Baker Designz Blog

I’m convinced that Erlang is going to see a large increase in popularity in the future. After reading about how the people at Ericsson, where it saw its birth, wrote a electronic switching system with a few million lines of code that should only fail one second every 30 years or every billion seconds. I’ve also read of YAWS ( Yet Another Web Server ), a web server wrote in Erlang that out performs Apache in parallel connections. (See it here) This means that things wrote in Erlang are very scalable. Erlang applications are  also suited to solve heat issues you could find at a data center.

Okay.. So that’s the good.. but what’s the bad? Well first off it has a different paradigm that what many people are accustomed to. It is not Object Oriented, but Concurrency Oriented. Its syntax isn’t C-like to make it easier for you to learn.

Want to learn more? Visit Erlang’s Website

After I began using border radius to give elements rounded corners, I began to wonder if circles could be created this way. The corners would have to be half of the height and width. This technique worked in Firefox 3, but not Safari 3.Any ways, I made a circle with that technique.

Works in FF3, Safari 3

view it at http://bakerdesignz.com/code/circle.html .

if you don’t have FF or Safari, this is what you are missing: Screenshot of circles`

Today, Google released their own open source web browser, Chrome. The Javascript rendering engine, v8, that Google uses for Chrome is super fast. The browser was built for speed, security, and the future.  Each separate tab runs in its own sandbox, so if a single tab crashes, it and only it will crash.  It is built from existing open source components including Web Kit and v8. This means that you need not learn how to make hacks sites for Chrome, because if your site already works in Safari, it will work in Chrome. I should note that v8 was specifically developed for Chrome by a Google team in Denmark. Now if I could only convince my school to change from the evil IE6 to this…

After playing around today with prototypejs and scriptaculous, I began to think: “How did the world work without this!?”.  If you compare using a javascript framework for XHR, as opposed to writing the code for each one, there’s no competition between the two. Frameworks, whether  or not they are server-side or client-side, simply do the task they are designed to do: cut development time in half.

Frameworks also bridge the gaps of browser incompatibilities *cough* IE. Code only has to be written in one way, unlike without a framework where you can end up with a lot of ugly try and catches.

One thing frameworks cannot do is write the code for you. You still need an experienced developer to write the code using the framework.  After all, wheres the fun if you don’t have to do anything?

Who agrees with me?  I know that has been around since 2004-2005, but why hasn’t it taken over the world yet?  It’s like you can have your cake and eat it too! It comes pre-packaged with my favorite javascript framework, Prototypejs, and the amazing scriptaculous  effects library.  In the screencasts shown on the Ruby on Rails site, a weblog is made using 58 lines of code.    Who uses this wonderful framework you ask?

Well.. just a few..

Twitter, Basecamp, Odeo,43 Things, Backpack, Strongspace, A List Apart.

It goes on and on.

Ruby on Rails is just plain amazing :).

- Justin B

For one, it’s no doubt the easiest framework out there. You can use $(’element’) instead of document.getElementById(element). I know that I’m lazy and I prefer using this :).
And going off of an example on protypejs.org, $(’comments’).show() will take an element with the id “comments” and show it if it was previously hidden.

JSON ( JavaScript object notation ) is a fast alternative to XML for transporting data via api’s that is commonly used by many sites such as Vimeo and Twitter . Prototype has a great JSON encoding and parsing support. Used in conjuction with the built it Ajax capabilities that Prototype has, Ajax is relatively easy .

Oh yeah, that reminds me of  how great Prototype handles Ajax. It offers a simple cross-browser way to address ajax. How about: new Ajax.Request(’/some_url’, { method:’get’ }) ? I would much rather type 3-7 lines for an Ajax function that 20 plus that does the same thing.

I’m not even going to discuss Jquery here. That’s for another day, another post.

-Justin B