Overview

Lately, I’ve been building some web applications using version 2.0.4 of the Play Framework. Overall, I find I like the framework. In my opinion, it compares favorably with technologies like Django and Ruby on Rails, especially for those of us who find that compile-time type safety provides useful benefits.

However, one area where Play lags far behind the competition is in CSS asset compilation.

So, I decided to run some tests…

I recently discovered that I needed to generate QR codes in Scala, and it turns out to be quite simple, with the help of the QRGen Java library, by Ken Gullaxen.

In this brief article, I demonstrate how to create a simple SBT project to pull in the appropriate dependencies, as well as how to call the QRGen library from Scala.

Introduction

For one of my clients, I built a customer web portal in Rails, and I used the ActiveAdmin gem to provide a slick administrative interface. The site also uses Resque to process background jobs, and the Resque web interface is mounted within the Rails application.

With these components in place, I wanted to provide cross-linking navigation menu (“navbar”) items within the application itself, within ActiveAdmin, and within the Resque web engine.

The application navbar is easy, of course, since it’s entirely under my control. Adding links to Resque web and ActiveAdmin navbars is more challenging.

Here’s how I did it.

I recently switched from Thunderbird to Mail.app, on my MacBook Pro. For years, I’ve been appending random fortunes to the bottom of my email messages, and I wanted this feature for Mail.app, too.

Awhile ago, I finally decided to bring the build process for one of my open source Java projects into the 21st century. Since I find Maven irritating, I converted the project to use Buildr, a Rake-based build tool that contains, among other things, Maven-style dependency management.

Life was good. I had a nice, simple build, with all the power of Ruby at my disposal, and without any need to edit XML, which sucks.

Then, someone reported a bug: The Buildr-generated POM did not contain dependencies. As the author of the bug report wrote:

Maybe they should be added to the POM, so my build system (I use Gradle) will be able to download all the required jars?

That, of course, is a perfectly reasonable request. As it happens, it was easier requested than accomplished.

Introduction

I use Jekyll to generate more than a few web sites. I like the separation between the HTML presentation and the Markdown content, and I like that its easy to migrate Jekyll web sites to and from GitHub Pages.

Recently, I decided to update one of those web sites, partly to take it out of the dark ages, and partly to learn more about Twitter Bootstrap. Twitter Bootstrap is a terrific package, consisting of Javascript, CSS and HTML that is relatively easy to use, flexible, and customizable.

Like many others who do some development for the web, I’ve grown to like CoffeeScript. The CoffeeScript package comes with a Javascript implementation, allowing CoffeeScript to be translated into Javascript directly in the browser. Jeremy Ashkenas, author of CoffeeScript, recommends against using that approach for anything serious, and with good reason. However, there’s one scenario where I find CoffeeScript in the browser to be especially useful.

Introduction

Suppose you’re writing an application that stores and compares street addresses. Depending on how you obtain those addresses, you may need to standardize them.

• Standardizing the addresses makes them easier to compare.
• Standardizing the address can have the side effect of validating the address.
• Standardizing an address also makes it more likely that you can send a physical piece of mail to the address and have it actually arrive.

This article explores one way to solve that problem. I’ll be showing examples of Ruby and Python, but the same general approach works for other languages.

A few months ago, I switched from GNU Emacs, which I’ve used for more than 20 years, to Sublime Text 2. After years of using Emacs, there are a few things I miss in Sublime Text 2. Fortunately, Sublime Text 2 has a rich Python API, and it supports plugins; so, it’s relatively easy to add features I miss.

Like all decent modern programming editors, Sublime Text 2 supports syntax highlighting. But, for various reasons, it can’t always guess which syntax applies to a file. For example, lately, I find myself editing a lot of Sass files. Sublime Text 2 always brings Sass files (i.e., files ending in .scss) up as plain text files, with no syntax highlighting. I wanted a way to tell Sublime that all files ending in .scss should be assigned the “Ruby Sass” syntax, by default.

In other words, I wanted the equivalent of this Emacs Lisp capability:

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(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.scss\\'" . sass-mode))

Introduction

Octopress does a good job of generating a blog that scales nicely for large computer screens and smaller devices (such as my iPad). However, it’s possible to thwart Octopress’s best intentions, as I inadvertently managed to do.

I occasionally post cartoons to my blog, and the images tend to be large enough that they flow outside the boundaries of the blog’s text area, which looks like crap. My first attempt at solving the problem was to use CSS to set a minimum size for the text region. That solution, however, ruins the blog layout for smaller devices, such as a tablet.

There’s a straightforward solution to this problem, though.

The general idea is to display a smaller version of the image in the text area; when a reader clicks on that image (or taps it, on the iPad), the full size image appears in a modal popup. Many sites use this approach, of course, including Facebook and Google+. Its popularity is part of its appeal.

This solution can be implemented in a simple plugin, making it easy to drop into individual blog articles.