Mo'z Thinkz » kool apps

Backbone everywhere

Morriz — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 16:26:25 +0000

I finally put my newly built Node.js MVC stack on github! You can download it here: backbone-everywhere.

What’s so special about it? Here’s my list of exciting features:

Pages are rendered on the Node.js server by Backbone and jQuery.
All script resources are bundled by browserify and fileify, uglified by uglify, and gzipped by connect-gzip for fast loading and deployment on other possible javascript environments.
The entire Backbone MVC stack works on the server, and is loaded in javascript enabled browsers to take over from there.
The app state is reflected in the url by means of HTML5′s pushState, or using hash notation when not supported.
The same app state is regained for non-javascript browsers pulling full requests from the server, so no worries about SEO!
All client / server communication is handled by socket.io (ajax is sooo 2009) and subscribed clients are updated with published models.
A JSON-RPC service listening to ‘/api’ requests, with an easy to build on service layer. Handy for non-web contexts such as mobile devices.
All data is persisted in Redis through an adaptation of mine of backbone-redis, enabling indexing, sorting and foreign key lookups.

For me this is a whole new approach at engineering web applications, but I think I’ve managed to get a grip on it.
Not only that, it gave me a great impulse to reconnect with the pioneers of tomorrow. Because what I have done was build on top of the stuff from people with great vision.
Big shout out to the open source community, and the people willing and wanting to share. The sum of it’s parts will eventually overcome the current patent trolling paradigm.

What are you waiting for? Dig in!

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Node.js is the future of web dev happening now

Morriz — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:51:10 +0000

Having been a javascript fan since I started working with it a long time ago, I immediately fell in love with Node.js. Having discarded Jaxer earlier as too proprietary, even though it offered a solid mechanism for code reuse on the client, I have now adopted the uber active Node community.

You see, me and my partner decided to build a new and exciting community site/app (of which I have to keep the details secret for now). So when I started designing our new web 3.0 app with accompanying mobile app, I thought about and thoroughly investigated the possible frameworks out there. We decide to build a single page application that would work in all javascript clients, and would gracefully degrade to server roundtrips when javascript was not available (but also to enable deep linking for SEO). I quickly decided to discard most PHP frameworks for our MVC setup. Not only because of the fact that those were mostly too bloated or complex, but also because it implied having to recode a lot of functionality for the client. Of course I also favor the stateful and event driven possibilities of javascript, so I made the paradigm shift and chose the Node javascript stack.

With all the Node modules out there it is finally possible to create a full MVC framework operating on the server as well as in the client, in the form of backbone.js with the help of bones (a Node backbone server implementation offering code reuse in the client).
And with the help of HTML5′s new pushState, we don’t have to worry about breaking Google’s need for deep linking. (Those looking for an example with gracefully degrading URL’s, take a look at the jquery address plugin.)
More goodies come in the form of the browserify module, enabling us to optimally pack all our resources for client side usage, even all our templates and other static files!

Some more info for those interested:

With regards to storage, we decided to go for Cassandra, since we expect a lot of writes, and a lot of scaling. In the mean time I am hoping somebody will come up with a nice abstraction on top of the new Cassandra CQL language, since there are already some Node modules out there working with it.

Taking sessions into account, I am currently favouring Redis, which also has a nice pubsub layer. But I haven’t investigated that path fully yet.

In the mean time I am working on an iphone demo in Appcelerator’s Titanium. Too bad it doesn’t support all the functionality we need on Android as well.

That’s all for now. I have to try and curb my enthusiasm, as all this goodness may come at the expense of my sanity due to sleep deprivation.

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1995 is here!

Morriz — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 14:11:54 +0000

Did you read my previous post? 1995 is here. Well, almost. I can now listen to or view any track, video or stream I want, since I have added dTunes and PwnPlayer to my iPhone. They rock!

dTunes is an alternative to iTunes. It doesn’t support podcast downloading/viewing (iTunes does that well and for free anyway), but does offer:

torrent downloading with a webinterface defaulting to thepiratebay.org website;
a SeeqPod interface enabling almost all of their online functionality such as:
- searching/discovering/browsing music/video:
- downloading/streaming music or video files;
- browsing my Podlists (SeeqPod’s online playlists). Problem is that it wont let me start playback of a playlist, nor let me create new Podlists. So I am left to downloading/streaming one track at a time. (And that suxx, so where’s the SeeqPod app?)
a TinyTube interface (providing PDA-screen optimized video’s from well known 3rd parties);
shake and play: turn the feature on and shake yer iPhone to let it play shuffled songs :)

How kool is that? But like I said, one problem is that it won’t allow me to create podlists , so I am tempted into downloading tracks for later organising (which I am trying to avoid). However, at other times you are likely to rip your own or somebody else’s cd’s. So you are bound to collect media files sooner or later anyway. And for that we have the PwnPlayer, which is an alternative to the original ‘iPod’ player. It does everything the iPod player does, plus:

filesystem browsing and playing;
on the fly playlist creation.

One problem with the PwnPlayer is that it’s not so easy to sync it with desktop music apps like RhythmBox. (I think there are ways, but it involves hacking xml files on yer iPhone.) I use AirSharing to move files to its public folder on its webdav server, and created a symlink to that AirSharing folder in my ~/Library/Music folder. I also created a link there to the downloads folder that dTunes uses: ~/Media/Downloads. So now I can listen to and organise my incoming files from within PwnPlayer (or MobileFinder for more file management options).

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iPhone home

Morriz — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:54:55 +0000

I finally managed to go to a Belgian store and got me the last simlock free 16G black iPhone (of that particular week). Went home, tried to jailbreak it first over VMware, which fortunately told me in a rather early stage that it wouldn’t work. But then it dawned on me that I still had a dualboot XP setup (doh!), and JB’d that sucker in a whiffy.
WHY, oh WHY didn’t I get me one SOONER? With the port of apt-get in the form of Cydia, it’s just like my Ubuntu! I’m in heaven, going through all those repositories offering me all da goodiez from open source geekdom. But wait, there’s so much more. After viewing some apps in uncle Stevies appstore, I googled around a bit for some easier handling of my insta-app needs. And thats when I found that little gem called Installous. It can install ipa files, which are basically user created archives of an installed app, which can be created with Crackulous. Just go to http://appulo.us, and you can see what people are sharing. It’s actually a better experience than the AppStore itself in my opinion. My mobile life will never be the same.

I have created a special iPhone apps page where I am listing and reviewing my favourite apps. If you haven’t JB’d your iPhone yet, I suggest you do that asap :p

Did I already say I am in heaven? I can play LastFM without even a bit of lag, and the same goes for any stream over 3G, even on the highway! Some of the time I listen to dubstep.fm on ShoutCast, but I mostly crank it up for my favorite number 1 stream from InterGalacticFM :) Finally, no more downloading music! Which is what I hoped for back in 1995, when I stopped buying plastic media and started downloading over dial-in….what a way to come :]

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Music for me

Morriz — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:42:43 +0000

At last at last! I am getting old and must be a little bit deaf, for I didn’t hear of this beautiful gem called PocketScrobbler. It’s a LastFM client for my Windows Mobile 6.1 device! Yoohoo! Finally I can stream LastFM over bluetooth in my car. I wished for such a thing to happen the day I heard of the interwebs existence, and alas, its here! Not that I will enjoy it’s meager interface/options for long, because my iPhone day is coming closer and closer. And they have many clients for LastFM, according to some wiki :) Please God, let my current employer give me a couple of hours off to drive over the border of Belgium, so I can buy an unlocked 3G iPhone without that not so 3G, 2 year T-Mobile contract :p

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Looking Good, Feeling Fresh

Morriz — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:13:58 +0000

Yesss! I managed to put some time and effort into this blog and made it to my liking. Finally!

There are still some things I have to put up with for now, like the Flickr photo plugin behaving badly. It won’t consistently work with the lightbox module. If you click on one of my random pix it takes you to an HTML version of the gallery. Hmmm, time to override/add some event handlers then.

What constantly needs updating, are my favorite apps and open source section. Go check em out! I even made special sections for my apps:

I’ll try to keep them as updated as possible :)

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Kohjinsha SR

Morriz — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:29:14 +0000

Ok, I was in Japan..and had to get me one: the Kohjinsha SR. Of course I also ordered the 2 GB mem upgrade, the large battery and the car charger.
I must say it’s rather sweet. The touchscreen especially has me panting. Installed some FF plugins like mouse gestures and the likes, and now it’s almost dashboard ready for my car :p. Almost. I just setup a XAMPP server to serve me a google maps page which updates every 4 seconds (thanks to the original post by Ryan Byrd). Now I am waiting for the next GpsBabel beta that supports my Qstarz BT1000 gps mouse. With a little mashing of google maps services I can drive around and see my personalised stuff be updated on the screen in real time :).

Update: the latest GpsBabel just came out, and I got my setup working aok! Darn slowness of my phones GPRS internet connection won’t handle the payload though :(

Something related that also needs mashing into my own project:

Google Calendar Map Generator

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Songza: just music, no strings.

Morriz — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 23:25:57 +0000

Ha, very refreshing! Remember how most of todays online music services want you to install a client? Or want you to register? Or give you the impression that it might be tapping into a limited store of sponsored songs? Or are just too complex or trying to do too much?

Go check out Songza. It’s just a Plain Ol’ Website (with some smart scripting) that makes you search what you want and then play/playlist it with a clean friendly interface. I don’t say it looks that nice, but hey, I just wanna hear some music!

If you wonder where the songs are actually coming from, I checked under the hood: Youtube items are searched for, and only the audio is played. I wonder how much of those downloaded bits are actually used for music. Might not be such a good use of your bandwidth resources :P Also, if you are a quality freak, you might barf on some of the noise…

Anyway, try it while it’s online! The copyright lawyers might decide to take it down before turning to the real bad boy of the class: Youtube itself.

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