React & Web Development

Gone are the days when a team could solve a business problem by simply building a set of interrelated Web pages. Most of the time, you don’t build plain Web sites anymore; you build articulated solutions that result from the combination of various artifacts, including a classic Web site full of HTML pages, a mobile front end for navigation over devices, maybe a push-notification endpoint for mobile apps that relates to the solution, and a distinct network for static content.

Each piece of the solution requires its own framework when not on its own platform. This causes a proliferation of frameworks and codenames that are confusing to everybody except a (very) small group of geeks.

In addition, sites like GitHub make it easy for everybody to contribute his own work to the community. Far from being a problem, it encourages everybody to write his own framework for doing the same things as others but in a slightly different way that the author and a few followers reckoned was better.

Now, if your work is on the cutting edge, and you are lucky enough to only work on brand-new projects from day one, and your buyers are open to any sort of technology or framework regardless of support (and lack thereof), availability of (and lack thereof) service-level agreements, open-source statements and similar, then you live in a perfect world. But otherwise, you may just happen to live in the neighborhood of hell and want to move elsewhere.

This article, like a real-estate leaflet, lists properties on sale without exaggerating value, benefits, and quality!

A website that is not configured to operate in a disconnected state is unavailable in any form if an Internet connection is not available. For instance, Figure 1demonstrates the type of response you may encounter while trying to view http://msn.com while working without an Internet connection.

 I have been brewing on this post for some days now and the excitement of the presentation to come motivated me to finish it. We use ElasticSearch at my day job at eBay and the product is also a key ingredient in my ELMAH in the cloud project elmah.io. In this post I will share my experiences setting up ElasticSearch in a clustered setup of virtual machines, running on Windows Azure. Disclamer: this is in no way an official guide on how to setup ElasticSearch in a cluster. My experience with replication in ElasticSearch is pretty limited, and I only just now found out how virtual networks work in Windows Azure. Use this guide for inspiration and I would love to get some feedback on the approach used.

If you don’t have access to Azure, there’s a free trial available from the frontpage: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/. You will get 30 days of Azure with a maximum of $200 worth of services. Pricing on Azure has always been a nightmare, but $200 should do just fine in order to play around with a couple of VMs. When signed up and in, start by creating a new virtual network:

Signaling is the process of coordinating communication. In order for a WebRTC application to set up a 'call', its clients need to exchange information:

Session control messages used to open or close communication.Error messages.Media metadata such as codecs and codec settings, bandwidth and media types.Key data, used to establish secure connections.Network data, such as a host's IP address and port as seen by the outside world.

This signaling process needs a way for clients to pass messages back and forth. That mechanism is not implemented by the WebRTC APIs: you need to build it yourself. We describe below some ways to build a signaling service. First, however, a little context...

I know that SignalR has been around for a while, but I wanted to take a moment to provide a SignalR for dummies post.  And for the record, I am just using the expression; never would I actually imply you are an actual dummy.  Since you are viewing my site, all evicence would suggest otherwise.  Eh-hem….  Well that was arrogant Chris!

This post is intended not just for anyone that is new to SignalR, but also in preparation for my upcoming Desert Code Camp presentation as well as a few follow up articles I intend to write on some more advanced SignalR concepts.

Rich-clients are back. But the new rich-client is the browser. No more plug-ins or ActiveX objects in sight. Instead you’ll find new, more powerful JavaScript libraries enabling you to more easily build large-scale applications directly in the browser. You’ll still need to be able to work with the disconnected nature of websites, but you no longer need to worry about a page-based model.

One of these libraries is AngularJS from Google. In this article, I hope to get you started by showing you how it works and hopefully why you should be using it.

Once AngularJS is in place it intercepts all the url navigation requests (<a> tags) and stops the browser form full page refresh. How it happens is

• It starts with user navigating to the app home(such as http://localhost/home). This is a standard HTML request which gets data from a server view.
• The browser then loads the necessary html and scripts and sets up the AngularJS configuration.
• AngularJS navigation ($location service) kicks in and hence forth the only requests that are send are to load partial views into a specific page section (ng-view or ng-include).

Keeping this in mind we start setting up the view.

HDInsight provides a very easy to use interface to provision a Hadoop cluster with a few clicks and interact with the cluster programmatically. In this blog post, we will explore Hive and how it can be used with HDInsight.

Hive is very popular among data analysts/scientists as it provides a friendly SQL-like interface to interact with the Hadoop cluster. However, behind the scenes, Hive uses the MapReduce framework to submit jobs and get results back. When an HDInsight cluster is provisioned, HiveServer and HiveServer2 services are installed on the head node of the cluster. While HDInsight provides the option to interact with both the services, HiveServer2 is the service of choice since it addresses the concurrency limitation imposed by HiveServer.

The server side is located in the cloud and interacts with a client through event handlers which are deployed in some web application. Further, received messages are distributed to different types of client applications via SignalR: client initiates communication; server uses opened socket to return data to the client; client uses keep-alive to preserve open connection. In such a way, the CQRS events processing is provided.

If you haven’t heard of OAuth or OpenID you have most certainly used it in day to day life. Have you provided your google username/password and logged in to StackOverflow or used your WordPress.com account to post comments on someone’s blog or used third party Twitter clients whom you have given permission to use your Twitter account or used Facebook to post comments on some tech blog site? If answer to any of the above is a Yes, you have seen OAuth or OpenID in action.

In the first two parts of this series of articles, I set the groundwork for a solution that used ASP.NET MVC to create a simple site for a fictitious company called NorthWind Traders with a SQL Server database and which used R for the analytics and visualisation. Now, in the third part of the series, I’ll build on this by introducing two new R libraries that widen the analytical power of the application that we began developing in part 1 and 2. These libraries are called lattice and googleVis.

You want to try creating a single-page web application (SPA) on top of AngularJS, a client-side MVC framework by Google. I assume, you’re already familiar with ASP.NET MVC. Will these two play together nicely? The answer is YES! With a few gotchas…

First, why on earth would you want to mix a client-side MVC-family framework with a server-side one? I think you do not want to do that. On the other hand, ASP.NET MVC 4 provides a great framework for creating RESTful services: Web API.