Imagine you are starting to work for a customer who has an existing software system that needs to be extended. On your first day at the customer you want to quickly understand the existing piece of software. So you start your favorite IDE and check out the project from Git or Subversion. You are trying to run the project but nothing happens and you are still trying to get anything running but nothing happens again. You are getting frustrated. This blog entry should help you avoid getting others in this situation. But this blog entry is also useful for software architects that need to work with external or newly hired software developers. This blog entry is not so technical, but it is more about how to build software that can easily be extended by new developers.
Posts by Philipp Darkow
Thoughts of a software developer – How to build extendable software
October 21st, 2014 by(https://blog.trifork.com/2014/10/21/thoughts-of-a-software-developer-how-to-build-extendable-software/)
HTML Canvas
September 3rd, 2014 by(https://blog.trifork.com/2014/09/03/html-canvas/)
During my holiday I start to read about the HTML5 canvas object which can be used for a variety of graphical presentations or animations. Honestly, I was quite surprised about the possibilities of the canvas element. At first I am going to give a short description about the canvas object. Which is followed by a simple canvas example and a small part about how to draw a circle. In the end a conclusion is given.
The Spock Framework
July 31st, 2014 by(https://blog.trifork.com/2014/07/31/the-spock-framework/)
In one of my current projects, I started to play around with Groovy and was fascinated how groovy this language is. I got more curious about the way to perform testing and started googling around a little bit. My google research showed me several frameworks to test groovy applications. One of these frameworks is the Spock framework. Spock is created for testing Java and Groovy applications. It has a very clear syntax that is easy to read and it comes with a JUnit runner that ensures you can use it with any of your existing tooling. Furthermore, Spock combines the best features of proven tools like JUnit, jMock, and RSpec, and innovates on top of them. In the first part of the blog I am going to explain how you get started with the Spock framework and how a test method looks like. After that I am going to show how you can use Spock with the Geb framework and what the difference is between testing with Spock alone and Spock combined with Geb. In the end a conclusion is given.
Validating epubs
July 10th, 2014 by(https://blog.trifork.com/2014/07/10/validating-epubs/)
In one of my recent projects, I had to deal with the validation of epubs. Unfortunately there are not many references on this topic on the internet. Therefore I thought it would be good to write a small blog entry about the validation of an epub file. In the first part I want to explain in short what an epub file is and show what issues and problems may occur when dealing with them. The second part is a manual on how to solve these issues and problems. If you have any questions do not hesitate to leave a comment. Read the rest of this entry »
GOTO Amsterdam Conference 2014
July 1st, 2014 by(https://blog.trifork.com/2014/07/01/goto-amsterdam-conference-2014/)
Introduction
Two weeks ago was the GOTO conference in Amsterdam. With a lot of pleasure I was happy to attend one of the best developer conference in the world. There were a massive amount of talks divided into 5 rooms. After a hard time choosing which talk I wanted to attend I ended up attending the following talks:
- 3 SHORT TALKS: There’s an App for that! by 3 different speakers
- Anti-Usability & UX in Games by Simon Bostock
- Spring 4 on Java 8 by Juergen Hoeller
- Software Architecture vs. Code by Simon Brown
- Designing & Evolving a User-oriented API in Elasticsearch by Shay Banon
- REST: I don’t Think it Means What You Think it Does by Stefan Tilkov
- Economic Darwinism, the Next Generation IT & Everything by Uwe Friedrichsen
- Functional Principles for Object-Oriented Developers by Jessica Kerr
I am about to relate three talks I listened to in more details and explain why I found them interesting.
Elasticsearch, Spring MVC & Sencha Touch 2 in the Cloud – Part 2
May 6th, 2014 by(https://blog.trifork.com/2014/05/06/elasticsearch-spring-mvc-sencha-touch-2-in-the-cloud-part-2/)
This is the second part of my blog on how to develop an application using Elasticsearch, Spring MVC and Sencha Touch 2. In my previous blog post part 1 I showed and explained which technologies I used to accomplish the connection between the frontend and backend. In addition I presented the steps to connect a database service (Elasticsearch) with a Spring MVC service. Part 2 will continue the development, in particular the connection between Sencha Touch 2 and the Spring MVC projects. Finally, I will show how to deploy the developed application into the cloud.
Elasticsearch & Spring MVC & Sencha Touch 2 in the Cloud – Part 1
April 15th, 2014 by(https://blog.trifork.com/2014/04/15/elasticsearch-spring-mvc-sencha-touch-2-in-the-cloud-part-1/)
Introduction
Welcome to my third blog entry. In this one, I want to show how to connect three different technologies (database, REST service, and a mobile framework) and deploy them into the cloud. Those three technologies are:
- Elasticsearch (Database)
- Spring MVC (REST service)
- Sencha Touch 2 (Client side framework)
First, I want to give a short introduction of the three technologies. I am going to start with Elasticsearch, followed by Spring MVC and in the end Sencha Touch 2. In the second part, I will explain the services that I used. The first service is called searchly and is a database service. The second service is cloudbees and is used as cloud host. In the end a conclusion is given. Part 2 of this blog will cover a demo with the steps to connect everything with each other. I wish you fun reading this entry and if there are any questions don’t hesitate to drop a comment (Of course you can drop also a comment if you just like it).
Performance of native and web-based mobile applications
January 30th, 2014 by(https://blog.trifork.com/2014/01/30/performance-of-native-and-web-based-mobile-applications/)
Intro
Hello and welcome to my second blog post :). This blogpost is a summary of my master thesis. The topic of my thesis was the performance of mobile applications. In particular I am going to compare native and web-based applications. But at first I will tell a little bit about me. My name is Philipp Darkow and I finished last year (2013) my master diploma in software engineering at the University of Amsterdam. Before my master, I studied at a University of Applied Science in Venlo (Netherlands) and finished with a Bachelor in Software Engineering. During my master thesis I carried out a research at Trifork about the performance of mobile applications.
Meteor – Client & Server Programming in One
January 9th, 2014 by(https://blog.trifork.com/2014/01/09/meteor-client-server-programming-in-one/)
In this blog post I want to introduce to you a relatively new JavaScript framework which is called Meteor. The Meteor framework provides the feature to write server and client side code just in HTML 5, Javascript, and CSS. Right now there is just a preview version available (Preview 0.7.0.1), nonetheless this preview version is quite powerful already. Therefore you can find already a number of meteor application on the market. For example, an application called Share with 911, Interview, ApplyBin, etc. In this blog entry, I want to present some of the features such as the how to write server side and client side code. I want to explain what are templates in the meteor framework and how they are used. Additionally I will show you where and how to store static content such as images and other resources. In the end I will give you my own conclusion and a tutorial to help you get started.
