Vapid Space

Stuff that doesn't matter. Some stuff that does. Some stuff that falls down the crack.

  • Improving Node App Performance Using Cluster

    As you are probably aware a node application is run on a single thread on a single core of your cpu. If you are running your application on a multi-core box then a great deal of your servers processing power is going unused. Help is available however using the cluster...

    | 12 Feb 2015 | 0 Comments |

  • Cordova From A Web Developers Perspective

    We all make responsive web sites nowadays and for a new project I was working on I needed to make a multi-platform mobile application. Cordova was the obvious choice for the skills that I have. I wrote this post just to keep a note of some of the tools and...

    | 18 Nov 2014 | 0 Comments |

  • Class Inheritance With Node

    Albeit a bit clunky compared to c# or Java, it is possible to implement object-orientated patterns within JavaScript and node.js. Recently I was refactoring one of my node applications and decided to create a base class to hold all of the common functionality shared with a few classes I had....

    | 07 Nov 2014 | 0 Comments |

  • Code Coverage Metrics With Mocha And Istanbul

    A few months back I wrote a post about getting code coverage stats with nodeunit. Since then I have moved a lot of my unit testing over to using Mocha as I prefer the syntax. I needed to get code coverage statistics for my tests again and it turned out...

    | 29 Oct 2014 | 0 Comments |

  • Writing Desktop Applications With Node

    I recently found out about node-webkit. A project intended to allow developers to write cross-platform desktop apps by combining webkit and node.js. This allows you to use traditional js/css/html but with the added ability to call node librarys from within the client side code. As a node developer this sounded...

    | 12 Jun 2014 | 0 Comments |

  • Common Unit Testing Pitfalls

    I’m a great believer in unit testing and all automated testing, really. I often see it being done incorrectly so I thought I would jot down my thoughts on this… Mocking of external dependencies Unit tests should be self contained, require no setup and should be able to be run...

    | 08 May 2014 | 0 Comments |

  • Create Maps With D3

    As you may or may not know the Ordnance Survey have been releasing some of their data for free for a while now. I wanted to have a play with it and as I am currently looking at d3 and d3 comes with built in support for geographic data, I...

    | 18 Mar 2014 | 0 Comments |

  • Creating Graphs An Introduction To D3

    I have been hearing a lot about d3 of late and wanted to have a play with it to see how easy it is to create something useful. As seems to be the tradition I thought it would be good to try creating some graphs. So below is my attempt...

    | 17 Feb 2014 | 0 Comments |

  • Shadow Dom Basics

    Chrome has now supported the Shadow Dom spec since version 25/26. I thought it was about time to have a look at it and the problems it aims to solve. A common-or-garden web page exists as one big global dom tree where each element is free to interact and alter...

    | 12 Feb 2014 | 0 Comments |

  • Automating Selenium Tests With Grunt And Mocha

    Selenium is a great tool for performing automated integration or acceptance testing on your web applications with drivers developed for all the main browsers. I wanted to go one step further and see if I could integrate it into the build process so that regressions would get picked up earlier....

    | 08 Feb 2014 | 0 Comments |