Tag: web development

After a year of using NodeJS in production

There are days, when I feel jealous of all the young kids playing around with new technologies.  I need a certain level of stability and acceptance of the technology before I can apply it to client projects.  And I need time, which is a very scarce resource lately.

And yet there are days, when I feel good about being somewhat reserved and conservative in my technology stack choices.  Reading this blog post makes me feel just that.  Of course I need to try it out for myself and shape my own opinion, but with my lack of time, this should do.

I spent a year trying to make Javascript and more specifically Node work for our team. Unfortunately during that time we spent more hours chasing docs, coming up with standards, arguing about libraries and debugging trivial code more than anything.

Would I recommend it for large-scale products? Absolutely not. Do people do that anyway? Of course they do. I tried to.

I would however recommend Javascript for front-end development such as Angular or React (like you have another choice).

I would also recommend Node for simple back-end servers mainly used for websockets or API relay.

Now if only somebody wrote a similar post about Docker …

Web Development With Assembly

The other day I was joking with a colleague of mine about how much fun it would be to do the web development in Assembly.  All the usual stuff – pages would be super fast, and the whole subject makes it for some fun interview material, as the candidates mention Assembly pretty much on every CV.

WebDev with Assembly

And then I decided to do a quick Google search.  To my (not so great) surprise I got to hilarious this Reddit thread, which, among other things, links to MiniMagAsm, a web development framework written in Assembly.  It compiles into a native binary and can be executed as a CGI script.

I’m not going to use it any time soon, but I think it’s super cool, and way more than a simple “hello world” page that I was expecting to find.

SugarCRM cache directory – it is NOT a cache directory!

Here is a useful reminder from a few years back – “SugarCRM cache directory – it is NOT a cache directory!“.   Unlike most modern day web applications, which use cache/ folder for temporary files, which are safe to delete, SugarCRM keeps a bunch of stuff in there, which, if disappeared, would leave you in a very uncomfortable and confused stay.

Things have obviously improved over the years, but it’s still far from perfect.  And while we are on the subject of surprising issues with SugarCRM, make sure check my other post about working with encrypted values.  Basically, the summary is: backup, backup, backup!  If you want to sleep well at night, backup SugarCRM’s full file system (files, configurations, temporary files, caches, etc) and its database.  And never ever change anything.