ntschutta.com » Articles

Ajax: Tools of the trade

Nate — Wed, 27 May 2009 00:52:24 +0000

Over on JavaWorld, you can see my latest article: Ajax: Tools of the trade. If it’s been a while since you looked at client side development and you still think alerts are the end all be all of web debugging, you might want to give it a read. Here’s the official summary:

Where JavaScript developers were once tool-deprived, today we’re often overwhelmed with the abundance of options. In this article, Foundations of Ajax author Nathaniel T. Schutta reviews development environments, debuggers, testing tools, and utilities that elevate JavaScript to first-class status in the Web development world. If you’re still programming JavaScript in a text editor, this survey of the modern tools landscape should open your eyes — and could make your life much easier.

If you like the article, you might also want to listen to the podcast of Andy Glover and I chatting about Ajax, JavaScript, testing and more. Enjoy!

Test Infecting the Legacy Organization

Nate — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:56:40 +0000

As Neal Ford explains, the NFJS Anthology series has been reborn as a monthly magazine and in the current edition, you can read my take on test infecting legacy organizations. I’ve been a proponent of the testing meme for most of my career but I’ve also spent much of that time convincing reluctant coworkers (and managers) that testing was in their best interest – the article takes my talk of the same name and puts it to paper. All NFJS attendees get a complimentary copy of of NFJS, the Magazine, but anyone is free to subscribe. Each month you’ll get an eclectic mix of articles written by NFJS speakers on topics they are passionate about; if you’d like to see a sample article, check out Jared Richardson’s A Case for Continuous Integration [PDF]. Enjoy!

The Art In Programming

Nate — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 19:52:39 +0000

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ve probably seen me reference (here and here) The Art in Computer Programming by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas. I first encountered this piece last year when Dave gave a fantastic keynote at NFJS so when I saw this post on Andy’s blog last week I had to point to it. DeveloperDotStar has taken their work and added links to the art mentioned throughout – it’s almost as good as seeing Andy or Dave present live…almost!

Getting Started With Ajax

Nate — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 02:18:30 +0000

I’ve been a fan of A List Apart for some time now and I get really excited when my blog reader says they’ve posted something new. Today they covered a topic near and dear to my heart with a piece entitled Getting Started with Ajax which does a great job of covering the basics. Of course I was particularly pleased to see that Foundations of Ajax was listed in the Ajax Resources section! I know this may seem a bit biased, but if you’re a web designer and you don’t subscribe to ALA, you really should (and if you don’t…well, you’re in the minority – A List Apart is 22 on Technorati).

Improved application development, Part 4: Building a Web client

Nate — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 17:57:50 +0000

My second tutorial for IBM developerWorks is now available. Here’s the abstract:

In this tutorial, you’ll return to the Auction application that you developed in Part 2. You’ll add functionality to what you developed previously and connect to your entity beans via a Web-based front end. You’ll take advantage of leading-edge technologies like JavaServer Faces (JSF) and Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) to create a dynamic Web project — and, thanks to IBM Rational Application Developer’s powerful Web design features, you’ll hardly have to touch the keyboard.

For the entire tutorial, click here: Improved application development, Part 4: Building a Web client. You should check out parts 3, Incorporating changes in requirements and 5, Testing and verifying with Rational tools both written by MC Brown.

Improved application development, Part 2: Developing solutions with Rational Application Developer

Nate — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 17:47:58 +0000

My first tutorial for IBM developerWorks is now available. Here’s the abstract:

In this tutorial, you move from modeling your use cases to building the components of your application. Learn how Rational Application Developer enables you to create class diagrams while generating much of the template code for your components. With this outline in hand, add application-specific implementation code that extends the original model, which you will test in the final part of this tutorial by deploying your code to WebSphere, working through any bugs before moving to more formal testing.

For the entire tutorial, click here: Improved application development, Part 2: Developing solutions with Rational Application Developer

You should really read the first tutorial written by MC Brown before embarking on mine.