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It is no surprise that streaming technologies such as meteor have taken the spotlight over the last year. They present a compelling real-time way of keeping the client in sync with the server. One interesting result of thinking in real-time is that things like conflicts become…

There exists a viewpoint that Ember Data is “broken”; that the core team has abandoned the project and that the codebase is awash with issues. This is far from the reality of the situation, as I personally know many people who are successfully using ED on real projects. It is…

Inevitably, if you are building any web application, you are going to need some form of analytics. Single page javascript applications are no exception. Unlike normal applications, however, integrating Google Analytics and Mixpanel is not as trivial as including some javascript…

CoffeeScript is great. I’m not going to spend any time backing that statement up in this article, but you are free to stop reading if it’s not your cup of tea.

Four months ago, in February, I wrote a blog post detailing a strategy for handling routing and layout in Ember.js. This was at a time when there was no support for these features in Ember’s core. Today, however, this is not the case. Ember now has the notion of a Router and an…

At the core of any web application is a mapping between urls and application logic; a mapping between what is in the browser’s address bar and what should be displayed on the screen. Rails has routes.rb, Django has URLconf, Backbone.js has Backbone.Router, and Sammy.js has…

Having used Ember.js for a few months now, I have compiled a list of gotchas that I have encountered. Many of these will change/be fixed as Ember matures, but until then I hope these will serve as pre-emptive time savers for other developers.

I am long on Ember.js. I previously wrote a brief comparison of some of the more popular javascript frameworks, and Ember came out on top. I am now in the process of incorporating it into GroupTalent in a big way.

Over the last several months I have been in a constant search for the perfect javascript MVC framework. Driven by a dire need for the right level of abstraction and features, I have tried out - some more cursorily than others - every framework I could get my hands on. Here lies a…

HTML and CSS has always been filled with frustration when it comes to being able to intuitively create layouts and designs. Web developers have long since sacrificed ease of implementation for accessibility and semantic purity. Basic layouts and simple aesthetics frequently…

I spent the last few days teaching myself Flex 4 and AIR. Per my usual way of learning things I like to make (somewhat) functional applications. This time I made a desktop notification system for Stackoverflow. Currently it just notifies of new questions asked, subject to certain…

I started playing around with the beta of the Flex 4 sdk the other day. The purported features of the new version are very exciting to me, especially the support for advanced CSS selectors as well as enhanced component skinning capabilities.

Two of the most popular ways to build flex projects are Flex Builder and the Flex SDK Ant tasks. We had been using the first for development and the second for production.

If you have ever spent any time developing and styling flex applications, you have probably come to find the 9-grid scaling feature indispensable. For those of you unfortunate enough to have never experienced this feature, it enables you to easily scale an image while preserving…

I ran across several bugs features today that I thought would be worthwhile to share. These are of the variety that take a while to figure out and are not very intuitive. Both were encountered using Flex 3.1

One of my biggest gripes so far with the flex scrolling system is the automatic scrolling policy: a container’s viewing area is not changed by the introduction of scroll bars. This is especially troublesome in the vertical case and seems to be a pretty shitty way of doing things…