Installing npm on webOS 2.0

Posted on November 28, 2010 by Derek

NPM + webOS Now that webOS 2.0 ships with Node.js, one of the first things I tried to do when I got the webOS 2.0 SDK a while back was get npm installed. While successful, it took a little bit of work, so figured it was worth a post to help aid anyone else trying to get it installed. For those that aren’t familiar with npm, it is a package manager for Node.js (Node Package Manager). In short, it’s a easiest way to get Node.js modules installed on your system. It is Node’s equivalent to Ruby’s Gems, Ubuntu’s APT, PHP’s PEAR, and Perl’s CPAN. So instead of manually downloading libraries/modules, explicitly including them in your source code, and having to manually resolve dependency issues, you can just let npm handle that for you. Now, installing a new module is as easy as typing npm install <module>. The version of Node.js that webOS 2.0 ships with (at the moment) is v0.1.102, which is rather old. The build scripts for the latest npm installer does not work with older versions of Node.js, so with trial and error, the most recent version I’ve been able to install on webOS 2.0 is npm v0.1.23. Luckily it’s pretty easy to install that specific version, so here’s how you do it on your webOS device.

If you are looking for a list of packages, check out http://npm.mape.me/. Or, you can just type npm ls. Are there any plans for npm to be included in webOS? HP/Palm engineers confirmed at the webOS Developer Day event a few weeks ago that there are no plans for npm to ship with webOS. That’s fine with me. Modules should be included in the application package anyways.

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How-to: Secure OAuth in JavaScript

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Derek

Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could use OAuth in JavaScript-only apps? JS is a powerful, expressive programming language, and the browser engines are getting faster and faster all the time. Why not use JavaScript to conduct your API calls and parse your data? In many cases, it is unnecessary to maintain a server-side proxy if all it is doing is making API calls for you and hiding your OAuth keys.

Think about this… If you don’t need any server-side processing, your applications suddenly become infinitely scaleable, right? We could host on the cheapest of cheap commodity hosting. Heck, if all we’re doing is serving static HTML/CSS/JS files, just throw it on a CDN like S3 or CloudFiles and pay per GB.

Before you get too excited, realize that there is a fundamental problem with OAuth in JS. Because JavaScript in the browser is “view-source”, you are always forced to expose your consumer key pair, which compromises the security of your application. *sigh*

For example, when Twitter recently deprecated their Basic Auth services, that left OAuth as the only authentication method. It was supposed to be the death of JS-only Twitter apps. This was unfortunate for quite a few developers who leveraged the browsers ability to do Basic auth, to help with scaling their Twitter apps. I know, I was one of them.

So then I began to think what if you weren’t forced to expose your keys? What if your JS app could talk to any web API out there, in a secure, user-authenticated way?

Is that actually possible? Yup.

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Book Review: High Performance JavaScript

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Derek

When I saw on NCZ’s blog that he was writing a new book on JavaScript performance techniques, I instantly went to pre-order it. Having partially read through High Performance JavaScript by now, I figured I’d start writing a review of this excellent book.

Since JavaScript is such an expressive language, there are dozens of different ways to do the same thing. Some of them good, some mediocre, and a lot of them bad. It’s amazing how much awful JS info is on the web, all leftover from the dark ages of JS (’96 – ’05). Up until this point, we haven’t had an authoritative source on the topic of how to write JavaScript that performs well, both in and out of the browser. Sure we’re had great books about web performance (High Performance Web Sites is my favorite), but we haven’t had anything specific to JavaScript. Now we do.

Nicholas is widely known as one of the best minds in the JavaScript world today. He joined Yahoo! in 2006 as a front end engineer and has been working on one of the most trafficked pages on the interwebs, the Yahoo! home page. His blog (nczonline.net) is a treasure trove of information on all things JavaScript & web performance. Some recent gems include Interviewing the front-end engineer & Writing maintainable code. It goes without saying that he knows his stuff when it comes to JavaScript & performance. As his books and blog posts have shown, he’s also a very skilled technical writer, keeping topics fresh, concise, & relevant.

I’m writing this as I read along, so the verbosity of this post is due to me taking reference notes on interesting things as I go.
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Return to Sunnyvale

Posted on April 23, 2010 by Derek

So right now I’m sitting in a booth on the Yahoo! campus, the same booth where I set a goal 20 months ago that one day I’d work for Yahoo! and….

[Wavy distorted omg we're going into a flashback. Begin narration]

My first experience on the Yahoo campus was for Y! HackDay 2008. I remember coming to the campus, being totally lost, and overwhelmed, almost like your first day of High School or College. I wasn’t an employee or anything. I was just a dumb programmer who wanted a taste of what Silicon Valley was really like. Seriously, I come from the startup world in Kansas City, I was in absolute awe of the place. This is where the Internet happens. Holy shit.

I came to HackDay armed with an idea for a hack to build, but was totally unable to focus, so I just sat around, tweeting, talking, and having fun. The music, the hacks, the food, the beer. I was totally awestruck when I talked to someone who worked at Yahoo!, especially the ones working on products I had used. I knew at that moment this was a place I’d always strive to work at. I knew I just *had* to work here, and be the person on the other end of that conversation.
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Node-YQL

Posted on March 6, 2010 by Derek

The more I play around with Node.js, the more I love server-side JavaScript. Once you get over the weirdness of writing JavaScript outside of the browser, it feels very natural. And the bonus is that it is blazing fast.

Also, as I’ve been playing around with YQL (Yahoo Query Language) more lately, I realized I wanted to be able to access YQL data from within my Node app. So, I created a node-yql module.

Now you can do something like…

YQL.get("SELECT * FROM weather.forecast WHERE location=90066", function(response) {
 
	var location  = response.query.results.channel.location,
	    condition = response.query.results.channel.item.condition;
 
	sys.puts("The current temperature in " + location.city + " is " + condition.temp + " degrees");
});
// Output: The current temperature in Los Angeles is 57 degrees
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jsFiddle: A JavaScript playground

Posted on February 25, 2010 by Derek

Ajaxian had a story yesterday about a brand-new JavaScript playground called jsFiddle. A write and execute web-based JavaScript IDE is nothing new, but this is much, much more than that.

The real power of jsFiddle is that you have the option to include any of the most popular JS libraries, including; Mootools, jQuery, Prototype, YUI2.8, YUI3, Glow, Vanilla, Dojo, Processing.js, & ExtJS. This feature gives anyone the ability to try out any of these libraries without going through the task of downloading, extracting, and coded up some examples. With a few mouse-clicks you can view example snippets from any of the major JS libraries, and start editing them to see how they work.

As if that wasn’t enough, jsFiddle also includes social features that give you the ability to write a snippet, save it, and share the URL. As I was hanging out in various JavaScript IRC chatrooms tonight, I continually found myself using jsFiddle to code up snippets to answer questions. In the past, everyone would always just use Pastebin.com, but that lacks any interactive features. Now you can use jsFiddle as a replacement to Pastebin for any JS, HTML, or CSS snippets and the user will have the ability to actually edit, execute, and view the output.

As icing on the cake, you can take your snippets, copy the embed code, and paste them anywhere. Here’s a snippet that I was able to code up in about 15 minutes (writing this blog post took longer than that!) to demonstrate the power of YUI3, YQL, and the Twitter API. In this iframe, you’ll find all the JS, CSS, and HTML you need to create a simple little Twitter widget.

In all, this is an amazing product that I’ll likely find myself using on a daily basis.

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Crockford on JavaScript

Posted on February 21, 2010 by Derek

I just finished watching Part 1 of Douglas Crockford’s ongoing lecture series on JavaScript, and it’s fascinating stuff. A must watch for any programmer. Even if you don’t code in JS, it’s worth watching simply because this first part is all about the history of programming. (video of talk is below)

As web developers, we spend anywhere from a little bit of our time to the majority of it coding in JavaScript, but few know the history behind the language. I’m not talking about just reading the Wikipedia article and knowing that it was created by Brenden Eich at Netscape in ’95, I’m talking about the history of where the ideas behind the language came from and everything that influenced it. Like most every language, JavaScript’s syntax and style didn’t appear out of nowhere, it was influenced by a number of different languages, and those influencers were in turn also influenced by a slew of languages. Continue reading →

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Amazon and Lala: What could have been

Posted on January 22, 2010 by Derek
lala.jpeg

It’s now been about 6 weeks since Apple bought Lala and I’ve spent some time reflecting on the acquisition. When I first heard the news, it sounded like a good fit. After-all, Lala is essentially a web-based version iTunes and has some great technology powering it. It makes sense that Apple would want to buy the next best thing and get some great engineers in the process. However, I didn’t think at the time that Apple’s strategy would become so clear, so soon. Apple’s acquisitions usually take years to come to fruition. Not this time though. TechCrunch recently reported that Apple is planning on transforming iTunes into a cloud-based iTunes.com service, and Lala’s technology is the quickest way to do that. (“Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy And Why Lala Is Critical“).

Seeing the immediate impact Lala’s technology can have, I began to think about who else was in the bidding war for Lala? Most reports say there were multiple companies interested, so you have to assume the a few of the typical parties were involved; Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, & MySpace. Only a couple of those companies stand out as a great fit, Amazon & MySpace. Right now MySpace has too many problems to deal with, so that leaves just one likely suitor… Amazon.
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On: Programmable Twitter Clients

Posted on November 30, 2009 by Derek

Loic Lemuer (CEO of Seesmic) recently announced at Microsoft’s Developer Conference that he’ll be releasing a new version of Seesmic that supports plugins. This is huge for developers, as well as users.

Up until now the Twitter developer ecosystem has been very closed. Sure the Twitter APIs are as open as possible, but all the clients out there are largely closed platforms. There are a few exceptions, including Spaz and Tweenky (my client) which are open-source. It is great to have a starting point (aside from raw libraries) that gives developers a place to start with when building a Twitter application. With Seesmic Desktop invading Windows with a programmable version that you can write plugins for, this is a huge step that hopefully will push other developers/companies towards the same model.
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Last Day

Posted on November 21, 2009 by Derek

It’s my last day at Catholic Content. It’s been a great 3 year ride and is certainly going out with a bang. When we started planning for NCYC 2009 (National Catholic Youth Conference) 18 months ago, I never would have guessed it would be my last weekend. But here I am, working behind the scenes with the production crew to stream the event out to thousands of people around the world. The fun part? I’ve never done live event streaming before, so it’s been a hectic, but adventurous weekend. In a way, it’s almost a culmination of the last three years. Lots of stuff I’ve never done before, but having a blast learning.

Coming into this job as the lead developer for MyCatholicVoice.com, I had zero experience running a project the size of where we have taken this. I had never built a web server this size from scratch (software-wise). But along the way, I’ve had to tackle hundreds, or heck… likely thousands of problems along the way, and I’ve learned something at every step. It’s been such an incredible learning experience as I’ve gained a bit of knowledge about so many different areas. These new skills include everything from cloud computing, systems architecture, to Linux administration, all the way to the front-end with JavaScript libraries. Then of course, that middle layer of PHP where my skills and knowledge have improved an unmeasurable amount.
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