In my job at Ribbon, I’ve been using Ruby on Rails a lot – that is what the Ribbon service is built with afterall. This has been my first time working with Rails, so read on for some thoughts.
Knockout vs Backbone vs Angular
There’s a lot of talk of various client-side kind-of-mvc libraries. Three of the popular ones I’ve used are Knockout, Backbone and Angular. While there are other comparisons of the three, I feel many of them don’t really touch on some of the aspects that I’ve come to learn from my experiences with the three.
Parsing and evaluating PHP in Haskell: Part 2
Last week I wrote a post about a PHP parser / evaluator I wrote in Haskell. I explained some of the parts on how the parser itself was designed to process PHP code into an abstract syntax tree. Continuing from where we left off in the previous part, in this post I’ll discuss the actual evaluation part.
Parsing and evaluating PHP in Haskell: Part 1
The other day I uploaded a new experimental project on GitHub – A Haskell PHP parser / evaluator. It doesn’t understand 100% of all PHP syntax, but it was an interesting experiment nevertheless. Here’s some insights and other thoughts from working on the code.
Could you use Minecraft to teach programming?
There are two mods (that I’m aware of) for Minecraft which let you build computers inside the game. ComputerCraft allows you to have Lua-programmable computers and robots, with basic wired and wireless networking capabilities. RedPower 2 on the other hand has a 6502-like CPU based computers, which are programmable either using 6502 Assembly or FORTH. What if you used Minecraft …
I made a thing: Planetside 2 minigame
Random ideas and idle hands lead from one thing to another. While waiting for the Planetside 2 (a large scale MMOFPS) beta to land, I decided to make a hex-grid of the game’s map. Once the map is complete, someone suggests it should be colored in one of the three in-game faction’s colors… then I realize, why not just let …
Best practices for building embeddable widgets
With all the embeddable buttons, such as Facebook like buttons, and widgets like Disqus comments and whatnot these days, you’d think there was some nice info on how they are actually built. But it turns out no, not really. I found this first hand when we had to build some FB like button style things at work, and had to …
Is Haskell good for web development?
I’ve been trying out Haskell for developing a web application, using the Yesod framework. I always found Haskell quite nice, but never tried developing web apps with it. After using Yesod, I’m slowly starting to think that Haskell might be much better for it than many of the commonly used languages like PHP, Python, Ruby or JavaScript. Here’s why:
5 ways how PHP is better than Node.js
All hail Node.js! Boo PHP! Except there are various things where PHP is better than Node…
How to run Apache and NodeJS based sites on the same server with Varnish
While developing Battlefield 3 Web Commander, I wanted to keep it on my VPS where I was already running Apache. Of course I had the option of putting it in a non-standard port like 8080, but it wouldn’t be nice if the URL would be somedomain.com:8080. The second option was ordering an extra IP address from Linode. That would’ve cost …