I recently discovered Apache Ant and it’s an absolute godsend! Ant is an automated build system written in Java. You write build(make) files in XML. This allows Ant to be cross-platform which is very handy in my line of work. Previously I used a combination of manual tasks, windows batch files and shell scripts on linux to manage my builds.
Heres a small snippet of code I found that will successfully post updates to your Twitter account:
curl --basic --user username:password --data status="Having fun with cURL" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
The command ‘curl’ is normally present on most Linux distro’s these days. Windows users will need to Google and download it. To use the code above simply replace ‘username:password’ with your real ‘username:password‘, the string of status in double quotes is the update that will actually appear on your Twitter page. The url present at the end of the code is the Twitter API endpoint.
Twitter will reply with a response similar to the following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<status>
<created_at>Sun Apr 08 01:25:56 +0000 2007</created_at>
<id>12345xxx</id>
<text>Having fun with cURL</text>
<user>
<id>xxxxxxx</id>
<name>Your Name</name>
<screen_name>your_username</screen_name>
<location></location>
<description></description>
<profile_image_url>[removed]</profile_image_url>
<url></url>
<protected>true</protected>
</user>
</status>
Note: I have replaced specific numbers with ‘x’s.
Prototype 1.5 has finally been released as stable along with a new website. The team have also started a documentation effort to make life easier.
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo now all support the Sitemap 0.90 specification. This is great as it allows webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. Web Developers can also save time by using an adopted protocol.
The Ruby programming language has recently become widely adopted with the advent of key web frameworks and applications. The big player, being Ruby on Rails has wide-spread it’s usage infectiously. I’ve always been a loyal PHP fan – having used it for five years now. I did not want to spend time learning another programming language again. I tried Cake and other popular frameworks but they are still to immature to consider for a large-scale application.
Finally the digg link, (should be close to 1000 diggs) on the front page tempted me to try an interactive hands-on demo. Its too simple, easy and fast. I’m going to test-drive rails soon on a small application and see whether it shapes up to the endless hype floating around. I might even end up hooked. Time is money, simple is good.
This guy offers the Sveasoft firmware for download at no extra cost (free as in beer)! He also talks about how he was abused by Sveasoft and how they are in violation of the GPL.
A library of pre-written regular expressions that you can plug into your code. Also, features a regular expression online testing engine against inputted text or a website text. Very handy resource!
I love this cool flash animation [link].
I have recently discovered the AJAX-hype out there on the internet. I wont explain what AJAX is, I’m sure that has been done many times. I wanted to get into it, so I read this helpful article and ajax-ed the digg feed on my sub menu.