Currently, I am working on a hobby project, a theater production and actor database (mwtdb for short). It is visible on GitHub and open source.
Requirements What I want to create is something similar to IMDb, which focuses on movies, TV and celebreties, but for amateur theater. A very basic version will contain actors, directors and technicians, contributing to productions.
From a technical point of view, I will create a web application, using Angular and Neo4j, a graph database.
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I am currently experimenting with service workers (see Using Service Workers or Service Workers: an Introduction). One scenario is to provide mock data when no connection to an external service is available. And by theory, service workers should be able to intercept any request made by the website.
But there is one exception. If you fetch data with jQuery.ajax() function and use async: false, the service worker will not be able to intercept any of those requests.
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Soon, I will attend the Technical Summit 2016, which will take place from Dec 6 to 8 in Darmstadt. This is my first conference for my new employer (ConWeaver), where I am working pretty much along the same lines as for Comparis, meaning front-end development with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and its many derivatives (Sass, LESS, TypeScript). A new challenge is Angular, which has recently reached version 2 and comes with a nodejs-based workflow and with mostly alpha-staged tools around.
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After my first week at ConWeaver, I got a first impression of the search framework and the technology used. The hot topic in the moment is Angular, which is a web application framework. In contrast to other server-side frameworks, the application logic is on the client (browser). This is a major trend now, aiming at Progressive Web Apps, which are as quick and responsive as native applications.
To work with Angular, I need to understand the entire ecosystem which has evolved for developing with Angular.
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I have started to read a new book, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. She takes quite a good approach and starts at 63 BC with Cicero accusing Catiline of conspiring against Rome (Second Catiline conspiracy), in one of the most popular political speeches.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?
How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?
After this introduction, the next chapter goes back to the beginnings of Rome as a little village.
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One pleasurable cinematic experience was the movie A Hologram for the King by Tom Tykwer. Tom Hanks stars as an ageing sales agent, who is sent to Saudi Arabia for a pitch of a virtual reality conference system. He finds himself with his fellow colleages in a tent in the desert, the king far away and probably never coming. I really enjoyed watching it and can recommend it.
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For the next five days, I will be on an innovation week, as my company calls it. I will be away from the daily business and dig into one topic of my own choice, but of course related to current challenges within the company. And since service-oriented architecture is something that moves us in the moment, I chose service scalability as my topic. But for that to work, I need a quick way to set-up services within their own context, making it possible to add more service nodes when needed.
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In the past week, I explored Foundation, the “most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world” – a bold statement.
What is a responsive front-end framework? A responsive website displays its content on any device size in a meaningful way. Imagine a horizontal navigation menu, which is perfect on a large screen. That same menu would look totally crammed on a mobile phone screen. Therefore the site switches to a compact version of the same menu, e.
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