Node.js synchronously: Node.js is sweet if you can adapt to the asynchronous model of start thing, say what you want to do when its done, do everything else anyway. Good for web request handling but bleh for trying to emulate a shellscript. Turns out that in Node.js 0.12 (coming soon? anyone? Bueller?) we get synchronous child processes to now you can run that curl or find or whatever and just wait till its returned with its results. The folks at Strongloop have written about these synchronous child process methods and how they make writing command line utilities in Node easier. Check it out Noders.
Serviced Polyfills: Polyfills fill gaps in browser functionality and standards compliance. The older the browser, the more Polyfill you need to fill the gaps and the newer, the less. But it gets hard working out how much Polyfill you are going to need. Fear not, as Samuel Giles at FT Labs has an answer, “Polyfills as a Service”. Add a simple script tag pointing at a source from the polyfill.io content delivery network to your pages and whatever browser views your page, it gets the polyfill it needs. This is because the system sniffs the browser agent and works out the best set of polyfill based on that. Neat idea, potentially very handy - and you can run your own private version if you need to.
Spark sparks: Apache Spark just got a 1.1 release. Spark is Hadoop data processing engine which can run on YARN-based Hadoop clusters or in standalone mode. Spark 1.1 improves the performance (and they already say they are up to 100 times faster than Hadoop MapReduce) and has SQL layer enhancements. 1.1 also adds more statistical functions, can take steaming data fromAmazon Kinesis and pull data from Apache Flume and more. If your into clusters and data crunching and haven’t looked at Spark, you might want to look into it.
Tangram Mapping: Do you want to render cool 2D and 3D maps? Check out Tangram, a Mapping Library then as it is building out from a WebGL implementation to other OpenGL platforms to make oodly cool dynamic map renders. Very slick.
SHAaaaaaa!: We mention the Google sunsetting of SHA-1 the other week. If you were unsure why this was important, can we send you off to Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1 which explains why it all and includes a brief history of collision attacks in the wild.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog