Ted Roche's weblog

The April meeting of the Seacoast Web Dev group took place on April 23rd at the AlphaLoft coworking space. Proprietor Josh Cyr had his usual welcoming speech: thanks to Flatbread Pizza for the pizza, the corporate and community supporters for the free beer, and to the speakers for volunteering. There were two excellent presentations last night:

Byron Matto showed off the Famo.us JavaScript library. Famo.us is coming out of the gaming space, with a lot of emphasis on animations via transitions and matrix math, and less heavy DOM structures like jQuery and the other libraries depend on. Elements tend to be rendered via absolute positioning on a flat canvas and animated through transitions that are hardware-accelerated, rather than being built in a a heavy DOM div-within-div-within-div container and wrapper structure, giving a lighter weight and better performance especially on CPU-constrained mobile devices. Famo.us does not yet have a clear roadmap and it is unclear exactly which platforms/runtimes it will be running on (discussion includes Backbone, OpenGL, and even XBox!) but Byron encouraged anyone interested to sign up for the beta (there’s a waiting list as they ramp up) to get in as soon as possible.

Charles Denault of SimpleCharters spoke on Hack, the Facebook fork of the PHP language, designed to work with static data typing and run on the Hip Hop Virtual Machine. Both HHVM and Hack are Open Sourced, licensed under the PHP and BSD license, respectively. Facebook started the Hack project as a way to improve performance and they report a 5x to 10x gain in speed using Hack on HHVM. Charles cautioned that while moving existing PHP on HHVM is fairly painless, if the choice is made to move your PHP code onto Hack, reversing that decision is more difficult, as the changes will occur in much of the code (a good source code control mechanism and branches ought to handle this, methinks). There was a lot of interest in the performance specs, and questions from the audience on HHVM compatibility with major frameworks, and performance benchmarks between PHP 5.6 and HHVM. (PHP 5.5+ have the newly-open-sourced Zend OpCode cache, see article here). Clearly, there is a lot of interest in the subjects of PHP and web site performance improvements!

Thanks to Charles and Byron for excellent presentations, to Josh and AlphaLoft for organizing and hosting the meeting.

There was a packed house, as usual, for the January meetup of the Web Dev group, held at the AlphaLoft coworking space. After the usual announcements by organizer and AlphaLoft proprietor Josh Cyr, there were three lightning presentations:

1. Open Source Software: an excellent overview of the concerns developers should have about Open Source Software and the processes they should be doing. Introduced by Matt Jacobs of Acentage Law, PLLC, the main presentation was by Matthew Jacobs, General Counsel of Black Duck Software, Inc. Mr. Jacobs included a copy of his white paper, “The Talk: What a General Counsel Needs To Know About Open Source Software” also available on the Black Duck Software web site.
2. Blogging with the Ghost blogging platform. Sean Baker blogs at http://www.seanvbaker.com web site using Ghost software. Sean was very intrigued with the new business model adopted by Ghost founder John O’Nolan and the non-profit business model he set up for Ghost. Ghost appears to be a minimal product (in the good, lean sense) focused on blogging alone, and avoiding the complexities of morphing into a Content-Management-System-To-Rule-Them-All.
3. Elastic Search, presented by Nick Plante. Elastic Search is technology based on Lucene. Nick moved from Solr to Elastic. [Side note: the right time to use MongoDB: never.]  Elastic Search is used by some of the big guns: Etsy, GitHub, Path, Foursquare, since 2010. It’s all JSON, all the time, so you avoid the bottlenecks of interfaces and impedance mismatches of query languages, object models, etc. It supports excellent horizontal scaling: hand it hosts, and it creates shards across them. It has excellent tokenizers  built-in, since it is based on Lucene. Nick suggests avoiding NIH syndrome by searching for tokenizers before taking the DIY route: it’s probably already out there: tokenizers are available for strings, numerics, arrays, stemming, synonyms and more.

Thanks to Josh for organizing and all the speakers for putting together coherent and informative presentations.

WordPress

We continued our series on HTML5/CSS3 features last night, with a number of speakers taking turns showing off new capabilities of HTML and talking about how they could be integrated into WordPress or might already be in your favorite theme, or if there were incompatibility issues (did anyone say “Internet Explorer?”) and whether there were work-arounds.

Jacqui talked about the new semantic tags of <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <section>, <article>, <aside> and <main> and also on media queries. There’s enough materials in either of those two topics for an entire meeting! I spoke on data entry: placeholders, required attributes, data types and the output tag. Andy talked about <audio>, <video>, <canvas>, <progress>, <meter>, <details> and <figure>. Amanda showed the <datalist> feature and the related CSS of animations, transformations and transitions.

There was a lot of material, and I’m looking forward to finding some spare time to play with many of the features I saw demonstrated.

Several more presentations were at the ready, and we’ll be looking forward to David and Kevin next meeting. Developers will likely get together on March 5th, the first Wednesday meeting. The kick-off users meeting will be held in February. Please join the Meetup group to keep up to date on the details.

At tomorrow’s Seacoast WordPress meeting, we’ll be doing a round-robin session where many attendees have volunteered to do short presentations on what’s new in HTML5. I’ll be covering the “features previously known as Web Forms 2.0” especially placeholder, required, autocomplete and the new Input types and output fields.
The best resources I’ve found are the WHATWG reference on forms and the CanIUse web page and the jQueryUI pages and plugin pages.

FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award

At the Southwest Fox 2013 conference, held in Gilbert, Arizona on October of 2013, I was awarded the FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award. I am honored and humbled to be recognized by the FoxPro community, a group of developers I hold in high esteem.

Sadly, I wasn’t able to attend the conference, but the keynote was live streamed and recorded at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/39939836.

I join an impressive group of people. All the award winners are listed in our equivalent of the FoxPro Hall of Fame on the Fox wiki: Internet Archive of http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~FoxProCommunityLifetimeAchievementAward

Click to visit CentOS

Now, the CentOS group has announced that they have “joined forces” with Red Hat. It will be interesting to see how this plays how, and how the roles of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Fedora distribution and CentOS plays out.

It hasn’t always been this way. I bought a box of RedHat (probably version 5.1) at Best Buy many years ago. Red Hat has tried reaching out to the smaller market before. There was also a developer/OEM program (I don’t recall the name) where individuals could obtain inexpensive copies of RHEL, less the support, for development and pilot testing. This is a new direction, and I look forward to seeing how it works out.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports on the announcements for ZDNet here.

The first 2014 meeting of the Seacoast WordPress group took place on Tuesday (not our usual night), January 8th, amid bitterly cold conditions in Portsmouth, NH. Nonetheless, we had a big crowd of a dozen attendees. I spoke on HTML5 and CSS3. My slides can be found at http://www.tedroche.com/Present/2014/html5css3/html5css3.html.

Our next meeting is a week early, on January 29th. Join the group on Meetup for further details and to stay up on group news.

Thanks to Amanda Giles for organizing the meetup and Josh Cyr for providing the AlphaLoft meeting space.