Developer Catchup: Go libraries, easy Charts, Tumblr frameworks, Zsh secrets and secret Android compilers

Posted by Codepope's Development Hell on Friday, November 21, 2014
Last Modified on Saturday, August 31, 2024

Facebook Go: When you develop a lot in Go, you make a lot of libraries and tools in Go. Facebook must be doing plenty because their new Facebook Go repository is full of code, much of it useful utilities for managing HTTP connections, mocking for tests, apps to test libraries like MySQL and MongoDB drivers and so on. Add to your resource list.

HTTP2 Go: While we’re talking Go, there’s a HTTP2 library in development by Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick. While you probably will never touch this directly - it’s designed to be hidden behind net/http – it’s good to know it’s being worked on and it tracking the drafts of the next generation HTTP.

Simpler Charts: When you pick up a powerful charting library does your head spin with the number of virtual buttons, knobs, sliders and dials youo can adjust? And do you get disheartened when no matter how much you twiddle, things just don’t look good enough? Metricsgraphics.js might be what you need. Underneath it uses the D3.js library, but to the user it presents a simple, opinionated API which is designed to need the least twiddling for a good chart. An examples page shows what you can do and an interactive demo lets you play.

Tumblr Services: Seems the folks at Tumblr have been wrestling with microservices, performance and reusability. To take that on they have built Colossus and blogged about it - it’s a Scala/NIO/Akka based framework designed to rapidly and concurrently to process many small client requests. It’s still a work in progress and the release is “pre-1.0” but the code is up on Github. The most interesting part is probably that its coming out of Tumblr.

Zsh features: Zsh is a neat shell, but at first look not overly compelling. This article on Zsh features shows why Zsh is neat. It talks about smart directory completion on ‘cd’ commands, shorthand pathing, partial command searching, tab completion for the kill command, expanding environment variables, git and general help and more. I’ve switched over to zsh but there’s still so much to find and so much familiar from bash.

Covert Compilers for Android: Interesting article about Jack and Jill, two compilers for Android and a new intermediate byte code called Jayce. It appears Google are pushing out a new build chain which does away with dex and has Jack generating Dalvik bytecode directly. For libraries, they are compiled into Jayce bytecode by Jill and are consumed by Jack. These aren’t announced yet but it will represent a major change to the Android build system, sufficient to allow Google to start moving away from standard Java.

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog