I'm evaluating switching my Web App work to Amber Smalltalk and away from CoffeeScript. I like CS fine but I'm far more comfortable with Smalltalk.
I have had a lot of trouble finding sites that are deployed from Amber so that I can evaluate the quality (and maintainability) of the JavaScript code generated by Amber. Can anyone point me either to sample sites coded in Amber so I can examine the JS output source or to any online pieces making that assessment? I've searched pretty thoroughly here without success and I've also spent some time in Google without any helpful results as well (though I will keep trying there).
I'm asking the same question on Smalltalk forums but StackOverflow has always been so helpful and responsive, I figured I'd give this a shot as well.
I'll copy most answers from the thread on the Amber Mailinglist:
Answers by Herby:
The Amber IDE is written in Amber itself so you can take a look at the generated JS output in js directory of the GitHub repo. However, the JS output changes over time and will become more efficient as the compiler evolves.
Amber is a little more heavyweight than CS because it needs to
map Amber methods into JS methods (between:and: -> _between_and_) and
maintain parallel inheritance (Amber String is subclass of Collection
though JS String is not; in runtime both concepts are merged, Amber
wraps JS String), so the output looks accordingly.
The code of a simple Todo demo application can be found here with a link to the online demo.
Answer from me was:
Take a look at the SmalltalkHub webinterface which is written in Amber (although a fairly old version). The SmalltalkHub code can be found on SmalltalkHub, too.
Answer by Matthias:
To browse the SmalltalkHub webfrontend code go to SmalltalkHub, open a JavaScript console and run amber.toggleIDE() to bring up the Smalltalk IDE. From there take a look at the packages starting with Hub. Or you can take a look at the JS files downloaded by the browser from the JS console.
Related
I'm working on a website with Visual Studio Code.
Is there a way to save only the files being used by a project into a separate folder?
Basically what I'm looking for is a tool which would scan all the local resources linked by all html files (meaning linked images, videos, files), and then it would save them all in a separate folder.
The reason why I'm asking this is because at the moment I'm testing things out, meaning I'm using image A, then image B, C and so on so forth. These images live in subfolders, so now I ended up with some images which I'm actually using in the html pages and some which I'm not. The thing is, is not simple to check which images I'm using.
You'll find the same principle in 3d applications, such as 3ds Max for instance, where, once you're done with the project, you can use a Resource Collector tool to strip out all the unused assets and save only the ones used by the project.
I've looked for an extension or a solution to this without any luck, so I guess an extension does not exist yet, but I think it would be a nice tool.
I don't understand why someone downvoted my post.
Either what I'm asking is already possible, although like I said I searched and I didn't find anything, or who downvoted consider my request stupid.
Whatever the reason, I believe it would be more mature to give a proper answer, even if whoever downvoted did it for either one of the two possible reason above.
In fact:
The solution already exists: like I said, I didn't find it, so if someone knows the solution why not simply posting it here?
The solution doesn't not exist but someone thinks it's a stupid idea. Well, it is not and it would be polite and civilized to discuss it.
In the current era it became so easy to express opinions without actually doing anything, by simply pressing a button to say nothing valuable, as a "I like".
I never stop feeling amazed where the social media behavior it's taking us.
I have an old system that was written in PHP a long time ago that I would like to update to node.js to allow me to share code with a more modern system. Unfortunately, one of the main features of the PHP system is a tool that allows it to load an existing PDF file (which happens to be a government form), fill out the user's information, and provide a PDF to the browser that has all of that information present.
I have considered making a PHP script that will just do the PDF customization and using node for everything else, but it seems like something like this should be able to be done without requiring PHP to be installed.
Any idea how I might solve my problem just using node?
After a lot of searching and nearly giving up, I did eventually find that the HummusJS library will do what I want to do!
Update April 2020: In the intervening years since I posted this other options have cropped up which look like they should work. Since this question still gets a lot of attention I thought I'd come back and update with some other options:
pdf-lib - This one is my current favorite; it works great. It may have limitations for extremely large PDFs, but it is constantly improving and you can do nearly anything with it -- if not through the helper API then through the abstraction they provide which allows you to use nearly any raw PDF feature, though that requires more knowledge of the PDF file format than most possess.
It's worth noting that pdf-lib doesn't support loading encrypted pdfs, but you can use something like qpdf to strip the encryption before loading it.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/nopodofo - This one should be one of the best options out there, but I couldn't get it working myself on a mac
https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-pdfsign - Not exactly the same thing but can be used with other tools to do digital signatures on a PDF. Haven't used it yet, but I expect do
Update Dec 2021: I'm still using pdf-lib and I think it's still the best available library, but there are a lot of new libraries that have come out in the last couple of years for handling PDFs, so it's worth looking around a bit.
I read a lot about how MT works, that it binds to the iOS's API, that it uses AOT compiling, that there is no .NET runtime on the iPhone and so on.
Geoff once wrote this in an answer to one of my questions, which shows how to bind an ObjC selector:
var url = new NSUrl ("http://www.google.com/");
var str = (NSString) Runtime.GetNSObject (Messaging.IntPtr_objc_msgSend_IntPtr (Class.GetHandle ("NSString"), Selector.GetHandle ("stringWithContentsOfURL:"), url.Handle));
But what is happening under the hood if I do this? And does that mean if I use a call that is already bound, it will execute something similar like the code above in the background, hiding it from me? Does it mean that everytime some Selector.GetHandle() and Runtime.GetNSObject() is executed?
How has the whole MT project been started? At some point the team must have been there thinking, "we have ObjC here and Mono there - how can we combine them?" I mean, what was the first thing that was done, tried?
And one last thing about the garbage collector: I assume it has to run in a separate thread - but is it really ONE thred? Or are there several? How does the GC collector decide that it is time to clean up?
Alot of what MonoTouch does is exactly what Mono does on other operating systems.
They started with a subset of the .Net BCL: Silverlight, and also bound the Objective-C apis on the iPhone. They also probably created the AOT compiling option, as I would assume this is the first situation that needed it. Apple required (or strongly preferred) that no one would abstract, or put a layer on top of their APIs. So far MonoTouch, is the only framework that has succesfully done this to bring a new language to the iPhone.
To read some of the more interesting details, check there documentation here. When I first started working with MonoTouch, I read every bullet point under the Documentation heading, as all were pretty interesting and in-depth.
Another resource that you might get more answers than stackoverflow is at their IRC chat. Here is a link to a web-based version, if you don't want to mess with IRC.
Hey guys, I'm very excited about how experienced I am in programming.
The first, working program that I have written, was in 2004 with C. Since this I have tried many programming languages, now got stuck with php. Currently I'm working as a web-developer, and everyones pleased with the work I do. Except me :) Thats the reason why i want to know, how high my experience and my knowledge is.
Could you tell me, some tips, tricks, test, or anything, on what I can see how much I need to learn and practice to get a mastermind in programming? (at first place in php)
I'm also a programmer who doesn't like to stagnate, so perhaps I can offer a few tips:
1) What's your weakest area? Networking? Graphics? Regex? What is the one area that if someone asked you "I need a program that can do X" and that X scares you what is it. Now study as much as you can on that subject. Hack out a few prototypes and make it so that you understand it allot better. I used to hate Regex commands, now I use them whenever I can.
2) Study "different" languages. I'd recommend learning a "functional" language such as Erlang, Lisp, or perhaps certain aspects of Python. Get a book on "functional programming" and read it through, and then think how you can apply these concepts to your current work. Start using map() and filter() in python instead of for loops, etc.
3) If you're doing web programming, get yourself a massive set of data and start doing some number crunching. A while back I was playing EVE Online, so I fired up SQL Server Express and hacked out some market analysis routines in it. It was around 4 GB of data the server crunched through, but I learned allot about SQL Server in the mean time.
I recently was watching a lecture on Lisp and the Professor said: "Computer Science is not about computers and not about science. It's about knowledge, and how to manipulate that knowledge to obtain more knowledge" So true, so the more tools you have for manipulating and gaining knowledge, the better programmer you'll be.
Start a new programming project and take your time to make every single aspect of it as good as possible.
Use git or Mercurial for source control. Use submodules (or whatever the Mercurial equivalent is) to manage external frameworks. Set up post-commit hooks to run your unit tests and zip up your executable. Use new branches for everything and do octopus-merges to get them all back into a single branch.
Script everything you do. Deploying a new version of your app (including website updates!) should be as simple as running a single script.
Make your app 100% localized. Deploying in a new language should be as easy as sending a strings file out to a volunteer to get translated, then popping that translated file into your source code, no additional work needed.
Optimize, optimize, optimize. Spend the extra week to make your app load 100ms faster.
Refactor, refactor, refactor. Don't just go for orthogonality and abstraction, aim for pure code beauty. Using your classes should be like using Duplo blocks, they just snap into place with not an error in sight.
Unit test everything. 100% coverage. Don't let a single regression go unannounced. Automate the entire test suite so that you can't promote your code without all the tests passing.
Put your app in the cloud. If you're writing something for the desktop or a mobile device, give your users a way to sync their data to a website. Write that website. If your project is web-based, give your users a mobile or desktop front-end to access their accounts.
Accessibility. Handicapped users should be thrilled with the care you put into designing your app.
Keep in mind that if you do everything I listed here, you'll never ship, but you'll be a well-rounded a developer, an asset to most any team.
Let me setup my question with some info. I'm not in college yet and strictly a hobby programmer. Probably a little more than 2 years ago I got started programming on mac. I started with very simplistic GUI examples with Cocoa and XCode. Long story short, I learned from the top down, first learning objective-c, then venturing into more "low-level" projects where I became better at basic C and even used a few C++ libraries in my existing projects.
What I'm saying is that I've never really done anything outside of an XCode project and occasional iPhone project. I've implemented lots of stuff, algorithms, math, etc. but all within that environment. I look at the world of programming and there is so much out there that's not necessarily a standalone application. It seems to me that the hardest thing is finding out where to start; how to setup the environment. I guess I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions, projects, tutorials, maybe on setting up environments for different languages on different systems. Web programming, java applets? etc.
On the note of environments, I would be interested in knowing on a more basic level what makes a "development environment." To my basic knowledge, an "environment" combines the language, with the compiler that interprets that language, and contains libraries that provide an API for the language, where the compiled product runs on a certain system. This is my basic concept, but again, I'm here.
Sorry if this question... well... combines too many questions, but any input or guidance is welcome. Thanks in advance for any replies!
Not sure if I understood your question correctly or if this will help you, but here are my (relative newbie) thoughts and rambling:
I've done Java at uni in two different courses, one where we wrote the code in Notepad and then compiled it in command line, in some dubious DOS application, and then two years later when we worked in NetBeans and while NetBeans was a lot better and easier, I learned a lot and was a lot more careful when writing code after the Notepad experience (especially after waiting for several minutes for a compile only to see a message caused by a silly bug).
If you can choose between IDEs, I would read on different blogs, see what people prefer and why and make a choice. The problem is that most of the time, both at uni and at work, you can't choose and have to go with the teachers/managers choose, and make the best of it.
It seems to me that the hardest thing is finding out where to start; how to setup the environment.
I think it would be easiest if you found something that you want to do, and then take small steps and get bits done. I work as a desktop app developer and 3 years ago I set up a wordpress blog for a friend and imported posts and comments from a different blogging platform, with minimal knowledge about everything involved. I started with things that were already done by others and learned how to use them and then slowly tried to fill in the gaps - the comments part wasn't done then, so I had to learn about databases, how I could see them and then write the code that inserted in them, etc.
What I'm trying to say is that if you find something to do (and if you don't have ideas for projects, you can find several posts with ideas here, on SO) and then set goals towards doing that, even if you don't finish it, or your studying takes you in areas you hadn't expected, it will all be useful at some point.
I guess I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions, projects, tutorials, maybe on setting up environments for different languages on different systems. Web programming, java applets? etc.
This is way too broad a question. If you're doing web programming, you need to set up a web programming environment. At a minimum, you would need an HTTP server. You'd probably also need a relational database. The rest of the web environment would be language dependent.
If you're doing GUI programmng, you would need access to the device or devices (iPhone, Android, etc.) that you want to write programs for.
To my basic knowledge, an "environment" combines the language, with the compiler that interprets that language, and contains libraries that provide an API for the language, where the compiled product runs on a certain system.
That gets you started, yes. You'd want an integrated development environment to write the code. Again, you'd probably need a relational or object oriented database. The rest of the development environment is language dependent.