Do you use Twitter in your social media marketing? Want to be more efficient and productive on the platform? To talk about a wide range of Twitter tools for social media marketers, I interview Ian Anderson Gray. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
ajSlider is a jQuery slideshow plugin which can be used as the main banner for your webpages or as a image gallery which fits into user defined sizes.
Before we dive into the topic we have to answer the crucial question: What is reactive programming? As of today, the most popular answer is that reactive programming is programming with concurrent data streams. Most of the time we will find the word concurrent replaced by asynchronous, however, we will see later on that the stream does not have to be asynchronous.
It is easy to see that the "everything is a stream" approach can be applied directly to our programming problems. After all, a CPU is nothing more than a device which processes a stream of information consisting of instructions and data. Our goal is to observe that stream and transform it in case of particular data.
The principles of reactive programming are not completely new to JavaScript. We already have things like property binding, the EventEmitter pattern, or Node.js streams. Sometimes the elegance of these methods comes with decreased performance, overly complicated abstractions, or problems with debugging. Usually, these drawbacks are minimal compared to the advantages of the new abstraction layer. Our minimal examples will, of course, not reflect the usual application, but be as short and concise as possible.
Without further ado, let's get our hands dirty by playing with The Reactive Extensions for JavaScript (RxJS) library. RxJS uses chaining a lot, which is a popular technique also used in other libraries such as jQuery. A guide to method chaining (in the context of Ruby) is available on SitePoint.
Before we dive into RxJS we should list some examples to work with later. This will also conclude the introduction to reactive programming and streams in general.
In general, we can distinguish two kinds of streams: internal and external. While the former can be considered artificial and within our control, the latter come from sources beyond our control. External streams may be triggered (directly or indirectly) from our code.
Usually, streams don't wait for us. They happen whether we can handle them or not. For instance if we want to observe cars on a road, we won't be able to restart the stream of cars. The stream happens independent of if we observe it or not. In Rx terminology we call this a hot observable. Rx also introduces cold observables, which behave more like standard iterators, such that the information from the stream consists of all items for each observer.
The following images illustrates some external kinds of streams. We see that (formerly started) requests and generally set up web hooks are mentioned, as well as UI events such as mouse or keyboard interactions. Finally, we may also receive data from devices, for example GPS sensors, an accelerometer, or other sensors.
The image also contained one stream noted as Messages. Messages can appear in several forms. One of the most simple forms is a communication between our website and some other website. Other examples include communication with WebSockets or web workers. Let's see some example code for the latter.
The code of the worker is presented below. The code tries to find the prime numbers from 2 to 1010. Once a number is found the result is reported.
(function (start, end) {
var n = start - 1;
while (n++ < end) {
var k = Math.sqrt(n);
var found = false;
for (var i = 2; !found && i <= k; ++i) {
found = n % i === 0;
}
if (!found) {
postMessage(n.toString());
}
}
})(2, 1e10);
Classically, the web worker (assumed to be in the file prime.js) is included as follows. For brevity we skip checks for web worker support and legality of the returned result.
var worker = new Worker('prime.js');
worker.addEventListener('message', function (ev) {
var primeNumber = ev.data * 1;
console.log(primeNumber);
}, false);
More details on web workers and multi-threading with JavaScript can be found in the article Parallel JavaScript with Parallel.js.
Considering the example above, we know that prime numbers follow an asymptotic distribution among the positive integers. For x to ∞ we obtain a distribution of x / log(x). This means that we will see more numbers at the beginning. Here, the checks are also much cheaper (i.e., we receive much more prime numbers per unit of time in the beginning than later on.)
This can be illustrated with a simple time axis and blobs for results:
A non-related but similar example can be given by looking at a user's input to a search box. Initially, the user may be enthusiastic to enter something to search for; however, the more specific his request gets the greater the time difference between the key strokes becomes. Providing the ability to show live results is definitely desirable, to help the user in narrowing his request. However, what we do not want is to perform a request for every key stroke, especially since the first ones will be performed very fast and without thinking or the need to specialize.
Continue reading %Introduction to Functional Reactive Programming with RxJS%
Composer is a fantastic tool that is widely used in modern PHP development to handle your project dependencies. It helps to install and update all related packages or dependencies of your project. Although it is not primarily used in WordPress core yet, as developers we can still take advantage of Composer to bootstrap our WordPress applications.
For references and documentation on using Composer alongside WordPress, I cannot recommend highly enough Rarst’s Composer site. It is a great resource to learn how Composer can be integrated to WordPress in many different ways. Recently, there has also been a few projects that aim to simplify the WordPress setup using Composer such as WP Starter and WordPlate.
According to the official WordPlate website, WordPlate is described as a:
"WordPress framework built with Laravel and Symfony components. With a familiar setup for every Laravel enthusiast. Following the don't repeat yourself principle".
WordPlate is a WordPress boilerplate that takes the idea of managing your WordPress site completely with Composer, and ease up various parts of the development with popular packages from Packagist such as PHP dotenv and Symfony components. The rest of the article will focus on WordPlate, specifically the latest release version of 3.1.0 at the time of writing.
Continue reading %Better WordPress Development Workflow with WordPlate%
It's never surprised me that scrum has a bit of a controversial reputation. While some praise scrum for its effective and straightforward approach to software development, there are professional software developers who have staked their reputations on arguing that approaches such as scrum are at best pointless, and at worst detrimental to an effective software development effort.
Scrum may well have encouraged such heated debate, not because of anything intrinsic to scrum itself, but rather due to misconceptions and misapplications of the terminology and the technology that have grown up around scrum. And if your team is working on web and mobile development projects, scrum may be the best possible solution out there for managing your projects.
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Scrum is one of a family of approaches to organizing software projects that fit together under the umbrella of agile. Other agile techniques include kanban and extreme programming. All of these approaches share a few common principles about how people should work together in software development, and how to optimize that process, such as:
In particular, scrum is optimized for teams working on projects that can be broken down into complete slices of functionality able to be delivered within a fixed and regular time frame of usually one or two sustainable work weeks, known as sprints in scrum. Scrum uses the term stories to describe those slices of functionality, and strives to improve the team's ability to estimate how much effort would go into completing a story.
Unlike traditional software development approaches, often lumped together under the label waterfall, scrum doesn't involve long and detailed requirements documents full of specifications crafted by product managers that all need to be spelled out before the team can get started working.
Scrum is flexible enough to allow a team to get started based on just enough stories to keep them busy for a couple of weeks. In that time, if there's new user feedback, the market changes, new information comes up from outside or inside the company, or the technology underlying the product shifts, new stories can be introduced and worked on for the next couple of weeks.
Scrum also favors regular face-to-face communication over detailed specifications. This is usually helped along by having every member of the team stand up in a group daily and report on what they've done the previous day, what they're planning to do the current day, and whether they have any blockers. Scrum also recommends other regular face-to-face meetings, called rituals, for planning, demonstrating, and doing a retrospective every sprint.
While the prospect of a daily meeting may sound off-putting to a lot of developers, it's important to remember that these are all finely tuned scrum rituals managed by a scrum master, with fixed times and clear agendas. For example, the daily standup should never take longer than 15 minutes.
Roles such as scrum master and product owner are also defined within scrum. And you may have noticed that the vocabulary of scrum sounds a little funky for a professional technical environment. That's kind of the point. Scrum defines roles, rituals, and artifacts in such a way that you can't confuse them easily with other approaches.
Continue reading %Why to Choose Scrum for Web and Mobile Development%
