A Technology Blog by Alan James
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.
Recently I’ve been working a lot with continuous speech recognition and keyword detection in Google Chrome. Several months ago I found a really great library for streamlining is the process, a library called annyang.
For a long time I’ve had a CSS and JavaScript library that I’ve maintained for my personal and professional projects. The CSS included UI components, like buttons and switches, and the JavaScript were ports of all the PHP functions I had written so I have the same functions client side that I had server side.
Recently I released these libraries under the banner of a larger project, MogulMVC.
Since releasing them on GitHub I’ve been able to install them in any project by just running a git clone or git pull in my CSS or JS directory, and this makes it very easy to keep them updated, but it was still lacking something.
Since deciding to use WebSockets instead of AJAX calls with Node.js I have discovered some interesting things. Some of these things are good, and some are bad.
Node.js is great at times, but in some ways it’s a real pain in the ass.
Sure, it can create WebSocket servers, and it seems to be on the cutting edge of everything, but try to update an array of objects in a database then output a message and you’re in trouble.
I’m in the process of converting a web application from an Apache + PHP backend to Node.js. The application being converted is based heavily around real time interaction between users, so, it was a natural fit for WebSockets.
In fact the old application used a Node.js backend for WebSockets, but an Apache + PHP backend for everything else, including page generation and AJAX endpoints. This means every AJAX driven form had a PHP endpoint which performed a desired action and a WebSocket event listener waiting to broadcast the event to other users.
Having to recode this application from the ground up in a new asynchronous language presented an interesting question to me.
Why should I use AJAX when I have WebSockets?
For several months I have wanted a cross browser voice recognition system that doesn’t rely on a server, use browser plugins or extensions, or use external programs like Flash. Something that could continually listen for keywords and trigger functions when one is detected. I looked into the webkitSpeechRecognition() object in Chrome, but unfortunately that relies on Google servers and is only available in Chrome. I looked into building extensions and plugins for Firefox and Chrome that package CMU Sphinx, but that is not native code. I even got voice recognition working in Flash, but wasn’t happy because it didn’t work on my Android device.
After months of looking I have found one that fits the bill completely and is really awesome.