Zendlab - Death and Rebirth

Lack of updates apologize

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:15:00 GMT

I've received emails asking me about the rest of my ASP articles and the only thing I can say for now is: "They will arrive...". Sorry I couldn't put a deadline for them 'cause while I know exactly what I want to write, it costs me a lot of time to search for the references I want to cite and currently time is not an available asset. I'm working hard on some Collective Intelligence based algorithms and documents and I must finish it until 2010.02.12, so the blog updates will be minimal. But don't worry, the articles are in the 2010 TODO queue for sure XD

gEdit AutoComplete 0.10.0

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:39:00 GMT

I'm very glad to announce today that I'm releasing gEdit AutoComplete plugin version 0.10.0. Now the plugin has features that I was really missing and it just cost me a little of time between Xmas and new year, so it's my first gift for the programmers in 2010. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Important Notes

This is probably my last iteration of the gEdit AutoComplete plugin using the current architecture, 'cause the gEdit core team (pbor, jessevdk, nacho and others) are working on a native GTKSourceCompletion engine that should be the basis for the next version of this or the gEdit official one. Meanwhile, I'm inviting anyone interested to make additional language libraries to make the plugin better while the stable official version isn't available.

TDD (Test Driven Development) in ASP/VBScript

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:46:00 GMT

Introduction

This article deals with an idea that I believe to be one of the key concepts of modern programming. When I say modern, I'm referencing to methodologies that re-appeared with hype names and excessive power during the second half of the 90's and the beginning of the 21^st century as an answer to the bureaucratic, slow and heavy regulated methods in use at the time. As some of their examples are: ASD(Adaptive Software Development), DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method), Scrum, XP(Extreme Programming) among others...

These methodologies, that were known as lightweight methods until year 2001 and then became the Agile Software Development, have some aspects in common. At first, they were "born" from the developers necessity to focus more on the product in which they're working on than in hard processes related to development. It means that, unlike the classic long-term strategies and specifications that predict and document the entire project from the beginning to the end, the development is made in small iterations, with minimal planning. Another important factor is that these methodologies are in favour of face-to-face communication rather than written documentation among the team members (which are small, around 5-9 people). Third and most important to all programmers, in my humble opinion, is the constant execution of automated tests in all steps to ensure the quality of each small unit of code they generate.

Despite being an interesting topic, I'll stop my wondering here, because it's not my goal to teach techniques to manage software teams, but to teach one of the things that all of those techniques will be require you to do. Before anything, I want to remind you that a programmer will always program, so that doesn't matter too much what methodology is adopted by the company where you are working on. For fun, below is a strip from Geek Hero Comic that was kindly provided by the author Salvatore Iovene for this article:

For those who don't know yet, this is the third article of a series that I committed myself to write. Here is the list of articles:

ASP, a misinterpreted technology
Event-Driven-Programming and lambda function in ASP/VBScript.
TDD (Test Driven Development) in ASP/VBScript.
Languages: Based on Objects and Object Oriented.
Object Oriented in ASP/VBScript "Hackers way".
"Scripting Components", the ace in the role.
Caching: the concept of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) applied to ASP.

If you're reading one of my articles for the first time, I strongly recommend that you read the previous ones first, because I'm trying to lead you into a great abstraction, presenting the topics incrementally.

Projects are now on GitHub

Fri, 29 May 2009 04:43:00 GMT

Better late than never! From now on, all my recent open-source contributions will be available at my github.com account. The current projects are:

ASP Xtreme Evolution (my ASP framework)
Exuberant-ctags (updates to make it's ASP parsing better)
Gedit-* (a lot of good things for gedit)
GTKSourceView-2.0 (updates to add/enhance language.specs)
jquery-vs-mootools (this one is an interesting article I translated)

Although this blog isn't being informative and updated as I think it should be, I'm currently very active and developing a lot of things but not writing much about it. Watching my git account will help you to keep the track of the latest updates in my software development. Enjoy!

Tidy and GeSHi WebServices for the mankind

Mon, 11 May 2009 07:45:00 GMT

Introduction

Sometime ago I spent a good amount of time playing with Wez Furlong PHPScript to merge PHP functionalities directly into ASP pages. Although it really can be done, I couldn't feel comfortable enough with the stability of the final application. In fact, the merge between PHP and other ASP languages (VBScript, Javascript, Ruby, Perl and Python) in the same script caused the application to work only in odd requests and not in even ones. Plus it was triggering processing errors in the server. This is incredibly strange and clearly shows that the Active Script port of PHP is flawed. It works fine for .wsc and other command lines things but not plays well with ASP.

Since PHP has a huge community which create really good things, it's interesting to get the benefits of their work in other environments that doesn't run the language. Two notable examples of the good things available in PHP are GeSHi, an incredible code highlighting extension that currently work with over than 130 languages, and Tidy, a nice extension to wrap and indent your XML and HTML. As we can't live without them, I've built the webservices for them both.

Geek Hero Comic at iGoogle

Sun, 10 May 2009 00:44:00 GMT

Today's geekherocomic.com strip came with an interesting news. It's Salvatore Iovene birthday! And the post was about the book his fiancée built with the last entire year strips archive. I really like this guy work, it's a funny part of my day and to celebrate this special occasion I created a gadget to all GeekHeroComic readers to monitor the latest strip directly from iGoogle homepage.

You can add it using:

Happy birthday @siovene! Keep doing this amazing work!

Event-Driven-Programming and lambda function in ASP/VBScript

Thu, 07 May 2009 07:20:00 GMT

Introduction

In this article, I'll speak a little about some issues that I believe are relevant to all modern programmers. However the examples will be written in ASP/VBScript+JScript, so I'll be coherent with the purpose of these articles, which will showcase ASP as an extremely versatile and efficient environment. Here is the list of articles:

ASP, a misinterpreted technology
Event-Driven-Programming and lambda function in ASP/VBScript.
TDD (Test Driven Development) in ASP/VBScript.
Languages: Based on Objects and Object Oriented.
Object Oriented in ASP/VBScript "Hackers way".
"Scripting Components", the ace in the role.
Caching: the concept of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) applied to ASP.

ASP, a misinterpreted technology

Tue, 05 May 2009 05:51:00 GMT

Introduction

After thirteen years of web development, in which the last five I spent almost entirely developing with the .NET platform, I finally saw in Classic ASP the most versatile environment for web development. The main reason for this versatility is, surprisingly, the fact that it is interpreted. It might sound like a joke, mainly because of the whole buzz around the code-behind and the advantages of the compiled code's performance. But, in my opinion, this attribute, summed to multiple languages support, is what guarantees to ASP a distinguish position among the environments for advanced programmers.

Aiming to share my experience and point of view to the whole community, I've decided to create a series of articles, where I'll address key topics that will lead to a greater understanding of the strength hidden in ASP. I've ordered them so that easier topics are discussed first before moving on to the harder ones. Here they are:

ASP, a misinterpreted technology
Event-Driven-Programming and lambda function in ASP/VBScript.
TDD (Test Driven Development) in ASP/VBScript.
Languages: Based on Objects and Object Oriented.
Object Oriented in ASP/VBScript "Hackers way".
"Scripting Components", the ace in the role.
Caching: the concept of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) applied to ASP.

In all subsequent articles, I'll indicate the current stage in bold. I don't intend to stop contributing after the end of the seven subjects. I'll probably attack more problems and more specific topics that illustrate the advantage of using ASP. Well, one step at a time...

Quick Highlight Mode gedit plugin

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 13:17:00 GMT

This plugin provides a faster and easier way to select the current document highlighting mode in gedit. Just press Ctrl+Shift+H, type the language and press Enter.

It's written in Python, so you don't have to compile anything or get any binary. The source is there for inspection and installation.

Logomark and Icons for AXE

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:32:00 GMT

Almost a year has been passed from the first release of AXE and from that to today the project still haven’t it’s own logomark or icons to be used as faveicon. But today, I spent my morning trying to solve this issue. Look, I’m no professional designer, but did my best in this task and liked the result. For the icons I tried to make it compatible with the Tango Icon Guidelines to guarantee a good contrast for both dark and bright backgrounds. I would love to know what you all like or dislike about it. Here’s the final art:

Well, about the new version of AXE, I’m a bit busy working on another project and have no time to polish it. But the enhancements are huge and I hope to have a new version in the next 1 or 2 months.