Application Development Meanderings

I had the chance to read the Manning SPA book. It is a great read and I encourage you to read it. It describes how to use the browser as a deployment platform for your application and to develop your application all in the client (the browser) using javascript. The central idea is that a SPA is a desktop application really in that most of the logic, except data access, occurs on the client. Based on the description, there is a launcher html file that is used. It specifies most of the javascript and CSS resources you need for your application. And there is a specific, or at least recommended, way to manage your javascript code for scalability, etc. It recommends that you manage your "single page application" from the javascript. This is all good stuff because I see most of the execution in a variety of frameworks really moving to the desktop. Some frameworks are still more server centric. Essentially, in a SPA, you do not do the puts/gets etc. back to the server, the javas...

The cake pattern is typically described as a way to use small layers of functionality to create a larger, more complex program. This area of application design is typically designed with application scalability not in the pure performance sense, but in the sense of scaling the application up to more complex functionality and maintainability over time. There have been many papers and blogs on this aspect, but a few especially helpful blogs include: http://debasishg.blogspot.com/2010/02/scala-self-type-annotations-for.html http://jonasboner.com/2008/10/06/real-world-scala-dependency-injection-di https://www.precog.com/blog-precog-2/entry/existential-types-ftw https://coderwall.com/p/t_rapw All of these describe the cake pattern but they all look alittle different and a reader may be left to wondering why are there so many ways to describe the cake pattern? The confusion is warranted. The Cake Pattern is really more of a design pattern than a specific, set- in-stone programmi...

I have been using neo4j for awhile now and I think I have begun to realize that the Node class is really a data transfer object in disguise. Some applications can use it directly, and that's okay and you should because it is simpler to use than other options. Because I need to have to perform other operations on nodes prior releasing them, I need a first-class DBObject type that allows me to use interceptors and various other processing schemes to meet the requirements of my application. For example: Lucene indexing: I need to create special external lucene full text indexing that uses quite a bit of the lucene engine. I need to manage that index in one place where the updates, adds and deletes occur. Property change event: I need to send events when the properties change so that my UI can be updated appropriately. For some properties on a node, I need typed access. I could use a simple wrapper around a Node and access the Node's properties when I need to obtain a va...