Have you ever come across a situation where you have to test an application having features that require using email-id? Let’s say an user registration module that requires unique email id. One is you could use your personal email id, but that is one time and then you cannot use the same id. Another option would be to create different email-ids with one of the free service providers like gMail or Yahoo! mail. Think about the server space that would be wasted for creating these email ids used for temporary purpose.

Guerilla Mail would be handy in such a situation. It provides temporary email ids which require no registration and has an expiry time of 15 minutes. You can read and reply to the e-mails using the Guerilla Mail. In case you require more time in order to complete the task then, a link is provided which when clicked resets the timer.

Thanks to my friend Sowmya Ambiti who pointed me to this site.

With more and more rich user interface based screens there is lot of HTML + CSS that has to work together to make it really rich. There can be more than one HTML element that can produce similar result but the way in which they render might be different. The best example is the TABLE and DIV element. While both can achieve putting the data in a matrix format there are differences in terms of rendering, advantages and disadvantage of using either of them. If you are a presentation layer developer you might want to know the difference in using these elements, when to go for a TABLE and when to go for a DIV. A TABLE alters its size dynamically as the data gets filled up. Here is an example site that extensively uses TABLE. If you see carefully you can see how the table size varies as the page gets loaded. This could be annoying if there is too much dynamic data represented in table and there is a flicker effect on the screen when the page gets loaded.  For some insights on the differences refer this article “Table Vs Divs“.

If you are working on different projects locally then you might want to access them with the project name in the browser without providing the localhost prefixing it, just like how a production environment URL would look like. Apache is an amazing web server that can front end a web application irrespective of technology (except for .Net as far as I know). Apache can be configured to work with other application servers and the request routed to them appropriately. But most of the scripting language based web application such as PHP can work directly from Apache using the appropriate module plugin. Setting up Apache on your local development environment to configure and host the projects locally will provide an environment that resembles production and will also help learn Apache. Here is a good article “Setting Up Multiple Apache Local Web Sites On Your Computer” that provides details of how to do it.

How do you customize a feature? Customizations that will involve user initiated feature? While this does not mean that a user can create a feature out of the air but under the context of the application’s domain features could dynamically adopt to a user’s need. One example here could be offering promotions or additional inputs based on users past usage history and an appropriate user interface to highlight it. A template based engine could exactly do that by generating source during the runtime. The inputs to a template engine is a data model that feeds the input data and a template that provides where to use this data and on the fly an engine uses these inputs and provides an output. Apache Velocity is a java based template engine that can generate source during runtime. Use the following resources to get started with Apache Velocity.

• Template-Based Code Generation with Apache Velocity, Part 1
• Template-Based Code Generation with Apache Velocity, Part 2
• Velocity Users Guide

When executing a project keeping track of the issues from the quality control team as well as keeping track of issues from customers/users is the key to making sure that they are prioritized and fixed. Having a manual system for such a need can be vulnerable for human errors as well as chances of missing them is high. An issue tracking system is a must for every organization. An issue tracking system should not only be available for the project team but should also be accessible for the customers/users to post the issues they find. There are many open source as well as commercial issue tracking systems available. This recent article in JavaWorld “What issue tracking system is best for you?” discusses three issue management tools, Bugzilla, JIRA and Trac. Another open source tool that is quite good is Mantis which is a PHP based open source issue management tool. Nevertheless technology doesn’t matter but selecting a right issue tracking tool that will fit your organization as well as help customers post the issues through a system is a must.

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.