As Captain John-Luc Picard said after he was assimilated by the Borg, “Resistance is futile.” His point? You can’t change the path of least resistance. There are some inescapable truisms, whether you’re traveling at light-speed on the U.S.S. Enterprise fleeing from the Borg or you’re ruminating about meta-classes as you toil away creating fabulous software. [...]
It's all ones and zeroes 
Programming
Programming
Featured Post
by John Mueller | Comments
How to Inherit Somebody Else’s Code
You’re faced with a daunting upgrade of someone else’s application. How do you get started quickly and with minimal pain? Here’s five guidelines to streamline the process.
NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative
Picking a Web server used to be easy. If you ran a Windows shop, you used Internet Information Server (IIS); if you didn’t, you used Apache. No fuss. No muss. Now, though, you have more Web server choices, and far more decisions to make. One of the leading alternatives, the open-source NGINX, is now the [...]
7 Reasons that Rexx Still Matters
by René Jansen | Comments
Every time I mention Rexx on Slashdot or another techie site, people roll their eyes. They think that Rexx — the first widely used scripting language — is no longer relevant. I disagree, and in this article I explain why. First: If you haven’t encountered Rexx before, you may need an update. Though Mike Cowlishaw [...]
Take Your Desktop Application to the Web in 15 Minutes
by Cameron Laird | Comments
You have a crucial application that’s quietly done its job for years. Maybe it’s a game, played by tens of thousands of people around the world. Or it’s an oven control that ensures the crackers in one specific factory are perfectly crispy. Now someone wants—needs—that desktop (or tractor-top or command-center-top) application to run on the [...]
Making the Most of GPU Acceleration in Your Web Apps
by Andy Patrizio | Comments
In the past two years, the major web browsers have added support for the graphics processing unit (GPU) that’s a part of every PC. You might be aware that the GPU is there, but it rarely got used if you weren’t playing games. Quietly, the GPU is being put to work in non-entertainment ways. GPUs [...]
Understanding The Open Web Stack
by Molly Holzschlag | Comments
Technology “stacks” have been around for years. At best, a technology stack provides a means of visualizing the way a group of technologies work together. At worst, it ends up looking like a convoluted “follow the blind hamster” maze of confusion. In Web standards and the “Open Web,” we in the industry have definitely been [...]
Picking the Right Web Server for the Right Job
Once upon a time, the decision was easy. If you needed a Web server, and you used Windows on your servers, you used Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS). If you used anything else — and sometimes even if Windows Server was running in your data center — you used Apache. Simple. Things are a little [...]
The Biggest Changes in C++11 (and Why You Should Care)
by Danny Kalev | Comments
Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, said recently that C++11 “feels like a new language — the pieces just fit together better.” Indeed, core C++11 has changed significantly. It now supports lambda expressions, automatic type deduction of objects, uniform initialization syntax, delegating constructors, deleted and defaulted function declarations, nullptr, and most importantly, rvalue references — [...]
Will the Next Web Platform Please Hold Still?
Here is a seemingly simple enough question: What’s the minimum level of browser support provided by your team’s Web site? If your answer is Internet Explorer 6, which officially died in October 2006, then every browser maker today including Microsoft will tell you that’s not what it should be. You’re not taking advantage of the [...]
Gesture Recognition Moves Beyond Gaming
by Steve Sechrist | Comments
Gesture recognition holds the promise of new frontiers in user interface that will change the face of coding forever, in much the same way that touch technology did a few years ago. And while touch-based computing has been around for decades, it wasn’t until the advent of the smartphone and “smart devices” like tablets that [...]
