Supernifty - nifty stuff » technical

Speed Scrabble Notifier for Firefox

peter — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:20:31 +0000

If you’re a Speed Scrabble player and running Firefox, then you might be interested in trying the new Speed Scrabble Extension.

The add-on helps you keep track of who is currently online so you can easily drop in for a game. Try it out!.

Speed Scrabble is a fast, fun and free online multiplayer word game. If you’ve not played it before then check it out!

If you aren’t a Firefoxer, there are similar extensions for Safari and Chrome.

If you’re a software developer interested in seeing how the extension works, the source code is freely available and can be used for any purpose.

If you have any thoughts on the new extension, feel free to get in touch!

JavaScript Task Queue – Hack it #9

peter — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 04:28:37 +0000

Suppose you have a lot of tasks with completion callbacks to complete in the browser, but you want to do them sequentially. For instance, you might have a list of AJAX requests to make to your server.

This JavaScript demonstrates a simple solution:

If you can’t see the source code, look here.

Book Review – Programming HTML5 Applications by Zachary Kessin (O’Reilly Media)

peter — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 09:03:03 +0000

“Programming HTML5 Applications” is a new book from O’Reilly media that focusses on some of the new technologies available in HTML5. It also places significant emphasis on the language of web applications – JavaScript.

The book starts with a brief history of the Internet and the web, before covering some of the trickier features of JavaScript in Chapter 2 – primarily closures, the event-oriented nature of JavaScript, and the DOM.

Next is a good overview of two JavaScript frameworks: the ultra-popular JQuery and the more application oriented ExtJS, before moving on to some testing frameworks – QUnit for JavaScript unit testing, and Selenium for browser interface testing.

The author then moves on to HTML5, briefly covering:

local storage,
application caching,
web workers and
web sockets.

Finally, some interesting server side technologies are described: the “cloud” paradigm, node.js and Erlang. The book concludes with some useful JavaScript tools.

The copy provided for this review was an “early access” version which hasn’t been through the full editing process. The book clearly still requires considerable polish – I was surprised to find that the HTML5 chapters cover less than half the book; they feel incomplete. The “web workers” chapter contains a detailed example, but the other HTML5 chapters do not.

When learning a new technology, I like expert, clear advice about best-practise, and the production-readiness of each technology. This was lacking in the chapters on HTML5. For instance, there is little mention of which browser versions support which technology – an important consideration when deciding whether or not to use a particular feature.

Currently much better HTML5 resources are the truly excellent Dive into HTML5 and HTML5 Rocks.

In contrast, the JavaScript chapters are well-written and informative, particularly the framework and testing chapters. I would have liked to have seen some analysis of the other major frameworks. The overview of QUnit and Selenium and their use-cases made for a useful introduction to these tools.

When the final copy comes out, hopefully the HTML5 chapters will have filled out, and the many little errors corrected. Assuming this happens, this book will serve as an introduction to the main technologies involved in building an HTML5 application.

Note: This review applies to an “early access” version of the book and was provided by O’Reilly Media as part of their blogger review program.

Real-Time Auctions with HTML5, PayPal, and Google App Engine

peter — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:05:49 +0000

Supernifty’s latest series of technical articles demonstrates the use of Google App Engine and PayPal to build a real-time auction site.

We also show off some HTML5 and discuss some of the issues associated with designing a site suitable for mobile devices.

All pretty interesting if you’re into this kind of stuff. Check it out:

Or go straight to the source code.

Google App Engine, PayPal, Adaptive Payments – The Tutorial

peter — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:37:19 +0000

The final part of my tutorial on using Google App Engine with PayPal’s adaptive payments to create an online market is available.

It extends the example online market application developed in part two by covering some of the practical considerations and handy features of hosting on GAE.

In summary:

Supernifty uptime monitoring

peter — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 09:35:39 +0000

Having trouble connecting to Supernifty? Check our uptime stats, provided by Pingdom.

If at any time you encounter problems or slowness connecting to Supernifty, please let us know.

Google App Engine and PayPal Adaptive Payments with Python – part 2

peter — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:04:00 +0000

If you’re interested in Google App Engine, online payments and Python, then check out part 2 of Supernifty’s tutorial.

It extends the example online market application developed in part one by demonstrating:

Chained payments;
Instant Payment Notification (IPN); and
Embedded Payments

All handy stuff if you want to learn how to use this technology.

In summary:

Regular expression and Javascript Text Transformation Library

peter — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:26:37 +0000

Supernifty has a new resource – Text Transformer. It’s a handy place to keep JavaScript text transformations and regular expressions.

If you’ve ever spent time building a complicated regular expression or transformation, check out this new page. Building regular expressions is tricky enough that you should only have to do it once, or not at all.

If someone hasn’t already built a regex that does what you want, submit yours to the site so that you can use it again later.

The site uses JavaScript to build the transformations, full source code for each transformation is available for perusal and modification – a useful learning resource.

You can also chain transformations together. For example, chain Extract Text from HTML with Word count to get the word count of a HTML page. Handy!

Keep track of new transformations with the RSS feed

We also have an API available so potentially the tool could be integrated into other applications. If you have ideas, or want to learn more, please contact us.

This will increasingly become a useful resource for JavaScript developers and regex writers, as well as anyone needing to do tricky text transformations – watch this space

Google App Engine, PayPal, Python – A Tutorial

peter — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 10:37:42 +0000

Interested in accepting payments with PayPal Adaptive Payments using Google App Engine? Check out this tutorial by Supernifty.

It covers the steps involved in getting set up with Google App Engine and building a simple store with PayPal as the payment provider.

The source code is available from GitHub.

In summary:

Getting started with PayPal on Django

peter — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 09:18:38 +0000

If you’re a Django (or Python) developer, and want to integrate a payment solution into your web app, check out this tutorial by Supernifty: Getting started with PayPal on Django.

It covers the steps involved in getting set up with PayPal and building a simple online store with Django.

The sample code is also available from GitHub.

In summary: