kaffeinecoma

You can do some poor man's load testing very simply with siege (http://www.joedog.org/index/siege-home). Put a bunch of URLs in a text file, and run it with "siege -f urls.txt".

Of course it doesn't prove that your code is bug-free, but if you have concurrency issues, this will help shake them out. I've used this many times to reveal problems with DB connection pooling, concurrency issues, and excessive session size.

I created this largely for my own use, but I'm considering turning it a product. It's still very beta and has limited functionality- only the basic widgets are supported at the moment, but I'm working on adding more.

Feedback welcome, thanks.

Clickable link: http://aceto.armhold.com.

When I was a child I could not understand why every adult did not become a Good Humor man- my absolute dream job at the time.

Not a fan of the syntax, but my real gripe is with the header files, and all the DRY that entails. If I were Apple that's the first thing I'd aim to fix, rather than giving us ARC.

Anyone else find it odd that Steve Wozniak has to stand in line to get the latest device from Apple? Is it just that he enjoys the meet & greet, or is he not enough of a living legend for Apple to ship him a complimentary one for free?

It's because of sites like this that I started using unique passwords for every new login. Chrome + OSX Keychain make this reasonably easy now. Looking forward to the day when the browser will just automatically generate one for me.

Of course, I'd not trust backing up my data to a site that fails so miserably at basic security.

"make them use git" - given that the entire business is built around git, I should hope so. Git isn't the most user-friendly VCS, but why shouldn't a competent designer be able to pick it up? I've even got our designer working with branches.

What's interesting is that these prices are for design only; they do not include HTML/CSS, much less code to make a webapp functional.

It's really easy to contribute negatively to a project. On the business end, I've worked with people who changed priority/direction/feature-sets so frequently that they actually made things worse; the project would have been better without them, hence a negative contribution.

On the technical side, have you never worked with a programmer that insisted on introducing his favorite framework/language, or declared that the "current code sucks, it needs to be re-written"? That's potentially a negative contribution. Hell I've even been that guy. It's not only possible, it's common.

And as a bonus, you get to be on the hook for maintaining that site until the owner gets bored with it, making whatever changes they want (for free).

I think there are plenty of people with less than zero ability to execute, i.e. a net negative contribution.

I'm uncomfortable when people want to volunteer their ideas to me for exactly that reason. There's also usually an implicit question: how much will it cost you to build this for me?

Rather than hearing someone's idea for an app I'd much prefer to hear about an existing, unsolved problem that they have. You know, an actual problem worth solving. Those tend to be the more fruitful variety of ideas, IMHO.

But is it really worth the headache of such a Frankenstein architecture?

I initially fell in love with the "no sysadmin" aspect of App Engine, and started building apps around it. Eventually I realized that (for me, anyway) the upside isn't really worth the trouble of having to contort my apps to work in Google's sandbox- can't run SQL, have to deal with datastore timeouts, CPU timeouts, etc. When you're done coding work-arounds for all of these things, are you really coming out ahead?

Constructive criticism: change "goto" -> "go to". Unless you're targeting programmers. :-)

I tend to agree. One of the things that won me over to the idea of using an IDE for Java is that I can (effortlessly) click into a class from a library (or the JVM itself) and read the source code. Being able to read the source so easily has rendered Javadoc superfluous for me. I'd hate to think that Scala source code would become so "hard" that it's no longer useful as documentation.

Curious, why do you think static typing is brutal for poor developers? I rather think it saves them from hanging themselves a lot of the time.

That was my thought too. I moved to Git recently, but it wasn't that long ago that I was rejoicing over how awesome SVN was, simply because I could rename things (files! directories!) easily and still reasonably track history.

Hmm, was it SCCS or RCS that allowed you to "lock" files and then go away for the weekend, effectively shutting out the rest of your team?

I recently moved from Glassfish back to good old Tomcat because of this classloader leak. With GF, I could typically do no more than 1-2 redeploys before having to kill -9 it. That was really painful. We found that we weren't really using many GF/JEE features that couldn't be added to Tomcat as a simple jar dependency (J2EE connection pooling was one nice built-in, but we'll use c3p0 or something similar soon). Tomcat is a breath of fresh air- starts/stops in < 4 seconds, and redeploys never hang.

Are you planning on handling the money aspect (i.e. escrow) of consulting, like elance/odesk do? Or is this more of an introduction service?

PS: I once got stiffed for $6500, so I put up a "client hasn't paid" notice on the (demo) website for my code. I later learned that the guy I was accusing of non-payment was very likely a stolen identity. Some guy from Eastern Europe was using many fake identities and scamming lots of developers. So I ended up:

1) out $6500

2) feeling dumb for getting cheated in the first place

3) feeling bad for having pseudo-publicly excoriated a likely innocent

I wish in retrospect that I had taken the higher ground, open-sourced the code and just moved on.

Because it reeks a bit of airing dirty laundry, similar to the guy who added a "my client John Smith hasn't paid his bill, so I'm uploading this message to his website which I still control, in order to publicly shame him" which we saw a few months back.

Don't get me wrong- I think he's totally within his rights to (publicly) exclude him from the license. And as a developer who's been stiffed before, I sympathize. I think the restraint he's shown so far in that README is noble, and I hope he gets some good PR (and thus new clients) out of this.

He's trying to make the best of a bad situation- he put in a lot of time for which he was not compensated, but perhaps he can get some good PR out of it. Maybe down the road someone else will use his software and throw him some billable hours for customization.

Tempting and amusing, perhaps, but it wouldn't exactly put him in a flattering light as a contractor. It might even scare off potential future clients.

I think he's doing the right thing by releasing it as OSS. Hopefully he'll pick up some support hours if anyone actually ends up using it.

What do you need FB for? Is it just for authentication? I have a certain level of paranoia when a site wants my FB info to connect; I almost always say "no". As much as I hate the proliferation of accounts, I'd rather create a local account to try out some new web site than associate my FB info.

For my own projects, I try to offer users the best of both worlds: create a local account if you want, or login with FB (example login screen: http://armhold.com/resources/com.armhold.QuickstartPage/comb...). It's certainly more work for you as a programmer, but you'll have fewer drive-bys that way.

Good luck.

When I said "might have been an intentional move on Apple's part to make it less obvious which apps are running" I meant nothing nefarious on Apple's part.

Rather that they seem to be heading in a direction where they want the user to not be concerned with whether a particular app is running or not- just click on it, and it will pop up in the state you last left it, whether it was actually running or not. Just like (many apps) on iOS.

Nope, the change came with 10.5. The commands explained here still work:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2007101815375480

It toggles your dock between 3D and 2D. The 3D setting still has the dots, but they're very hard to see. So I was wrong about them disappearing entirely, but that's the change I was referring to.

If you still have the 2D look in Lion perhaps you ran this command previously under Leopard? I did, and the setting survived my upgrade to Lion, so I still have the 2D enabled.

I think Apple has been backing away from that "promise" for a while now. Remember in Snow Leopard (or maybe it was Leopard?) when they disabled that white dot that used to show beneath running apps? That made it very hard to tell which apps were actually running, vs just docked in your Finder for easy access. I know a lot of people went and updated some plist to revert to the old behavior (I did, and also did so for my wife's computer). But it seems like that might have been an intentional move on Apple's part to make it less obvious which apps are running.

I did in fact consider adding some hooks for payment gateways, but in the end I felt that it would be too specialized to do in a general way. A simple site can start easily and add a Google Checkout button (like I did) with a simple blob of HTML. Of course that's not a solution for everyone.

One possibility I thought of was adding support for payment verification callbacks. So you can create single-use digital downloads that are only authorized after payment is verified. If I ever get traction, that's definitely on my list for a future feature.

Thanks for the link to to the Saas starter kit- I'll take a look.

Good question. It's built with Maven, so technically I am not distributing the libraries with the downloadable product.

You're correct- it's more targeted for an entrepreneur who's trying to hire someone on elance to build such a thing. You can build this in a few hours in RoR? I was thinking it'd be more like maybe a weekend of work to replicate, but perhaps I've underestimated the power of Rails. Thanks!