I'm new in cooperative web developing and I've recently got a new colleague to work with in my node.js based web app. We work remotely and therefore we need some environment to manage our files.
We work in different areas, but from time to time, we make tiny changes in each others codes.
My need is some file manager (maybe online, maybe a node.js module) to work safely, prevent overwrites and keep track of changes.
If it's free, it's the best. If it has a small price, it's good and affordable, but if it comes with a heavier price tag, i might reconsider that option unfortunately.
(i also gladly accept any idea about cooperative web developing)
As #jfriend00 pointed out, GitHub is free and quite useful for collaboration and, as the name implies, it is based on git which is the defacto standard for source code management these days.
Related
I wanted to know if anyone has been using AirBnB Rendr and is it stable and ok to use in commercial projects or is it still changing a lot?
I'm developing a website which can run both client and server based, this mean I need to be able to render pages and widgets server and client based.
The server is running Node.js, dust.js and has custom server based code to render the pages and widgets on the server side. I need to pick how to handle it on the client side.
Naturally I want to try and not repeat code, but obviously the client is different I can:
Keep my current page based server rendering and develop custom
client side code.
Use backbone.js on client side and keep my server based code the
same.
Use AirBnB rendr that is based on Node.js and backbone to use the
same code on client and o server. AirBnB Rendr Library
I like the 3rd idea very much, but I'm looking for some input from you guys.
Has anyone used it? any experience with it in terms of stability and/or how often their api changes etc?
I've just started playing around with Rendr. If I ignore the learning curve and oboarding friction, I like it a lot and I plan to write my next large production app using Rendr.
Unfortunately, as bababa listed above, the documentation needs a lot of work. There is an explanation of how Rendr works in its README and the example app's README but beyond that you'll need to source dive in order to figure out how the gears are turning. Currently, there is no forum for questions (other than stack overflow :D) and I've had a hard time figuring out its idioms on my own.
Despite all the struggles, I finally see the light and I'm starting to understand why Rendr is so powerful.
tl;dr - If you're willing to source dive and figure out your own workflow, I would suggest using Rendr. Otherwise, I would recommend going old school by writing a traditional client app with a more mature library. (is it too early to say that? =X)
Well given AirBnb is a successful commercial enterprise, there's some validation that the library works well enough for them. This question is probably best answered by watching their github commit log for breaking changes. Given backbone is 1.0 and essentially stable at this point, rendr will probably quickly stabilize, but honestly your fear of instability is probably unjustified. I think rendr looks compelling and although my current project is using a very similar home-grown solution, I would consider using rendr in a future project or even porting our code to rendr. "Stability" per say is much less important to the web development community compared to other situations like packaged or embedded software.
I used (tried to use) and Rendr on a project and gave up. There are just to many limitations (currently) and the lack of documentation doesn't help. I ended up need to rewrite the source code to accomplish some things I would consider trivial with other frameworks, such as passing multiple collections to a view. It just wasn't possible (at the time I used it) and that was a deal breaker. Not being able to pass a collection of categories and results to a page was to much of a limitation.
I have no doubt it will eventually be ready for production use, but right now I would say unless you are an engineer at AirBnb and know how to hack the source then no, it's not ready.
If you really want to know if it will work for your needs, take a look at the issue list on github. That will give you a good idea where the projects at.
I will soon be developing an application to log and priorities worker shifts. It only needs to be small, and simple, but I am wondering what framework to use. All that needs to happen is boxes with names are in 3 lists, and the user can switch these around at will. It must log the times, which I will need access to in real time.
Im new to application development of this sort, and would like any suggestions. I have time to learn new technologies / languages.
Portability / device independence would also be useful. Should I consider a Web Application in Javascript? or something more like Python.
Thanks.
Even if your application is going to be simple that does not mean that whole system will be simple too. I can imagine that your app will serve only as a front end to something much bigger. If that is a case and you really have freedom to choose what language you will develop your app with consider choosing something that you will feel comfortable to work with. But before you will make your decision I would go to whoever gave you that task and try to get as much information about it as you can because expected features can help in choosing technology.
First of all, it seems that it is up to you to decide if it should be web or desktop app. In my opinion it is completely wrong situation. You should get clear requirements on what kind of application customer expects and in what environment it should work. And I would not move a finger towards a code before somebody gave me that information. You write that portability and device independence would be useful but is it actual requirement or you just think it would be nice feature to deliver?
EDITED (to answer a question in comment)
Probably there is as much possible solutions as people that would answer you so in the end you will have to make your own choices.
One way of doing it (considering that you want to learn something new and have a challenge :) would be implement WCF service that would act as a data provider from your database (so every GetUsers(), GetVacationDays() methods would be in it) and it would take care of some business logic (for example CalculateMaxValidWorkingTime() or whatever). That service would be a real power horse of your system. Since you don't have clear requirement whether it should be desktop or web app you could satisfy both possibilities by creating thin clients that would communicate with your service and they would be just a pretty front ends. And if you keep in mind that you can consume webservices practically with everything from C++ to .NET (C#/VB) to Javascript to Python to PHP after you done with service you would not be constrained with one particular technology/language.
Regarding databases I won't advice because personally I hate dealing with them and it always was somebody else's task to provide me with pretty API :)
I want to rewrite a complete community website in nodejs,express and
nowjs with mongodb. Its currently in php using the codeigniter
framework. It includes functionality such as your own profile page,
photoalbum, guestbook, internal messages, contacts and more. And im
going to add an im to it and some other things like a forum and so on.
Its a pretty big project.
I have to make a decision about which techniques to use in the
webapplication. So i did a little research and found, node, Expess and
nowjs.
Should i stick to finish the application in php( codeigniter ), mysql
and ajax, or can i do this in express, mongodb and nowjs?
Can anyone recommend this for use on a live production site? And if
so, are there any security issues one should know about? General
guidelines?
Help would be really appreciated so i can make up my mind and finish
the project
Regards
George
The problem with Nodejs being young is not that it's a half baked product or something but infact it's growing very fast and new developments are being done at breath taking place. So you need to keep up with them while developing.
Otherwise there are huge projects out there developed totally with node and express. Take a look at expressjs.com/applications to see what kind of commericial projects are built using it.
As far as security, sessions etc. are concerned. Unlike ASP/PHP , you don't get most of the features out of the box. You'll need to either write them yourselves or using open source frameworks. Both ways you and only you have to ensure that your application has all bases covered. With flexibility, comes complexity.
It should be noted that Nodejs is optimum for real time I/O. If you think this is something which is required at your end then I highly recommend to go for it.
What you describe does sound like a big project.
If you have the time to spare, I would suggest picking a small portion of it that deals with managing secure sessions (e.g. the profile page). Implement that in Express to get a sense of how it compares to the existing PHP. If you like it, keep going.
Particularly when security is at stake, always try to use existing components when they are available. Node's minimalism makes it tempting to 'roll your own,' but it's very easy to make a security mistake with anything less than expert knowledge.
In my organisation, we have some very inefficient processes around managing requirements, tracking what was actually delivered on what versions, etc, do subsequent releases break previous functionality, etc - its currently all managed manually. The requirements are spread over several documents and issue trackers, and the implementation details is in code in subversion, Jira, TestLink. I'm trying to put together a system that consolidates the requirements info, so that it is sourced from a single, authoritative source, is accessible via standard interfaces - web services, browsers, etc, and can be automatically validated against. The actual domain knowledge is not that complicated but is highly proprietary and non-standard (i.e., not just customers with addresses, emails, etc), and is relational: customers have certain functionalities, features switched on/off, specific datasources hooked up - all on specific versions. So modelling this should be straightforward.
Can anyone advise the best approach for this - I a certain that I can develop a system from scratch that matches exactly the requirements, in say ruby on rails, grails, or some RAD framework. But I'm having difficulty getting management buy-in, they would feel safer with an off the shelf solution.
Can anyone recommend such a system? Or am I better off building it from scratch, as I feel I am? I'm afraid a bought system would take just as long to deploy, and would not meet our requirements.
Thanks for any advice.
I believe that you are describing two different problems. The first is getting everyone to standardize and the second is selecting a good tool for requirements management. I wouldn't worry so much about the tool as I would the process and the people. Having the best tool in the world won't help if your various project managers don't want to share.
So, my suggestion is to start simple. Grab Redmine or Trac and take on the challenge of getting everyone to standardize. Once you have everyone in the right mindset then you can improve the tools you use for storage.
{disclaimer - mentioning my employer's product}
The brief experiments I made with a commercial tool RequisitePro seemed pretty good me. Allowed one to annotate existing Word docs and create a real-time linked database of the identified requisistes then perform lots of analysis and tracking of them.
Sometimes when I see a commercial product I think "Oh, well nice glossy bits but the fundamentals I could knock up in Perl in a weekend." That's not the case with this stuff. I would certainly look at commercial products in this space and exeperiment with a couple (ReqPro has a free trial, I guess the competition will too) before spending time on my own development.
Thanks a mill for the reply. I will take a look at RequisitePro, at least I'll be following the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" strategy ;) youre right, and I kinda knew it, in these situations, buy is better. It is tempting when I can visualise throwing it together quickly, but theres other tradeoffs and risks with that approach.
Thanks,
Justin
While Requisite Pro enforces a standard and that can certainly help you in your task, I'd certainly second Mark on trying to standardize the input by agreement with personnel and using a more flexible tool like Trac, Redmine (which both have incredibly fast deploy and setup times, especially if you host them from a VM) or even a custom one if you can get the management to endorse your project.
If your company or project places an emphasis on (or at least appreciates) the development of code and components that can be reused and shared across projects, what are the "social engineering" things you've needed to do to facilitate the re-use the code?
In my experience, code or components that are simply stated as being "reusable" won't be reused unless that code has someone to champion or evangelize it. Otherwise, people simply won't know about it.
How do you make sure shared components or reusable code work in your organization?
A couple of thoughts come to mind:
Make them very well documented and easy to figure out. That way, no one will give up on using them because its too confusing.
Make them very useful, and make sure they take care of problems that are so annoying that people would have to be crazy not to use them.
Another great tactic is to find out what code other people in the organization have in their projects, offer to extract some of that functionality (talk it up about how great it is and how you really want to use it in your project). Once their code is added to the shared module, you usually end up +1 fan of the shared library, and have an evangelist to help you sell the idea. Remember, people usually only do things if they are in their benefit - so making them look good and their code look good is strongly in their benefit.
In my organization, we had management help to foster the creation of a shared library. We also indoctrinate new hires to use it.
Then, we put good code that must be reviewed by everyone for usefulness and completeness. This is where the group buy in comes into play.
Also, we have a very robust, documented process for branching the shared lib for use in Visual Studio. Hint: we use svn:external property to manage checkouts from different repositories in the same folder structure. Potential shared code first exists in the branches before it gets promoted to the trunk.
The best way I've found to make people want to use your reusable code is to show them how to use it the way you intend. Provide a sample program using your library. Keep it in the source code repository just like any other project. Keep the sample program documented and updated when the reusable library changes.
Personally I try and demo code that I think is useful and give a comparison between using it and not using it to try and show why it's so much better. Normally this happens during weekly development meetings.
I agree that it really needs someone to evangelise and push for the adoption of new methods, one of the things I've found a lot of developers to not be that great at is selling themselves or what they've done, so it's worth working on these skills and pushing others to do the same, leading by example.
This may be a bit java centric; but publishing both binary and source in a corporate maven repository does wonders for visibility. It makes other people happy to use your code ;) We work with a lot of open source and find that ready availability of source code to read is really a key feature, especially when it can integrate directly into the IDE. We really expect that from in-house projects too! I wonder how we managed before we had maven ?? (Even ant can use a maven repo nowdays)
In a grad school class a few years ago, I did a case study on a web-based repository where programmers could deposit their code for re-use. This wasn't for my workplace, but for a lab with thousands of scientists, & engineers where there wasn't any other centralized means for sharing.