Issue: I know this may sound "silly" to some, but my need is very specific to not using NODE.
I'm looking for something I could modify and design easily without needing to dig into the deeper code. CSS, SASS, HTML, and that sort of thing are easy for me, but getting into NODE is a bit more beyond my current capabilities.
I'm more of a designer/artistic/UX rather than a coder.
Goal: I want to build a simple portfolio site that is easy to maintain, uses "templates" like Markdown, and doesn't require a database to keep track of things.
Reasons: Right now, I don't have time to learn Node. I've tried, and for me, the learning curve is a bit too steep. I need to take more time to really understand it. However, I need the site up and running, NOW, for job-hunting reasons.
I could just pull out notepad and do it all by hand, but I've seen the wonder of Static Site Generators. My hiccup is that almost all of the ones I've come across require Node - which means learning Node.
(You do know this is going to be closed as primarily opinion based, right? 😉️)
Anyways, you'll have to use some programming/templating language otherwise it won't be a static site generator. You only stated you don't want to use anything Node-based hence I'm going to list some popular non-Node-based static site generators:
Jekryll seems very popular Ruby-based system sponsored by GitHub
Pelican is Python-based and uses Jinja2 for templating
Hugo is Go-based and uses Go templates – apparently it also has live updates during development/design
Related
I'm looking for an implementation strategy to ease A-B testing / Beta testing. I don't see any code/plugin available for any framework. If not for a direct solution, let us at least brain-storm the requirements/expectations from the component:
There are already a few threads around my query..
Is there a PHP CMS with builtin A/B Testing Support?
Anyone got any good strategies for A/B testing with the Play Framework?
Beta Testing
As no one's answered this question, I'll attempt to do so.
Basically, I'm not sure if there's a directly useful connection between your PHP framework and your A/B testing needs. I think this is mainly because what you're testing can be almost anything: the colour of a conversion-sensitive button, a page layout, an entire registration funnel, etc. These don't inherently have anything to do with your PHP framework and there are lots of options for how you could do your testing.
Another issue is that you might not really know the parameters of what you're testing until you start testing. Your testing might lead you down a way that you didn't really even consider, so how could you have accounted for it in how you built the site? If you need a REALLY wide window for what you'll be testing, you're probably better off not building it at all and using some type of vapor/smoke-testing to get the basic concepts right first. Not everything can be subjected to testing and you'll still need subjectively-generated hypotheses as your test cases (and your testing will be only as good as your hypotheses).
If you have something very specific that you need to test repeatedly over time and want to build this flexibility into the system, then I'd look for the most obvious solution in the framework to make it happen. For example, if you're using Symfony and if you think that you'll need to test 50 different sidebar variations for a page over the course of 6 months, it probably makes sense to build it as a slot/component so you can build some logic around simplifying your testing and swap those sidebars with ease. I'm not sure why it would need to be anything more complicated than that.
Overall, I'd also add that the role of A/B testing should to guide your product to sell/convert/monetize/engage better. Unless you're building some type of a testing platform, I wouldn't over-think it. I tend to see that most sites fail to test sufficiently not because the system isn't flexible enough for various test cases but because top management won't give enough product/dev time for it, or because people aren't making enough use of their analytics packages to draw even the most basic of conclusions.
Hope that helps.
http://phpabtest.com/ looks like a pretty easy to use framework that comes free!
First i have no experience on parasoft .test or jtest experience. I have read the datasheet that the product could automatically generate unit test.
but I am woundering how useful the auto generated unit test are. Does it really do not need any other effort by developer?
any experience sharing are welcome.
thanks a lot!
We used JTest for our product recently. We didn't use the standard product, we used the Eclipse Plugin. The standard product is built on the OSGI framework (read: it's like Eclipse), but you have to import and create your projects. We were already using Eclipse, so it made sense for us to simply use the plugin, which has all of the same capabilities.
While there are many things that JTest can do for you, there are also many irritating things about it. For example, Jtest's static analysis tool is what is really worthwhile, IMHO. It can look for lots of errors and has a pretty good reporting system. But, while unit test generation is okay, but I think I spent as much or more time fixing and enhancing the generated tests than I would have just making them myself. Administering Jtest is also somewhat complicated and involved.
The built-in mechanisms to make unit tests, stub objects, parameterized unit tests, etc. are not well documented. At least, my little brain couldn't make good use of them in the two years we used the product. However, a lot of their super awesome features (like GUI tracing, command-line interface, the Bug Detective, reporting system etc.) all require extra, very expensive licenses.
Really, Jtest just gives you an easy way to manage the execution of static and unit testing. But it's really expensive. I can't believe they charge thousands of dollars per license of that stuff. You'll also find that they will want to train you, which you almost need because the documentation is pretty bad. Which is odd, because the user's guide is like 900 pages long.
But here's a big hint: you can do it for free. If I had to do it over, I would have pushed hard for using these products (which, oddly enough, look and feel very similar to Jtest)
http://code.google.com/javadevtools/codepro/doc/index.html
I wouldn't get Jtest thinking that this will be a small something to add to your developer's routine. Jtest can become a huge time and process sink.
Jtest is very very useful.Yes it generates it own test cases which requires lot more efforts for fixing them.I use it in different form.I delete all the generated unnecessary test cases.I made one another file which create database connection and set various other parameters sets.Also after configuration the code will work without mocking if all of the code is ready and if it is not ready than you can stubs the required methods.
Static code analyzer is good(for checking null pointer exception)
Checking code conventions is very good.
Write your custom code guidlines as use cases and execute it on your code.
Code coverage.
Debug while testing.
The auto generated unit tests still needs a developer to decide what results are correct or not, so you have to sit down and do the job. A lot of the boiler plate code is of course auto generated, so a small time saver there. I haven't used it much, but did evaluate jtest for an earlier employer. Seemed like a great product, if I remember correctly. :)
Alas there will never be a silver bullet that addresses all unit testing requirements, but JTest & .Test (& C++Test for that matter) about as close as you will get. Uggwar is correct that the developer will still need to verify outcomes for the basic auto generated tests, however there is a whole lot more to it.
These tools can be used to create basic regression tests, these are there to tell you when something has changes, not whether what it is testing is right or wrong. You can also trace a running application and then generate JUnit/NUnit/CPPUnit tests that recreate what was going on in the application. These tend to be far more useful tests, which are used as regression tests for items of functionality.
Other functionality includes the ability to generate stubs, use spreadsheets as datasources and provide an object repository. There is a while lot more too ....
Give them a try.
http://www.parasoft.com
I have a game I wrote in Actionscript 3 I'm looking to port to iOS. The game has about 9k LOC spread across 150 classes, most of the classes are for data models, state handling and level generation all of which should be easy to port.
However, the thought of rejiggering the syntax by hand across all these files is none too appealing. Are there tools that can help me speed up this process?
I'm not looking for a magical tool here, nor am I looking for a cross compiler, I just want some help converting my source files.
I don't know of a tool, but this is the way I'd try and attack your problem if there really is a lot of (simple) code to convert. I'm sure my suggestion is not that useful on parts of the code that are very flash-specific (all the DisplayObject stuff?) and also not that useful on lots of your logic. But it would be fun to build! :-)
Partial automatic conversion should be possible, especially if the objects are just 'data containers', watch out for bringing too much as3-idiom over to objective-c though, it might not always be a good fit.
Unless you want to create your own (semi) parser for as3 you'd need some sort of a parser, apparently FlexPMD has one (never used it), and there probably are others.
After getting your hands on a parser you have to find some way of suggesting to the system what parts could be converted automatically. You could try and add rules to the parser/generator script for the general case. For more specific cases I'd use custom metadata on the actual class/property/method, assuming a real as3 parser would correctly parse those.
Now part of your work will shift from hand-converting files to hand-annotating files, but that might be ok for you.
Have the parser parse your classes and define actions based on your metadata that will determine what kind of objective-c class to generate. If you get this working it could at least get you all your classes, their simple properties and method signatures (getting the body of the methods converted might be a bit too much to ask but you could include it as a comment so you'd have a nice reference while hand-translating).
PS: if you make this into a one way process be very sure you don't need to re-generate it later - it would be bad if you find out that you have been modifying the generated code and somehow need to re-generate all those classes -- that would mean you'll have to redo all your hard work!
I've started putting a tool together to take the edge off the menial aspects of this process.
I'm trying to figure out if there's enough interest to make it clean and stable enough to release for others to use. I may just do it anyway.
http://meanwhileatthelab.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/automating-process-of-converting-as3-to.html
It's so far saving me a lot of time while porting one of my fairly large games from AS3 to objc.
Check out the Sparrow Framework. It's purported to be designed with Actionscript developers in mind, recreating classes that sort of emulate display list and things like that. You'll have to dive into some "rejiggering" for sure no matter what you do if you don't want to use the CS5 packager.
http://www.sparrow-framework.org/
even if some solution exists, note that architectural logic is DIFFERENT, and many more other details.
Anyway even if posible, You will have a strange hybrid.
I am coming back from WWDC2012, and the message is (as always..) performance anf great user experience.
So You should rewrite using a different programming model.
At the moment I am learning Objective-C 2. I'm aware that it's used heavily by Mac developers, but I'm more interested in learning the language at this point in time than the frameworks for developing on Mac OS X/iPhone (except for Foundation). In order to do this I want to write a few intermediate* console applications, but I'm stuck for ideas.
Most examples are something along the lines of "Write a Fraction class that has getters/setters and a print function", which isn't very challenging coming from a C++ background. I'd like some generic examples of programs, but I don't want them to include any Objective-C implementation details. I want to figure out the program structure/write my own interfaces and learn the language from there.
In summary: I am curious as to what example programs Objective-C programmers would recommend for exploring the language.
An example of an "intermediate" application would be something along the lines of "Write a program that takes a URL from the command line and returns the number of occurrences of a certain word in data returned:
example -url www.google.com -word search
"Project Euler" is a standard response for this kind of thing, but I get the feeling that you're less interested in being told to implement algorithmic stuff (since that knowledge is easier to port between languages) and more interested in miniprojects that will familiarize you with core libraries. Is this fair?
If so, IMO, you ought to know the basics of how to do the following with the standard libraries of language you hope to use for serious work:
Standard IO
Network IO
Disk IO and navigating the filesystem
Regexp utilities
Structured data (XML libraries and CSV libraries if they exist)
Programming problems I would recommend for those:
It sounds like you've already done this.
A very simple proxy - something like what you described in your post, but that listens on a port for a message containing a URL rather than taking it on the command line, and likewise returns the results to whatever contacted it over the network rather than outputting to stdio. [Obviously you need to have the machine behind an appropriate firewall for this!]
Something which takes a directory path and recursively tallies the number of lines its children contain. (So, get the directory's listing, open each child file and count the number of line breaks. Then open each of its child directories, get their listings, ...) Record any errors encountered (e.g., no read privileges) in a reasonable way. Write out the final results to file in the directory supplied.
Usually if I tool around in a language enough, I'll run across some problem which I just naturally find myself using regexps for. I'll assume the same is true for you and punt this element for now.
Fetch StackOverflow.com, and [by putting it into a DOM model and navigating that] determine whether this question is still on the front page.
I got the most out of Objective-C by exploring it with a testing framework. I have written a short blog post about it. You should also wrap your head around the memory management conventions employed by Objective-C, reference counting takes a little time to get used to but works very well if responsibilities are clearly segregated (I have written about that on my blog too).
By getting my hands dirty on a testing framework (GHUnit for that matter), I was able to learn far more about the language than I could have in a "traditional" way. Of course you'll need a little pet project, otherwise this approach doesn't make sense.
I don't think your example is a very good idea as it requires you to mess with http connections, resources etc. which is a little framework specific after all. Parsing a text file would be a little easier in this regard. Using a unit testing framework has the following advantages for you:
learn about platform specific build systems and deployment details
forced to develop components in a loosely coupled fashion from the ground up
thereby exploring unique mechanisms of the language, that might require new or make known patterns redundant (e.g. categories make dependency injection obsolete etc.)
fast compile-test cycle, less time spent in front of the debugger
combined with source control: painless experiments
You should also look into the testing framework implementation, as testing frameworks always require to work with metadata to some extend. Testing frameworks are often used together with isolation frameworks. They basically create objects at runtime that comply to certain interfaces and act as stand-ins for concrete objects. Looking at their implementation will teach you about the runtime manipulations that can be done in Objective-C (keyword: Method-Swizzling)
I maintain in-house business software for a living. Technologies included here are Java, Struts, Spring MVC, jsp, wicket, and a few others. I think it's time to branch out and learn something new.
I am hoping to show myself with a side project that writing code can, in fact, be fun (in some plane of the universe), and that I haven't wasted the past few years of my life doing something I can never love or have fun doing.
I'm thinking of having a fantasy-sport style web site - obviously much, much smaller with regards to features and all that. I was hoping I could get some recommendations for the newest or cleanest frameworks that will allow me to accomplish such a project. My goals are to work on following a real development process instead of just hacking a bunch of crap into an already crappy application on a daily basis. Also I will strive to follow best practices and create good, clean, understandable code that I don't shudder at the thought of having to modify. It's hard to do this at work, because the software I work on has already been developed by 50 guys from various continents that never took the time to design anything before jumping into coding.
I would need a simple database to store users and their picks for each event. Also at my job, the login security is all handled by another group completely. Do people usually write their own login systems from scratch, or are there open source utilities for that as well? I'd be interested in those, as my site will need to have a user login system, and be secure.
I had ruby and rails installed on my computer the last time I conjured up the motivation for this idea, but that was nixed by a hard drive crash. I figured before I just jumped straight to rails for this idea, that I would get a few other opinions off stack overflow to see if people liked something else that I didn't know about.
Also, if anyone has any good resources for how to think about OO design, I could brush up on that as well. I'm looking for anything that will help me to just think about the design from the start and how to get my thoughts into a diagram. I'd like it not to focus so much on patterns and other principles as much as just how to get started and actually put my thoughts in a professional document that I can use to build my project from. I tried to practice this prior to a card game that I wrote, and it got way too complicated way too fast, and the results ended up being not so great.
I’m more familiar with Django, although like you, the only frameworks I’ve really used are the Java/Struts/Spring/JSP, etc. The automatically generated administration interface in Django is amazing coming from these, and it comes with its own authentication system too.
Unless you’re especially predisposed against Python, I think you should give it a go.
Ruby on Rails, Python on Django, PHP on (not sure -- maybe Zend? or CakePHP?), are probably the most popular frameworks if I understand correctly that you want to learn a new language. If I misunderstood you, and you'd rather stick with Java, GWT seems pretty cool -- it's the only real way to avoid "explicitly" writing Javascript (if you DO want to learn and use some Javascript, I personally am in love with Dojo, but jQuery is substantially more popular: those are two good popular frameworks you should consider, though there are others of course, like for all languages I mentioned so far).
One advantage of picking Python and Django is that they work particularly well with Google App Engine (and with Dojo, too, thanks to the cool dojango project!) -- GAE supports JVM too, now, but it's supported Python for a much longer time and the Python side of it is more solid and complete at this time. So, if that's the technology stack you choose, you get to develop and deploy for free, on highly scalable infrastructure, at least until your app gets more than a few million page views per month -- and you really minimize your system adminsitration hassles, all you do is basically to code and write one simple configuration file.