NodeJS counter implementation

Performance counters can be implemented in applications to help operators determine where bottlenecks are in the design. Microsoft has a decent page, that’s somewhat Windows centric, about performance counters. This post is about implementing the most basic type of counter, a value which monotonically increases, in JavaScript for NodeJS and the performance implications of different designs. ...

February 20, 2016 · MichaelHughes

Loading a Cocos Studio scene into cocos2d-x 3.4/3.5

In the last few weeks I have been slowly learning about the cocos2d-x framework. cocos2d-x is a C++ based cross platform game engine. The makers of the engine also produce a UI creation GUI called Cocos Studio. Today’s post is a brief one about loading scenes from Cocos Studio into a cocos2d-x based application. ...

April 25, 2015 · MichaelHughes

The importance of being mindful of operator precedence

Operator precedence determines the order [Operator precedence determines the order]2 and binary operators are executed. In many situations, knowing basic mathematical operator precedence (for +,-,*, etc) is enough. In other situations not knowing the specifics of language can lead to hard to find errors. Quickly, in JavaScript what does 'the boogeyman ' + false ? 'is scary' : 'is not scary' evaluate to? ...

January 21, 2015 · MichaelHughes

Using Olingo ODataJS 4 Beta with AngularJS and Web API OData V4

Recently I started writing a new web application which uses OData V4 as the protocol for passing data to back and forth between the JavaScript client and ASP.Net server. The client is written using AngularJS which doesn’t have any built-in facilities for working in OData APIs. In order to avoid writing my own OData message handler I used the Apache Olingo library to handle the grunt work of sending requests and receiving responses. I wanted to encapsulate the Olingo library in an AngularJS service in order to make using it easier, the following post details how this was done. ...

January 5, 2015 · MichaelHughes

Java ArrayList resize costs

Today we will look at whether it’s worth developer time to pre-size ArrayList objects in Java application code. We will take a similar approach to the one taken in a prior post on how long it takes to handle an exception in Java. ...

September 11, 2014 · MichaelHughes

How long it takes to throw an exception in Java

Today post is exceptional, we’ll take a brief look at the time cost of throwing and re-throwing exceptions and put that time cost in context. To be specific, we’ll look at the timing information for a set of exceptions which might be found in a typical 3-tier business application. In our example the exceptions are thrown and caught in hierarchical order in order to promote separation between the tiers of the application. ...

September 1, 2014 · MichaelHughes

Server-client date time management in web applications

Previously we have discussed one approach and gave some implementing code for providing time zone adjusted date times to client web applications. Within the space of user facing web applications there are few different approaches to handling the storage and transmission of date time information. Today we will look at a couple broader themes for delivery of date times to client applications from servers and some thoughts on how to do it well. ...

July 25, 2014 · MichaelHughes

Gotchas associated with client side date handling

This is short post about a couple issues that end users might run into when using a method of displaying dates I described in a prior post. In short, Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 cannot parse certain types of ISO8601 dates correctly and Google Chrome does not track the system’s time zone correctly. ...

June 11, 2014 · MichaelHughes

Create an object based dual list shuttle with Knockoutjs

A quick tip post on using Knockoutjs to create a certain type of common web UI component. The short and sweet summary is that I’ll show how to create a shuttle control using two select boxes that are bound to arrays of Javascript objects (instead of simple value types) using Knockoutjs. Before getting to that though I’ll provide some background on the various component used to create the UI. ...

May 24, 2014 · MichaelHughes

The importance of structured cloud deployments

One of the advantages of operating in an environment like AWS or Azure is the ability to template and programmatically deploy both infrastructure and application platforms. This advantage is sometimes overlooked in place of a more adhoc deployment model where resources are created as needed. Today’s post provides brief commentary on some of the advantages of handling deployments in a more structured manner. ...

May 3, 2014 · MichaelHughes