Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

Google introduces Gmail API

Google is introducing the new Gmail API:

While IMAP is great at what it was designed for (connecting email clients to email servers in a standard way), it wasn’t really designed to do all of the cool things that you have been working on, which is why this week at Google I/O, we’re launching the beta of the new Gmail API.

This is somewhat expected:

Designed to let you easily deliver Gmail-enabled features, this new API is a standard Google API, which gives RESTful access to a user’s mailbox under OAuth 2.0 authorization. It supports CRUD operations on true Gmail datatypes such as messages, threads, labels and drafts.

As a standard Google API, you make simple HTTPS calls and get your responses in JSON, XML or Google Protobuf formats.

This is a nice bonus:

In contrast to IMAP, which requires access to all of a user’s messages for all operations, the new API gives fine-grained control to a user’s mailbox. For example, if your app only needs to send mail on behalf of a user and does not need to read mail, you can limit your permission request to send-only.

To keep in sync, the API allows you to query the inbox change history, thereby avoiding the need to do “archaeology” to figure out what changed.

They are also saying that it’s fast.  These are very welcome news indeed.

GitHub introduces the Revert button

Git is an amazing version control tool.  But like anything else, it has it’s clunky sides.  One of them is the undo of some operations, such as merges.  It is possible, but it’s not trivial.  And that’s the reason for projects like gitjk to exist.

GitHub however has been known for smoothing down the edges of git, making it easier and more fun to use.  Today, they’ve introduced yet another change that is very welcome – a Revert button.

github revert

When pressed, it will help you to create a Pull Request that reverts the changes in question.  Brilliant, just brilliant!

Front-end development bookmarks

Front-end development bookmarks – a huge list of frontend development resources Dmitriy Navrotskyy has collected. Sorted from general knowledge at the top to concrete problems at the bottom.