Many development teams are used to making heavy use of branches in version control. Distributed version control systems make this even more convenient. Thus one of the more controversial statements in Continuous Delivery is that you can’t do continuous integration and use branches. By definition, if you have code sitting on a branch, it isn’t integrated. One common case when it seems obvious to use branches in version control is when making a large-scale change to your application. However there is an alternative to using branches: a technique called branch by abstraction.

I started to write an article explaining how to package a Perl module but it got too long and detailed. Let's start with a simple case and build the smallest possible but still sane package. Later we can go in more details and see alternative ways.

In this example I will show how you can perform a standard Maven build whilst keeping your unit and integration tests in separate packages.

Other techniques specify using either a naming convention or a separate module to do this. This example allows true package separation and is self contained in a single profile so it can easily be used across projects. Alternative profiles can also be created for different types of test.

This solution lends itself well to generating code coverage metrics using Sonar and Jacoco.

If there's one point that we want to communicate to the world, it's that SSL/TLS is not computationally expensive any more. Ten years ago it might have been true, but it's just not the case any more. You too can afford to enable HTTPS for your users.

In January this year (2010), Gmail switched to using HTTPS for everything by default. Previously it had been introduced as an option, but now all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that.

There are two important reasons why bind_columns() is so awesome:

First, it greatly reduces the complexity of the code within the while() loop since you do not have to lookup in to an array ($sth->fetchrow_array()), de-reference an array ($sth->fetchrow_array()), or de-reference a hash-ref ($sth->fetchrow_hashref()). Instead the values themselves are available via appropriately named scalars.

Secondly, when using bind_columns() DBI is re-using the same scalars every time a fetch() is done which is much faster than creating an array or hash every fetch and typically causes the values to be copied one less time than normal. Benchmark it yourself – bind_columns() can make a huge difference when processing large sets of data.

Dive Into HTML5 seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine Standards. The final manuscript has been published on paper by O’Reilly, under the Google Press imprint. Buy the printed Work — artfully titled “HTML5: Up & Running” — and be the first in your Community to receive it. Your kind and sincere Feedback is always welcome. The Work shall remain online under the CC-BY-3.0 License.

Don't do these because "it's quicker" (it's not). Don't do these because "nobody else will use this code" (your future self will). Don't do these because "it's a one-time script" (almost all production software started as one-time scripts). Just do not do them. At all. Ever. Unless you are mst there is no reason to do any of this. The language has moved on. There is a better way.

This document describes the REST API and resources provided by JIRA. The REST APIs are for developers who want to integrate JIRA into their application and for administrators who want to script interactions with the JIRA server.

JIRA's REST APIs provide access to resources (data entities) via URI paths. To use a REST API, your application will make an HTTP request and parse the response. Currently, the only supported reponse format is JSON. Your methods will be the standard HTTP methods like GET, PUT, POST and DELETE (see API descriptions below for which methods are available for each resource).

This page gives a practical example of writing a emacs major mode to do syntax coloring of your own language. You should have few months experience of coding emacs lisp. If you don't know elisp, first take a look at Emacs Lisp Basics.

Every educated person really ought to have a basic understanding of accounting. Just like maths, science, programming, music, literature, history, etc., it’s one of those things which helps you make sense of the world. Although dealing with money is not much fun, it’s an unavoidable part of life, so you might as well take a few minutes to understand it.

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Eventually I figured it out: basic accounting is just graph theory. The traditional ways of representing financial information hide that structure astonishingly well, but once I had figured out that it was just a graph, it suddenly all made sense.