage of using Sublime is the plugin system. You can make Sublime into nearly any type of IDE you want.

Here is my list of best Sublime plugins.

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Making Desktop JavaScript Apps with node-webkit

Update: node-webkit is now called NW.js and uses io.js and Blink instead of Node.js and WebKit. All other information is still correct.

JavaScript can be run in a browser normally, on a server with Node.js, and on mobile devices with Cordova, but where else can we use JavaScript to program?

Well, plenty other places, but the last big place to write programs is the desktop and today I’m covering writing desktop JavaScript applications with node-webkit.

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Making Mobile JavaScript Apps with Cordova

Last time I covered what Node.js is and briefly covered creating server side JavaScript applications with it. But as part of my recent desire to write everything in JavaScript I have also started writing mobile applications in JavaScript using Cordova.

I’ve written mobile applications in various technolgies and even have some on the Google Play Store, but I like writing mobile applications in Cordova more than other technology I’ve used, which are Java and Flex with Adobe AIR.

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Remote MySQL Connection Access

When moving a site from one server/host to another it’s often necessary to have both servers/hosts share a third server’s database. This is necessary because as the DNS change propagates around the world some user’s ISP may send them to your old server and some may arrive at the new server.

If you had two independent servers running two instances of MySQL the records in the database won’t match and some users will never be on the new server. This is especially a problem if you’re running a subscription based website. You merchant may have already processed their account information and confirmed them on your site, but wait, were they confirmed on the old server or the new one?

Using a shared database allows users who sign up to your site through the old server to be added same database as users who sign up through the new server. But MySQL doesn’t allow this to happen by default. It thinks that any incoming request from an outside connection is a security threat.

The internet is usually a great place to find tutorials, especially relating to programming. However, configuring a MySQL database for remote connections seems to be a poorly documented thing online.

With that in mind, here is a short explanation of how to configure MySQL to allow remote connections.

Note: this will not work on shared hosting.

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