Socket.io & nodejs: at a medium pace

In my last blog entry, I shared some nodejs-code to read CouchDB’s _changes feed and publish the data to a website. In order to update the page in a continous fashion, I used socket.io which provides a nifty abstraction across server- to client-side transports — for example, websockets and ajax longpoll. Full-throttle When we tested the code for a few days over the weekend, the largest issue we ran into was that the stream moved too fast....

February 15, 2011 · 1 min

node.js & socket.io fun

I recently had the extreme pleasure to use node.js and socket.io on a project. Here are some insights. Objective So the objective of the project was to read data from the _changes feed of our CouchDB cluster (hosted by Cloudant) and publish the data to a widget which we can use to display a constant stream of “what are people doing right now”. The core of the problem we faced was not just taking this stream of data and feeding it on to a page, but since we’ll deploy this widget to our homepage we needed to make sure that no matter how many clients see it, the impact on the database cluster is minimal; for example, it would be a single client (or down the road up to three for failover) who actually read data from the cluster....

February 2, 2011 · 1 min

Tumblr: Display a list of entries in the sidebar

Update 2010-09-06: I turned my JavaScript code into a handy plugin for jQuery — let me introduce: jquery-simplerss. So for whatever reason, on a lot of blogs (but not mine ;-)), the sidebar also contains the list of latest entries on said blog. I recently edited a template for a client and he requested the same feature — which put me through three hours of nightmare. Tumblr Tumblr is a hosted blog service....

September 2, 2010 · 3 min

Looking for Two PHP Developers in NYC

Hey everyone, it’s my sincere pleasure to announce that we’re looking to fill two positions for PHP developers (entry/junior) in NYC. Expectations This is what we look for from candidates: A strong and firm knowledge of PHP5 First hand experience with the Zend Framework You’ve heard of PHPUnit and TDD An idea of what a HTTP request is and the different applications that take part in one You heard of CouchDB, MongoDB or Redis (generally “NoSQL”) before Last but absolutely not least:...

August 12, 2010 · 1 min

jQuery post requests with a json response, sans eval()

I know some of you out there are probably tired of jQuery and people raving about it’s goodness, but bare with me! Because jQuery never ceases to amaze me — especially when I haven’t looked at it — or client-side JavaScript code in general — in a good year or so. Refactoring I’ve been refactoring some of my old JavaScript libs on a project and I noticed that I had used evil eval() all over the place to parse the JSON from our API....

May 18, 2010 · 1 min