Category Archives: tech

25 Jun
2013

DC4D 6: Not-Programming for Programmers

In case you haven’t seen the news, the next episode of Day Camp 4 Developers is coming up on Friday 26th July. This edition is about getting beyond being awesome at the code, which we know that you are, and picking up some other skills to complete you as a profesional. Whether you work in a large international corporation, a smaller company, or alone, we’ve got content that will make a difference.

Day Camp 4 Developers is a virtual conference, and it’s $40 (about 25 quid for UK people). If you can’t make it on the day, just get the video ticket and download the recorded sessions later. What I’m trying to say in this paragraph is that there are quite literally no excuses for missing out on this :)
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13 Jun
2013

Are Subqueries RESTful?

Twitter is great for one-liners, but it’s very difficult to carry on any kind of advanced conversation there. Therefore when I saw this tweet yesterday, I knew I’d be picking a different medium to reply:

The blog seems like a good place, as I can put examples and all kinds other things here, and waffle at length (which is really why I like it!). Because when condensed to tweet form, the answer is really “it depends”.

The Problem(s)

REST is all about representations of resources. They might come in different formats, and they might appear at their own URI as well as in one or more collections, but essentially you just get a representation of a thing. This is great, apart from when it isn’t.

  • What if you want a smaller result set with only a limited number of fields?
  • What if you want related data? For every resource in a collection?

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29 Apr
2013

What Goes in Source Control?

Short answer: everything! However we need some good directory structures and source control configuration to make that a really practical answer, so this article is a quick outline of my usual advice for a good source control structure for a standard web project. The examples are for a PHP project but I’m sure you could apply this to your own language of choice, also. Continue reading →
15 Apr
2013

Pretty-Printing JSON with Python’s JSON Tool

Today’s quick tip is something that was widely retweeted after my “Debugging HTTP” talk at the ever-fabulous WhiskyWeb conference last weekend. When working with JSON on the commandline, here’s a quick tip for showing the JSON in a nicer format:

curl http://api.joind.in | python -mjson.tool

You need python installed, but the JSON extension is probably included, and that’s all you need for this tool. The result is something like:

python-mjsontool

You can also use this approach to present JSON data that has been captured to another file, for example, it’s a handy trick that I use often when developing something with JSON as a data format.

07 Mar
2013

Installing XHGui

There’s a new version of XHGui (well, a few months old) and it’s fabulous! It’s got a few new dependencies though so I thought I’d write down how I set up my version, in case it’s helpful to anyone else (and so I feel like a pro next time I have to do this!). If you’re not familiar with XHGui it’s a fabulously easy and friendly way to profile your application; to understand which method calls in a page take the time and how many times they are made, so you can improve the performance of your application. All these instructions are for my 32-bit Ubuntu 12.10 system, hopefully they will work for you or you’ll be able to adapt them as appropriate.

Dependencies

XHGui needs version numbers or fluffy animal names, because this is a really major release and quite different to what went before in both technology and in looks. In particular, it now uses MongoDB. If you’re not familiar with MongoDB, it’s a super-friendly NoSQL database that makes a really handy backend for this kind of unstructured data – because every run of every page will look different. Therefore you will need:

  • MongoDB itself
  • The pecl extension for mongo
  • The xhprof pecl extension (read on if you’re using PHP 5.4, there’s a gotcha)

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07 Feb
2013

Endpoints for HTTP Testing

While working on a book (“PHP Web Services” from O’Reilly, not out yet but soon!) recently, I was looking for some place I could make HTTP requests to, to show off how to make different kinds of requests with different tools. On my own machine, I have a couple of scripts that chatter back giving debug information about the requests that were made, but I wanted to get the tools examples going without any additional dependencies at all. I hadn’t used anything like these tools before, but I found quite a few alternatives, so I thought I’d share what I came up with. Continue reading →
30 Jan
2013

Printing PDF Bookmarks List

I work with PDF a lot, and it bothers me that I can see an outline view when I open the document, but I don’t seem to be able to grab just that view. My presentations are mostly PDF and the titles and section headings show up nicely. Today I figured out how to get an outline view, so I’m putting that information here while I remember how to do it!

I used a tool called pdftk which is excellent, I’ve used it before for doing various other PDF-related things. To grab metadata such as bookmarks, use the dump-data command, like this:

pdftk myfile.pdf dump_data | grep BookmarkTitle > outline.txt

The above line takes all the bookmarks from the PDF (this was a slide deck created using powerdot and LaTeX, the section and slide titles nest appropriately), and outputs a bunch of information about the document and the various PDFs. The grep command just gets the lines containing “BookmarkTitle”, then the whole thing gets written to a file. I cleaned that up and now I have the outline of my course, so I can add timings, notes for the exercises and so on.

23 Jan
2013

Five Clues That Your API isn’t RESTful

I get a lot of emails asking me to get involved with API projects, and that means I see a lot of both implemented and planned “RESTful” APIs. Now, I absolutely love REST and for a data-driven application, it would be my first choice. A service of some other description may work better for other scenarios or skill sets, and non-RESTful services can be very, very useful. If you tell me that your service is RESTful, then I expect it to be. If you’re not sure, look out for these clues:

It has a single endpoint

I don’t really care what else is going on in your API, any “RESTful” API which has a statement such as “all requests are made to http://example.com/rest” is … not RESTful. REST is all about handling representations of resources, each is represented by its own URI and we operate directly on that. If it looks like “pretty URLs”, then it’s probably along the right lines. Continue reading →

10 Jan
2013

How NOT to Design Your API

Recently I tweeted as a #linktuesday link the 10 Worst API Practices post from ProgrammableWeb. Today, in search of some concrete examples of APIs implementing unhelpful antipatterns, I sent out a tweet for help:

[blackbirdpie id=”289014953954930688″]

In the raft of responses (and thankyou all, this was fabulous, helpful and entertaining in equal parts!), there were some definite patterns that I’d like to share with you, in no particular order. Continue reading →