Digitrolled Just Trolling in the most digital way possible

Today was a very special day. We had Kosuke Kawaguchi coming to our office in Akasaka, Tokyo and telling us about how to develop plug-ins for the Jenkins continuous integration system. At first I thought it would be a challenge because I did not know Jenkins from before and I thought that maybe I can't develop the plug. 2 hours later I had understood the philosophy behind Jenkins. It followed a plugin-architecture much like that of eclipse and had a couple of hundreds of Abstract classes that were fairly easy to implement and thus allowed the code to extend the functionalities. More importantly, the thing to "get" was how Jenkins was structured in a fairly straight forward interface-defined manner. In about 3-4 hours I had covered the gap from being a "n00b" to a person with a fair bit of understanding of the underlying core technologies in place. That said, I am very much impressed with the ease one can implement the plugins. No wonder there are so many plugins already on the jenkins hosted server.

Anyways, this episode taught me something. That software philosophy is much greater than the software itself. If you can connect a lot of people using using the philosophy then maybe you have a better job of reaching out to them and telling them hey this can be done this way because of something. I think philosophy has a much greater role in determining the future of software because software is not just stagnant it evolves over time and thus it needs to be backed up by philosophy. When we have that kind of a philosophy, I am sure that people will understand how to use it. That is what I am saying now this is because some of the software just pops up and then it vanishes we do not even know why they manage to live such a short life. I think it is because they do not have a philosophy associated with them and philosophies are closely related to architecture of the platform or the software in question. It may be motivated by the architecture and not completely denote the functionality of the architecture itself. And I guess plugin-based architectures are so much overlooked but they offer the most sophisticated features and customizations. People like to extend these softwares because they come with bare minimum functionality built within them but plenty of extension points to start from and start forking/pulling/merging.

This is what in my opinion moves things forward: a software philosophy more than anything else.

In my previous post you saw how I wrote an uploader.js library for managing uploads to imgur.

Now the question is how to use it.

Here is a sample source code from a phonegap+jquery page.

The uploading happens in 2 steps. First, we choose the photo from the photolibrary. uploader.js sets up a callback_func to be invoked whenever the photo gets selected, it returns a 64 bit encoded string of the image. The function on the html side then sets up another function that take cares of the uploading process, setting up a second callback which takes care of any errors that might be raised. Thus it sort of sets up a nested callback.

Sample source code:

Enough has been said about Java and how the Java EE 6 specification has caused the process of making web applications in Java slow and painful. True with Java the problem is of comprehensibility and integration of the different components. On top of that you have a number of things such as patterns, JPA and the web front end files. All of this come with different kind of frameworks to ease up development, for example the JPA object relational mapping can be solved by using Hibernate. However there was no meta framework, something unheard of in the Java web application development world. A framework to manage the frameworks ? Hmm, very strange indeed.

Spring Roo solves all of that by providing a nifty overlaying architecture that just does one thing - integrating the different patterns and best practices and different providers/frameworks to do that. It keeps you focused on the logic and thats what is more important.

One of the things I seriously hate while doing work is to be able to look back and say that things could have been different but I did not put the required effort to get the job done. Completion of software projects is as much about planning as it is about being able to put the required amount of effort into it. The thing is that anyone can do anything technically, but it is the things that we actually do, matter the most and are the ones seen by the world. So yeah, while the world is harping on being agile and doings things fast, one step at a time, I think that doing them and not leaving them for later is a bigger game changer. No matter how agile we can be, there are things which should be done at an early stage of the project and cant be left for later. There is no guide which can tell which decisions fall under these categories, it's an individual's job and an individual regret that lives on with him/her later for the rest of the project cycle. We all wish for things to happen, but we can't just hope for them to happen, we have to satisfy the necessary preconditions in order to get the job done.

I commenced on making an iPad at the start of the semester and by and large towards the end I have learnt so many concepts. I am going to detail out solutions, some common ones, found out from the web or forums or just pure ingenuity.
I am not a big iOS coder, I am more familiar with javascript, java, python and C. But then again its the same MVC principle all over again. Although, the standard way of doing some things in XCode would be to use protocols, I don’t usually find myself very familiar with these constructs. So here are my solutions/tips.
Troll No 1:

Problem
You have 2 view controllers, master and detail, you want to load something (a GET request) to your detail panel (which is a hierarchy of navigation controllers). You can do it via a GET request in the root view controller of the navigation controller in the detail panel but you want to do it via the master view controller since it is at a higher level.
Solution
here’s how I did it.
NavigationController has a property called viewControllers which stores the stack of view controllers. The first one is the controller you wish to invoke as delegate. All you need to do is this:

UINavigationController* v1 = [self.splitViewController.viewControllers objectAtIndex:1];
[[RKClient sharedClient] get:@"/hello" delegate:[v1.viewControllers objectAtIndex:0]];

All you need to is make a get request via the RKClient and pass the delegate to be the first view controller in the navigation stack.
Its not clean, but does the job

 Testing screenshots