ECMAScript is a scripting programming language developed by Ecma International.  If you are a web application developer and if you have not heard about what ECMAScript is, probably you would be surprised if I say that JavaScript (Netscape) and JScript (IE) are extensions of ECMAScript.  Ecma international started in 1965 creates standards for communication and information technology. ECMAScript is a scripting language specification (ECMA-262) which became popularly used in the web as a client side scripting language after Netscape introduced it along with Netscape 2.0 from what SUN and Netscape had extended it as JavaScript.  You might have already known that there is no commonality between JavaScript and Java itself except that both of them follow the c/c++ style syntax. Microsoft provided its own dialect of ECMAScript called JScript and bundled with Internet Explorer.  Since then many browsers started implementing a dialect of ECMAScript with implementation mismatches and few additions not part of ECMAScript.  It became the starting point of all those browser incompatibility issues that you might have been cracking your head to fix lot of times.

I bumped into this site titled “Tips for maintainable Java code” with a list of tips or a java developer. I had covered some of the disciplines mentioned in this site in my previous posts. But on the whole it is a good collection of tips worth reading it, taking a print out and keeping it by your side if you are a Java developer.

The connectivity rate between your machine and the server you are hitting can help in determining the byte transfer rate. Here is a cool link “Speedtest.net” that determines the byte transfer rate from your machine to the server at designated places.

Happy weekend.

Whenever you want to search Google is the one you go for. But it brings whole lot of sites to look into covering all the words that you searched for.  The advanced search will help you to minimize the search results to an extent.  But what if you just wanted to search based on categories of sites say blogs, news sites, technical news etc.  Visit Rollyo, where you can customize the search and look for information from sites dedicated to particular categories.  You can also add Rollyo to your browser’s toolbar so that you can reach Rollyo search more easily.

During development normally the thought about performance of the application does not come to mind. That is because you test your code in your own desktop and if everything works functionally you move on. Some of the performance problems might show up during the load/stress test of the application by the quality team. But one problem that can really take a lot of time to find out is a memory leak. This is very common in web applications if not been thought and tested out before hand. A web application receives multiple requests hitting the server. Each request is treated as a thread that spawns a process in the web server and loads the appropriate objects from the application. When the response is sent, the objects loaded have to be released to clear up the memory.

Think about this, a web application continuously will keep receiving requests as long as the web server is up and running. If after a request is complete a used by the request doesn’t get cleared then for every request there will be an object residing in the memory till the web server’s life goes down. Now how can this happen? Why doesn’t the web server or the component that is responsible for handling that particular technology/programming model take care of it? The answer is it does but if you do not clean the object references and/or keep the scope of the objects in such a way that it is marked for removal once the execution comes out of that scope, the component that takes care of removing the object will think the object is still in use and will not remove it from memory. So if your web application project has gone live and after some time if you are hitting the memory limits then your application might be leaking. So it is imperative that the application be tested for memory leaks beforehand. There are tools that can determine if there is a memory leak in your application. Refer “Memory Leaks” in wikipedia that has detailed explanation as well as some good pointers.

I was looking at a piece of paper on one of my developer’s site that had a cheat sheet for Rails. Looked like quick reference for any developer new to Rails.  I got the site from where he got it and when I looked into it, there were cheat sheets for other scripting languages too. Wanted to share with you all, here is the cheat sheet link from Dave Child at ilovejackdaniels.com.

I was glancing through dzone as usual today and the blog link on “Rails Engine: A Short Introduction” caught my attention.  I went through it which led me to the Rails Engine plugin site.  It looks like the rails community is continuing to make developers life simpler.  This engine addresses common feature requirements that are part of most of the projects.  Example is the login functionality.  You just need to say the model that corresponds to the user table, and the engine on the fly can bring login and registration screens.  Of course the default one created by the engine is crude; it is simple to modify to suit your application style.  And as usual, a cool movie demonstration of using the engine is available.  Way to go!

Code reviews and code changes become time consuming when there is no discipline followed during the coding process itself. The discipline is more around following the standards itself. The following are the most possible causes I could think of in lack of discipline following the standards.

1. The developer is unaware that there exists a coding standard.
2. The developer understands there is a coding standard but does not know or understand what those standards are.
3. Most important, very lethargic to follow the standards in the first place. This is the most common mistake I have seen. Following the standards need to become a habit, so that at one point you really don’t need a standards document to refer to, it comes automatically like how you don’t realize that you are balancing when you ride a bike.
4. Procrastination to address standards and finally missing implementing it. Most of the time developers write a test code to make sure that the logic works. But finally that same code gets inserted into the actual code. My question is why not code to standards even while writing the test code? If it is useful, you can directly embed that in your code. If it is going to be a scrap code, so what you are making sure that you are getting the standards habit.
5. Documentation - I know this is a left out area, why because when the thought comes “It is the logic, what is there to document it? anyone can read it and understand” The truth is, no it is not easy to understand, the approach and thereby logic differs from one person to another. A lot of things go in your mind when you code, the reviewer or another developer reading it will not know these. This is what I recommend on documentation. You don’t need to have a formal comment statement, make it casual, and add some funny text in between and at the same time try to convey the message. If you don’t cover documentation when you code, it will pile up and you will not be able to do it at the end. I have seen developers think for sometime for their own code when I ask them to explain the logic during code review.

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