Code || Story telling || Philosophy || Tech Chamanism
Few weeks ago, I started to think about my next project, a mobile dashboard app for Salesforce. As I am not an IOS dev but rather a Ruby/Javascript one, I investigated a bit wondering what framework could fit the best my expectations:
Other candidates were RubyMotion, PhoneGap - Cordova, JqueryMobile, Titanium, RhoMobile. My final conclusions are not based on intensive trials but more on web investigations and personal intuitions. Here are the pros and cons of those different solutions.
In todays post we’ll have look at task scheduling using Heroku and the famous Resque gem. I have presented it at last London Skillsmatter Salesforce Dev Meetup. Watch the video: 
Delayed tasks on Salesforce have some well known weaknesses. For example: “Use extreme care if you are planning to schedule a class from a trigger. You must be able to guarantee that the trigger will not add more scheduled classes than the 25 that are allowed”. With the help of Heroku, most of your background tasks might be externalized and delegated to a dedicated app on Heroku. To build that solution we’ll be using 4 different gems. The objective is to create a simple web app that is able to create, handle and monitor tasks build by registered users. To be really functional, that web app should be reachable through an API (coming in a future post).
I heard one day that consultant finish to see the world into bullet points. Abusing of ppt everyday, their brain slowly mutate and they finish them self to behve as a continuous slideshow of concepts. Funny or scarring. It depends.
However, since 1 or 2 years, we observe people making js presentation, homemade or not. This might be a continuation of Google doc presentation growth or simply a consequence of people getting bored by ppt. To build them, you’ll find on internet libraries like impress.js, deck,js or scrollorama. Some website like prezi.com even offer now a real alternative to ppt based on js. To have an overview of available libraries check favbulous website
However, as this might sound unnecessarily complicated to create a slideshow, share it and publish it using js compared to ppt, I built a small mashup of Sinatra, deck.js and haml hosted on Heroku.
The principle is SIMPLICITY.
Sinatra let me publish and organize my slideshows on Heroku. A new slideshow is just a file with multiple sections. Each section is a slide. As I have extracted all the surrounding css/js call in a layout and added haml syntax, a visually impacting slide might be as simple than:
%section
%h1 you wont believe it !!!
Neat, isnt it ?
To try the go on Geek slideshow, fork it on Github and start using it.
It’s today a common statement to affirm that hegemony of monolithic relational database system is ending.
ORM, Object Relation Model, were the last trial to perpetuate that pattern born in the 70’s. ORM bring to software development specialist the sweet feeling of directly interacting with objects. In Ruby on Rails world, Active Record was a wonderful implementation imposing its conventional relational approach on all web developer. In “Java world”, Hibernate has still a massive user base but controversy about its performance and ability to handle some complex situation are numerous.
Long story made short, Relational Databases persist data. That’s a fact as for all storage systems but they also structure the way we represent and organize our data model. They oblige us to think them through principles such as cardinality, relation entity, foreign keys and all those typical normalized form concept Entity Relationship Model. Furthermore, well know performance might quickly be an issue when mixing ORM and relational Databases. You want to make a query with 15 joins to display a deeply structured data set with few conditions and limit? You should rethink it.
_Why?
August 19th 2007, _Why the lucky stiff, anonymous author of “Why’s poignant guide to Ruby” book and various OpenSource project such as Camping, Shoes or hpricot disappear from web radar. Since then August 19th is commemorated every year, all over the world and developers offer their strength, knowledge and will to help building Free content and applications.
This year, in France, Jérémy Lecour offered to host a hacking WE in his place, a charming house on Marseilles’s hills. We met there, during 2 days, with Thibault Barrère and Gregory Colpart, well decided to bring also our small contribution to the OpenSource world.
Travis ?
I started to look into Travis project after RuLu 2011 conference. Sven Fuchs and Josh Kalderimis came to present their idea and invite the french community to use, speak, love or hate Travis-CI application.
Title: “Les nétocrates” (in french)
Author: Alexander Bard, Jan Söderqvist
Edition: Léo Scheer
Abstract:Feudal lords, capitalist bourgeoisie then knowledge netocrats. Three historical eras, three ways to structure the society. In netocraty, the last paradigm, netocrats architect their power on contacts and knowledge sharing. No more fields and castles or industries and funds. Only matter relevant informations, spread cautiously with the righ people.
As barbars, netocrats are coming with new rules, objectives, ambitions. Conservative positions are swept without. In that society secret management is more important than money. Real and virtual networks are invisible kingdoms where power links are redefined.
Curators, nexialists and eternalists are the three nodes typologies authors introduce to describe the netocrats network.