Removing Click Delays on Mobile Browsers

If you ever wanted to get rid of the 300ms delay between a physical tap and the the firing of a click event introduced on mobile browsers then the polyfill those guys from Financial Times created is the answer you are looking for.

Available on GitHub, FastClick is a simple, easy-to-use library for eliminating that delay and make your application feel more responsive to, for example, the touch of a button.

Have a look and fork the project at: https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick 

You can also give it a try running one of the demos on your mobile device pointing your browser to: http://ftlabs.github.com/fastclick/examples/layer.html (it won't work on your desktop browser as the library doesn't attach any listeners to them).

Fascinating and job well done...

Running iOS Simulator from Command Line

I've recently migrated to Mountain Lion and it looks like I couldn't start the iOS Simulator from command line as I used to do in Snow Leopard.

Luckily, I was able to find a solution and all development is back to normal now :)

Here is how to run the iOS Simulator from command line:

$ open /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/iPhone\ Simulator.app


and that assumes that you have installed Xcode under /Applications.

You can also create a script with the content above and update your $PATH variable or even create a symbolic link under your /Applications folder using the following:

$ ln -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/iPhone\ Simulator.app/ /Applications/

Time for another change...

Well, it's time for another career change... I've decided to take a slightly different direction and join TIBCO as Principal Consultant where I'm going to be involved with lots of architecture discussions, application design white boarding, development and deployment techniques, pre and post sales activities as well.

My story with TIBCO started a long time ago when I was primarily competing against the company on every single account I was working on. It definitely showed me how good the TIBCO technology is and how hard was to compete against a company that innovates a lot and definitely understands what customer are looking for.

Then moving over to a couple of smaller companies I could experience the partnership side from the EMS, Spotfire and Web Messaging perspectives which gave me a good way to start contributing from the first moment.

If you think about how the opportunities that have emerged from information silos to integration silos and consequently moving over to the new trends of mobile, social, cloud and other big things, TIBCO is definitely the company with the right technology to give you the right information at the right time and on the right hands to make a decision and give you the ability to compete on such tough markets these days.

And keep mind that having all the information related to a particular event six month after the fact is not more valuable that having a little bit of the right information just before it happens.

It can't be a more exciting time to join a company like TIBCO and I'm pretty sure the ride is going to be fun from Day 1.

Back to work...

The mysterious behavior of Mac Mail and Yahoo! Mail Plus

If you, like me, uses Mac Mail as your primary email client and you also have an Yahoo! Mail Plus subscription (which gives you IMAP access to your Yahoo Mail account), you may have experienced an intermittent connection behavior where the email client is not able to connect due an invalid password even though you're using the correct one.

I've been reading lots of blog posts and forums reporting the exact same behavior and I was not able to find a concrete answer but the following approach seems to be working for me so far.

So, next time you see that dialog box requesting that you enter your password again to login to Yahoo, go to your web browser of choice and navigate to Yahoo Mail (mail.yahoo.com).

If you are automatically logged into the system then make sure you click on the Sign Out button first.

When you return to the login screen, type your username and password normally but make sure you select the Keep Me Signed In checkbox and then click Sign In. That should solve the problem.

Have fun...

An Introduction to STOMP

STOMP (Simple (or Streaming) Text-Oriented Messaging Protocol) is a simple text-oriented protocol, similar to HTTP.

STOMP provides an interoperable wire format that allows clients to communicate with almost every available message broker. STOMP is easy to implement and gives you flexibility since it is language-agnostic, meaning clients and brokers developed in different languages can send and receive messages to and from each other. 

There are lots of server implementations that support STOMP (mostly compliant with the STOMP 1.0 specification). The following is a list of STOMP 1.0 compliant message servers:

• Apache ActiveMQ – http://activemq.apache.org

• Apache Apollo – http://activemq.apache.org/apollo

• CoilMQ – http://code.google.com/p/coilmq

• Gozirra - http://www.germane-software.com/software/Java/Gozirra

• HornetQ – http://www.jboss.com/hornetq

• MorbidQ – http://www.morbidq.com

• RabbitMQ - http://www.rabbitmq.com/plugins.html#rabbitmq-stomp

• Sprinkle - http://www.thuswise.org/sprinkle/index.html

• StompServer - http://stompserver.rubyforge.org/

On the client side, there are many implementations for a vast number of technologies. Below, you will find the libraries available for the most popular languages.

Language	Libraries
C	libstomp - http://stomp.codehaus.org/C
C++	Apache CMS - http://activemq.apache.org/cms/
C# and .Net	Apache NMS - http://activemq.apache.org/nms/
Flash	as3-stomp - http://code.google.com/p/as3-stomp/
Java	Gozirra - http://www.germane-software.com/software/Java/Gozirra/
Objective-C	objc-stomp - https://github.com/juretta/objc-stomp
Perl	Net::Stomp::Client - http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-STOMP-Client/ Net::Stomp - http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-Stomp/
PHP	stomp - http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.stomp.php stomp-php - http://stomp.fusesource.org/documentation/php/book.html
Python	stomper - http://code.google.com/p/stomper/ stomp.py - http://code.google.com/p/stomppy/
Ruby on Rails	stomp gem - https://rubygems.org/gems/stomp  activemessaging - http://code.google.com/p/activemessaging/

STOMP is an alternative to other open messaging protocols such as AMQP (Advanced Message Queueing Protocol) and implementation specific wire protocols used in JMS (Java Message Service) brokers such as OpenWire. It distinguishes itself by covering a small subset of commonly used messaging operations (commands) rather than providing a comprehensive messaging API. 

Because STOMP is language-agnostic and easy to implement, it’s popular to application developers and technical architects alike. STOMP is also text-based. Since it does not use binary protocols like other message brokers, a wide range of client technologies work with STOMP, like Ruby, Python, and Perl.

STOMP is simple to implement, but supports a wide range of core enterprise messaging features, such as authentication, messaging models (point to point and publish and subscribe), message acknowledgement, transactions, message headers and properties, etc.

The Definitive Guide to HTML5 WebSocket

The book is on the way now! You can pre-order it here. It has been so much fun and a lot of work but I personally hope you can get a copy and enjoy all the content we're putting together.

Here is part of the book description if you want more information about it:

"The Definitive Guide to HTML5 WebSocket is the ultimate insider’s WebSocket resource. This revolutionary new web technology enables you to harness the power of true real-time connectivity and build responsive, modern web applications.   

This book contains everything web developers and architects need to know about WebSocket. It discusses how WebSocket-based architectures provide a dramatic reduction in unnecessary network overhead and latency compared to older HTTP (Ajax) architectures, how to layer widely used protocols such as XMPP and STOMP on top of WebSocket, and how to secure WebSocket connections and deploy WebSocket-based applications to the enterprise. Build real-time web applications with HTML5."

The book gives you an overview of HTML5 WebSocket, the WebSocket API and the protocol, the high level protocols you can use on top of WebSocket, security aspects and enterprise deployment. 

The WebSocket bufferedAmount attribute

If you have been working or planning to work with HTML5 WebSocket you may end up transporting large amounts of data and/or you may have the requirement to transport data as fast as possible. 

The WebSocket object has an attribute called bufferedAmount that's particularly useful to check for the amount of data buffered for transmission to the server. You can use the bufferedAmount attribute to check the number of bytes that have been queued but not yet transmitted to the server.

The values reported in that attribute don’t include framing overhead incurred by the protocol or buffering done by the operating system or network hardware.

The code below shows an example of how to use the bufferedAmount attribute to keep sending updates every second, if the network can handle that rate, or at whatever rate the network can handle, if that is too fast.

// Buffering threshold at 10k

var THRESHOLD = 10240;

// Create a New WebSocket connection
var mySocket = new WebSocket(“ws://echo.websocket.org/updates”);

// Listen for the opening event
mySocket.onopen = function () {
 setInterval(function() {

// Check for amount of data buffered but not sent yet //and then send an update in case there is nothing //in the buffer

if (mySocket.bufferedAmount < THRESHOLD)

                                    mySocket.send(getUpdateData());

                  }, 1000);

};

Using the bufferedAmount attribute can be useful for throttling the rate at the applications send data to the server avoiding network saturation.