The Daily Carousel Performance

The Daily Carousel Reimplemented

Today, we are introducing Hydra, the meta-language that runs on the JVM. Hydra supports (and encourages!) any JVM-based language at any time in the file.

Example: Person.hyrdra

:groovy
class Person {

  :ruby
  # define properties
  attr_accessor :first_name, :last_name

  :python
  """ 
    Get the full name by concatenating first, last
  """
  def full_name (self):
    print "%s %s" % (self.first_name, self.last_name)

  :java
  /**
   * Set the firstName attribute to name. (Useless javadoc)
   *
   * @param name the new first name value
   */
  public void setFirstName(String name) {
      String prefix = "Setting first name to ";

      :clojure
      (print prefix)
      (defn printChar [c] (print c))

      :javascript
      name.forEach(printChar);

      :java
      this.firstName = name;      
  }

  // Switch to python so ending '}' isn't needed ;)
  :python

Sent from my iPad]]> http://www.nearinfinity.com/blogs/jason_harwig/taking_polyglot_programming_fu.html http://www.nearinfinity.com/blogs/jason_harwig/taking_polyglot_programming_fu.html Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0500 The most popular entry I've written at Near Infinity has been the JavaScript Particle Engine. It had limitations because I used transparent images and only made one color -- black. I recreated the fire demo for a talk -- Advanced Web Graphics with Canvas -- that I gave at the Rich Web Experience. I'll post the slides, sample code, and some more demos in upcoming entries.

I thought that entry was interesting, but I'm not sure I'd use them because of code readability and maintenance. It did get me thinking of some other ways to obscure simple tasks.

Now, overall, I am really excited about the future in this project. The problem I had is all their examples use synchronous XMLHttpRequests. We already know why this is unfriendly to users.

HTML filtering was never recommended because it was so difficult to get right, and with no proven libraries, trying to build a solution would almost certainly contain security holes. Thanks to Arshan Dabirsiaghi we finally have something to use. He has created the OWASP AntiSamy project to easily sanitize HTML input. AntiSamy is currently implemented as a Java 1.5 compatible library, but there are plans to support other platforms.

• Cross-site scripting (XSS)
• Cross-site-request forgery (CSRF)
• JSON Hi-jacking
• JavaScript portscanning
• JavaScript and CSS History "Go Fish"

Testing instance methods can be a pain if the functions use instance variables and the object is heavyweight. In my case the constructor did a lot with the DOM that I didn't want to mock. Instead of invoking the function through an instance of an object, I called it statically.

• Runs automatically every night
• Backup OS X resource forks correctly
• Maintain creation/modification times for backup files
• Make checkpointed-incremental backups

The site lives at prototypejs.org and should help new and experienced users alike master the popular JavaScript library.

Features

• API of all extended and new objects with examples
• Tips/Tutorials section that includes how prototype works
• Easy method for users to contribute

Good work guys!

Firebug now has it's own site at getfirebug.com. The new site shows the features for Firebug 1.0 which seem like a giant leap in functionality from the current 0.4.1. My favorites look to be the new profiler and the network activity view (shown right).

The catch? According to Hewitt's blog, it might not be free. I know I would pay $15-$25, what about you?

I was at the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium in Reston, VA this past weekend and had some time in between sessions to work on something. As most of the people I work with know, I rarely code things that might actually be useful to someone in my spare time. So, I had no reason to attempt to rationalize the use for a particle engine in Javascript.

I think I've written a particle engine in almost every language I've used for an extended period of time. This includes python, java, objective-c, and c. What's surprising is that it has taken me this long to write a particle engine in the language I probably spend the most time coding in -- Javascript.

By the way, this is probably the worst particle engine ever created (TM), but it is written in Javascript, so give me a break. It doesn't support colors yet as I couldn't think of an efficient way to change the color of a png. I've only tested it in Firefox and Safari because I'm on a Powerbook. It's also pretty slow, in that it can handle only a dozen or so particles.