Thanks to my friend Kanmani who sent me a link that has information how to be an effective programmer. In fact TechMasala’s foundation series of posts main objective is also to list down certain technical as well as soft skills to be an effective programmer. The document covers tips and best practices under the categories of personal and team skills for a beginner, intermediate and advanced programmer. “How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary” is a good read for every programmer.

When an expression or a block of code is passed as a parameter to a function or method then the piece of code that gets passed is called a closure in programming language terms. Closure is not something new and has been supported in programming languages like Smalltalk, Lisp, Python etc. A closure is like nameless functions within functions. Closures are supported in Ruby and are called blocks. A simple closure example in Ruby would be,

5.times {puts “Hello World”}

This prints “Hello World” five times. This code is the equivalent of the below code,

for i in 1..5
puts “Hello World”
end

Complex closures can be tricky to understand but once a developer gets the point how it works it could simplify or complex depending on the problem in hand and where it is applied. Some programming languages like Java don’t support closures yet. Is closures really handy or inconvenience? Read this article “Crossing borders: Closures” for more insights.

When it comes to the production environment it is a real test for the application as the users start using the application. It is very important that the performance of the application is something that has to be proactively measured and is a continuous constant effort to get the production environment fine tuned to the need. As far as Rails is concerned there are few insights here and there on the scalability and performance of the application. Stefan Kaes has written a package called Railsbench consisting of some Ruby and shell script code that can do some performance measurement of Rails application. Complementing the plugin is this article by Stefan on “A Look at Common Performance Problems in Rails” that talks about some common performance problems. But as mentioned by Stefan in the article some analysis of the performance of the application is necessary to apply the relevant changes to the application.

Today is TechMasala’s first anniversary. Thank you my dear friends for reading my posts and your continual support. Thanks to my mentors and fellow navigators at Compassites for their support and encouragement to keep me writing.

I had posted a reference article “Vista - To go or not to” where I had mentioned that if everything what you need to work on is available on a desktop operating system that comes for free then why pay so much for an operating system such as Vista. Well if you say that Windows has cool visual effects that can be unmatched, hold on, watch this YouTube video “Don’t Buy Windows Vista - Get Ubuntu for free“. Though the windows manager for linux add-on Beryl project is in its earlier stages, it is there. More good things on the visual effects to come on the Linux desktop systems. A significant advantage is that they work on a regular PC that doesn’t require hi-fi system configuration.

Happy Weekend!

Also see - “Linux Desktop Based Development Environment“.

JUnit is a great tool for unit testing Java applications but it is little difficult to apply it and test the flow from a web application perspective. Particularly say you have unit tests for your DAO you will have to use the JDBC driver connection class to connect to the database and cannot test through JNDI as it requires a server environment. Try JUnitEE. From the site,

JUnitEE provides a TestRunner which outputs HTML and a servlet which can be used as an entry point to your test cases. Building your test harness as a standard J2EE web application means:

• Your tests are packaged conveniently into a .war file which can easily be moved between servers; you can leave the .war file in the main .ear file and simply avoid enabling the test web application on the production server.
• Your test classes will be dynamically reloaded by the app server (assuming your server supports this).
• Your test cases look just like your production code, and can use the same beans (or whatever) you use as a facade for your EJBs.

Text formats and representing language character has ever been in the focus ever since computers were invented. For obvious reasons we wanted to interact with the computer in the language that we understand better rather than in the binaries. Clearly the focus initially was to build a representation method for the international language English. But as we evolved more sophisticated in the Internet space global applications are more looking at systems that can enable users to work in their specific locale (language, currency, date and time formats etc.). As far as language is concerned the old formats such as ASCII and EBCDIC will not help in representing the characters of languages around the world.

The Unicode Consortium, a non profit organization developed the standards Unicode Transformation Formats that help in representing the characters of any language in the world. The Unicode Standard defines three encoding forms that allow the same data to be transmitted in a byte, word or double word oriented format (i.e. in 8, 16 or 32-bits per code unit). All three encoding forms encode the same common character and can be efficiently transformed into one another without loss of data. UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format 8 ) is the standard format that is used for web applications that is applications that use HTML for visual representation of text. “The Unicode® Standard: A Technical Introduction” in the Unicode site gives an introduction to the technical details of UTF.

ActiveMessaging is a plugin for Ruby on Rails to enable messaging between applications. This brings in the ability for Ruby on Rails to integrate with messaging systems like MQ, JMS and so on enabling application integration. ActiveMessaging also features enabling applications with event driven architecture. To get started with ActiveMessaging read the article “Introduction to ActiveMessaging for Rails“.