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Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#91
post #6

Redis. Fucking awesome database. Does exactly what it's advertised to do, with no unexpected surprises. Great documentation. Finally we can go beyond the simplistic key-value map/reduce datastores, for when you don't need all the guarantees that traditional SQL forces you to have. http://redis.io/ (I still use postgres and sqlite for other database needs, but I'm strongly considering moving a few of those over to red…

I'd like Redis more if they had chosen the logo that had earned the most votes. :-)

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#93
post #36

The iPad has changed everything. It's an entirely new type of computer that turned out to be substantially better than anyone imagined. Watch a 5-year-old use an iPad for the first time and you will immediately see and understand why this is a major paradigm shift. It's the first "socially acceptable" computer -- at Christmas I can pull out my iPad, plop it down at the dinner table and share pictures with the family,…

The iPad is an entirely new type of computer? You mean, like a pad computer as suggested by Wieser in the 90s?

> turned out to be substantially better than anyone imagined

By anyone you mean analysts, right?

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#94

Jekyll ( https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll ) First touched it two months ago just to tinker with but didn't really do anything with it. Then after numerous frustrations with my current blogging setup, I spent the last 5 days hacking on it over the holidays and I think it's almost ready to launch. Had to do some custom stuff that I'll write about in a post. It's extremely hackable and I love it. The only thing that do…

I love Jekyll. It fits into my workflow perfectly and made it really easy to translate the entire site into Japanese for that market. The whole thing took 3 days.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#95
post #11

2010 was, for me, the year of JS-related technologies. (I'm actually rather disappointed I haven't had more time to check out Clojure and to use Haskell and Scala more--I was doing quite a lot of front-end web stuff.) 1. Socket.IO ( http://socket.io/ ) It lets you use websockets and automatically fall back to flash sockets, long polling, or several other real-time communication methods if websockets aren't supported…

I'm looking forward to seeing someone combine Backbone.js with Websocket-based persistence. It's a bit out of scope for DocumentCloud to tackle, but the building blocks are there. One client makes a change to a model -> changes are synced to the server -> other clients that currently reference that model have its attributes updated -> all the UI that displays the model is automatically re-rendered. It's not critical…

I'm doing something pretty similar to rumpetroll (it is fully functional rumpetroll now, but we will add more features) using Backbone Model View Collections as my 'Sprites'. The code isn't public yet, but me and a friend have some plans for it. The only thing different is that we've completely dropped use of Backbone.sync, for the sole reason that the method based approach does not fit very cleanly into what we are doing and websockets. So we have one model as a 'dispatcher' instead, to which all models send messages which are transmitted over websockets. All sprites communicate via attribute change events which is a really good use of Backbone. On the server a tiny node.js wrapper uses Redis pub-sub to relay messages out to other clients.

The code is 'out there' but private, so if you want to take a peek at it, please contact me directly.

Thanks for a great framework.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#99
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking forward to seeing someone combine Backbone.js with Websocket-based persistence. It's a bit out of scope for DocumentCloud to tackle, but the building blocks are there. One client makes a change to a model -> changes are synced to the server -> other clients that currently reference that model have its attributes updated -> all the UI that displays the model is automatically re-rendered. It's not critical…

I'm doing something pretty similar to rumpetroll (it is fully functional rumpetroll now, but we will add more features) using Backbone Model View Collections as my 'Sprites'. The code isn't public yet, but me and a friend have some plans for it. The only thing different is that we've completely dropped use of Backbone.sync, for the sole reason that the method based approach does not fit very cleanly into what we are…

I'd love to take a peek, if you want to mail an invite to jashkenas at gmail.

Replacing Backbone.sync is totally legit -- and is indeed what having Backbone.sync in a single place is intended for. There are many good paths to data persistence: REST/CRUD, RPC, aggregated JSON, CouchDB or Mongo, LocalStorage, and so on. Backbone.sync is just the default implementation for the common case.

I think that one of the more exciting things about JS development these days, is how open and flexible the patterns still are.

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