"Code Podcast" entries

TurboGears2

Alessandro Molina, is CTO at Axant.it and a member of the TurboGears web framework development team. I recently got the chance to sit down with him to talk about the exciting opportunities TurboGears offers users, how being open source has affected the proejct, and what we should expect next.

Hypermedia APIs

Mike Amundsen explains why developers should explore hypermedia possibilities as they develop RESTful applications.

User-Centered Design

Travis Lowdermilk (@tlowdermilk) is a software developer who recently joined Microsoft as UX Designer for Visual Studio. He hosts the Windows Developer Show and advocates for User-Centered Design (UCD). Travis is the author of User-Centered Design: A Developer’s Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications.

iOS Core Data

Joshua Smith talks about why Core Data in iOS is so difficult to master and why it is worth mastering it.

PHP Design Patterns

Bill Sanders tells us why design patterns for PHP save time and money.

Appcelerator Titanium helps you generate native mobile apps

The author of Appcelerator Titanium: Up and Running describes how Titanium can be used to generate native mobile apps from JavaScript code. He distinguishes the Titanium platform from native API programming and from other popular JavaScript platforms for mobile devices. We look at the way Titanium exploits the expressiveness and flexibility of JavaScript, and some of the directions that the Appcelerator company is taking Titanium.

The R Programming Language

Garrett Grolemund, author of the forthcoming “Data Analysis with R” discusses the benefits of using a programming language like R, instead of traditional data analysis software, for data analysis.

Distributed resilience with functional programming

Steve Vinoski on when to make the leap to functional programming.

Functional programming has a long and distinguished heritage of great work — that was only used by a small group of programmers. In a world dominated by individual computers running single processors, the extra cost of thinking functionally limited its appeal. Lately, as more projects require distributed systems that must always be available, functional programming approaches suddenly look a lot more appealing.

Steve Vinoski, an architect at Basho Technologies, has been working with distributed systems and complex projects for a long time, first as a tentative explorer and then leaping across to Erlang when it seemed right. Seventeen years as a columnist on C, C++, and functional languages have given him a unique viewpoint on how developers and companies are deciding whether and how to take the plunge.

Highlights from our recent interview include:

Read more…

Emerging languages spotlight: Elm

Evan Czaplicki on breaking the HTML-CSS-JavaScript blockade with functional reactive programming.

Over the next few months I’ll be taking a look at new and emerging programming languages. The following piece is the first in this series.


The Elm Programming Language, created by Evan Czaplicki, tackles web interaction and takes on the big three — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Czaplicki to talk about why he decided to take on this daunting project and how Elm could revolutionize web programming.

Czaplicki was working on a front-end web project and he was thinking about how is it that web development can be “so frustrating in a way it didn’t have to be.” That was the day Elm was born (he talks about that moment in this segment of our video interview).

Today’s websites bear virtually no resemblance to those from 10 years ago, so why are we using the same tools? Cyclical upgrades to HTML, CSS and JavaScript have certainly enhanced and improved upon older versions. HTML5 has taken some great leaps forward. But we’re still using the core.

Coming from a functional programming background led Czaplicki to think about web programming from the perspective of functional reactive programming. What is functional reactive programming? It takes away the idea that interaction between a website and user is static — updating only at certain moments or clicks — and inserts the capability to update as events happen, like mouse movements. Czaplicki gives more detailed insight here. Read more…

CSS keeps growing

Once used for simple formatting, CSS now dominates the web presentation layer.

Eric Meyer, the author of CSS: The Definitive Guide (and much more) has taught thousands of people CSS through his books, his talks, and his articles. I’ve always enjoyed hearing his take on the state of CSS, as he manages to find combinations of capabilities that make CSS more powerful than I thought it was when I first looked.

We sat down last week to discuss the many huge changes CSS3 is bringing, from improvements to old capabilities to completely new tools for animations, transforms, and layout. The continuous rate of change and the size of the specification are driving him to serialize the next edition of the Definitive Guide, releasing it in pieces. Developers can work from familiar foundations, but reach new destinations. The declarative strength of CSS3 lets you create presentation by describing it, and that style keeps proving more powerful.

Highlights of the interview include: Read more…