A Technology Blog by Alan James
I’m fairly vocal about my opinion of Microsoft products. They have never made a single that is better than the competition, except maybe C#, but only maybe.
IE vs Safari vs Opera vs Chrome vs Firefox: Chrome or Firefox win
Office vs iWork vs LibreOffice = iWork wins
Windows vs OS X vs Linux = Linux wins with OS X a close second
However, they have finally made a product that is I would use over the competition, and most developers I talk to agree.
I had always been curious about DuckDuckGo and played around with it a few times in the past, but in May of this year DuckDuckGo released a new interface and a ton of new features. On July 9th I decided to give it a try and use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine.
Here are my thoughts after using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for a month, both good and bad.
For a long time I’ve been against the idea of data-binding. Like many people I started using it with Flex, then used it with AngularJS, and Knockout.
I’ve been opposed to using data-binding for a long time, until recently when I found a data-binding library that makes data-binding optional, easy to write, and framework agnostic.
Traditionally web applications were built using backend technology. A request is made to a server and based on the URL being requested the server responds by generating a resource, usually HTML.
To do this servers need to “route” requests to different resource generation logic. This logic is what backend developers build.
This worked well for many years, but as browsers became more advanced code started being moved from the backend to the frontend.
I’m normally not a fan of gamification. It feels like the person trying to teach me thinks I am incapable of learning and needs to trick me into it. However, I just discovered a great programming game that teaches you creative problem solving.
AND IT’S FUN!
If you’ve ever used Dropbox or Google Drive you know what cloud based storage is. It’s a hard drive located somewhere on the internet for you to store and share your files.
But what if you have terabytes of files, or a preexisting server infrastructure at your work or house? Are those solutions really the best? Is there a better self hosted solution?
There is and it’s called ownCloud.
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.
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.
JavaScript used to be used only within the browser. But nowadays JavaScript can be used pretty much anywhere programming is supported. It can be used in a browser, server, mobile device, and even desktop.
I’m going to write about building JavaScript applications for mobile devices and desktops in future posts. Today I will discuss how to make server applications in JavaScript.
In my last post I talked about the great annyang library by Tal Ater, which is a keyword detector and abstraction layer for Chrome’s continuous speech recognition system.
Annyang is a great client side JavaScript library for detecting a spoken keyword and performing a specific callback function. But what if you want the same functionality server side?
Use annyang-node of course.