eSQLate: Build minimum viable admin panels quickly with just SQL.

Project Purpose

eSQLate is an attempt to give small teams a quick and easy form of administration panel which is significantly more powerful than CRUD based systems but also as easy to set up.

What problem is it solving?

A lot of my work history has been based at small companies with small teams where there is enough resource to build a impressive product using great code, but it is sometimes difficult to justify investing as much time into creating administration panels which nobody other than internal employees will ever see.

There are many times I have had to delve into the database because the narrow range of operations which are available on the administration panels does not cover what I, at that moment, need to do. I don’t think this is always a problem, particularly when the project is at a very early stage but as a project grows having developers or systems administrators log into the database and change settings has some real downsides:

You’re taking time away from developers / systems administrators to do things which could, sometimes, be done by less technical employees.
Executing database operations is nearly always a bespoke operation on live data, meaning we have to be really, really careful and think things through in great detail.
Eventually, everyone will make a mistake, while logged into a live database the unintended effects could be disastrous.

What is it?

eSQLate interprets a simple JSON (or JSON5) file like this:

{
  "name": "product_search",
  "title": "Product Search",
  "description": "List products that include a substring",
  "parameters": [
    {
      "name": "product_name",
      "type": "string"
    }
  ],
  "statement": "\
    SELECT\n\
      product_id,\n\
      product_name,\n\
      suppliers.company_name as supplier_name,\n\
      unit_price\n\
    FROM products\n\
    LEFT JOIN suppliers on suppliers.supplier_id = products.supplier_id\n\
    WHERE LOWER(product_name) LIKE CONCAT('%', LOWER($product_name), '%')"
}

Using the above it will produce a fairly usable and reasonable web interface like what is shown below:

Simple JSON transformed into a fairly usable reasonable web interface

If users are of a nervous disposition and scared off by seeing things they don’t understand (like SQL) they can flip the toggle to convert the query based interface into a simple form.

People with a nervous disposition can hide things they don’t understand

We can specify parameters as strings, dates, datetimes, integers, selects, decimals and even use a popup to allow rich selection of a specific parameter:

Slideshow of some of the controls available

Another powerful feature is to provide the user the ability to link these simple JSON documents together together. Doing this giving many possible user journeys allowing basic, but meaningful self-service administration.

You can link documents making lots of user journeys possible

The result sets can also be downloaded as CSV files.

Tutorial - Adding a new workflow

The most simple example

About the most simple thing we can do is create a simple select of a table. This can be achieved by writing some simple JSON5 into a file:

example_definition/employee_list.json5

{
    "name": "employee_list",
    "title": "Employee List",
    "parameters": [],
    "statement": "\
        SELECT\n\
            employee_id,\n\
            last_name,\n\
            first_name,\n\
            reports_to\n\
        FROM employees"
}

The most simple thing

The most simple example - Enhanced

Taking the super simple example it is easy to make it marginally useful

example_definition/employee_list.json5

{
    "name": "employee_list",
    "title": "Employee List",
    "description": "List employee details which include a sub string",
    "parameters": [
        {
            "name": "search_string",
            "type": "string",
            "highlight_fields": ["last_name", "first_name"]
        }
    ],
    "statement": "\
        SELECT\n\
            employees.employee_id,\n\
            concat(employees.first_name, ' ', employees.last_name) as full_name,\n\
            concat(reports_to.first_name, ' ', reports_to.last_name) as reports_to\n\
        FROM employees\n\
        LEFT JOIN employees reports_to ON\n\
            reports_to.employee_id = employees.reports_to\n\
        WHERE\n\
            lower(employees.first_name) like CONCAT('%', lower($search_string) , '%') OR\n\
            lower(employees.last_name) like CONCAT('%', lower(${search_string}) , '%')\
        ",
    "statement_type": "SELECT"
}

This will find people who’s first_name or last_name includes $search_string anywhere within.

We have:

Defined a parameter named search_string which could also be wrote as ${search_string} if you need to be unambiguous about where the string terminates
Added a statement_type which really does nothing other than color the button below the query… but it goes a nice red when its a DELETE.

How does it look?

The most simple thing - enhanced

Allowing adding of employees

Taking what we know from `The most simple example'' it is trivial to transform it into an `INSERT statement, however I took the liberty of adding some comments due to the SQL separates column names from the VALUES.

example_definition/employee_add.json5

{
    "name": "employee_add",
    "title": "Add an Employee",
    "description": "Add an employee",
    "parameters": [
        { "name": "last_name", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "first_name", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "title", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "title_of_courtesy", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "birth_date", "type": "date" },
        { "name": "hire_date", "type": "date" },
        { "name": "address", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "city", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "region", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "postal_code", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "country", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "home_phone", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "extension", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "notes", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "reports_to", "type": "integer" }
    ],
    "statement": "\
        INSERT INTO employees (\n\
            last_name, first_name, title, title_of_courtesy,\n\
            birth_date, hire_date, address, city,\n\
            region, postal_code, country, home_phone,\n\
            extension, notes, reports_to\n\
        )\n\
        VALUES (\n\
            /* last_name = */ $last_name,\n\
            /* first_name = */ $first_name,\n\
            /* title = */ $title,\n\
            /* title_of_courtesy = */ $title_of_courtesy,\n\
            /* birth_date = */ $birth_date,\n\
            /* hire_date = */ $hire_date,\n\
            /* address = */ $address,\n\
            /* city = */ $city,\n\
            /* region = */ $region,\n\
            /* postal_code = */ $postal_code,\n\
            /* country = */ $country,\n\
            /* home_phone = */ $home_phone,\n\
            /* extension = */ $extension,\n\
            /* notes = */ $notes,\n\
            /* reports_to = */ $reports_to\n\
        )",
    "statement_type": "INSERT"
}

The end result looks like the below:

A very simple insert

Allowing adding of employees - who they report to - enhanced!

I dislike the way a user would have to take note of the user_id that the new employee would report to…

To fix it all we need to do is change { "name": "reports_to", "type": "integer" } into { "display_field": "full_name", "definition": "employee_list", "value_field": "employee_id", "type": "popup", "name": "reports_to" }. The final file is shown below:

Also converting the input of dates to dates is really easy (just change the "type").

example_definition/employee_add.json5

{
    "name": "employee_add",
    "title": "Add an Employee",
    "description": "Add an employee",
    "parameters": [
        { "name": "last_name", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "first_name", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "title", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "title_of_courtesy", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "birth_date", "type": "date" }, /* Changed from "string" to "date" */
        { "name": "hire_date", "type": "date" }, /* Changed from "string" to "date" */
        { "name": "address", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "city", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "region", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "postal_code", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "country", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "home_phone", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "extension", "type": "string" },
        { "name": "notes", "type": "string" },
        {
            "display_field": "full_name", /* Changed from "string" to "popup" */
            "definition": "employee_list",
            "value_field": "employee_id",
            "type": "popup",
            "name": "reports_to"
        }
    ],
    "statement": "\
        INSERT INTO employees (\n\
            last_name, first_name, title, title_of_courtesy,\n\
            birth_date, hire_date, address, city,\n\
            region, postal_code, country, home_phone,\n\
            extension, notes, reports_to\n\
        )\n\
        VALUES (\n\
            /* last_name = */ $last_name,\n\
            /* first_name = */ $first_name,\n\
            /* title = */ $title,\n\
            /* title_of_courtesy = */ $title_of_courtesy,\n\
            /* birth_date = */ $birth_date,\n\
            /* hire_date = */ $hire_date,\n\
            /* address = */ $address,\n\
            /* city = */ $city,\n\
            /* region = */ $region,\n\
            /* postal_code = */ $postal_code,\n\
            /* country = */ $country,\n\
            /* home_phone = */ $home_phone,\n\
            /* extension = */ $extension,\n\
            /* notes = */ $notes,\n\
            /* reports_to = */ $reports_to\n\
        )",
    "statement_type": "INSERT"
}

The end result is that there will be a new control shown which when clicked will open a pop-up:

Add a popup

Adding Links

The definitions we’ve defined so far do not have to be completely independent. It is possible to define links both on each row of the result set and above/below of the definition / form itself.

Lets first add a link from the Employee List to Employee Add. We can do this in three ways to a definition:

1. We can add to `"links"`

Links are displayed between the definition and the results:

"links": [
  { "href": "#employee_add", "text": "Add an employee" }
]

Links

2. We can add to `"top_links"`, which are identical to `"links"` except that they occur above the displayed definition

Links are displayed above the definition:

"top_links": [
  { "href": "#employee_add", "text": "Add an employee" }
]

Links

3. We can add to `"row_links"`

This will add a row on every line of the results table. This is useful if the row denotes some information you want to use in the place which you are linking to. To do this add the following to the root of the definition:

"row_links": [
  { "href": "#employee_add?reports_to=${popup employee_id full_name}", "text": "Add Subordinate for ${full_name}" }
]

Links on a row

Hiding the ``Employee Add'' Menu Item

If you wish to hide the `Employee Add'' menu item it is simple enough. Just change the name (and filename) from `employee_add.json5 to _employee_add.json5. Beware any links that exist will also need to updated.

Installation

Desktop Method

If you have a PostgreSQL server and want to run it on your local laptop you may choose to use the desktop method.

This will has the nicety of automagically picking port numbers and opening the browser once everything has started up.

Set up a PostgreSQL server and get the hostname, port, username and password.
Clone this repository with eSQLate with git clone https://github.com/forbesmyester/esqlate.git.
Change into the directory you checked out the code into with cd esqlate
Run npm install to install dependencies etc.
Run ./esqlate.

Docker Compose Method

If you’re just trying eSQLate out the most simple way to test it out is to use Docker Compose. There is a docker-compose.yml file right in this directory so all you’ll have to do is:

Clone this repository with eSQLate with git clone https://github.com/forbesmyester/esqlate.git.
Change into the directory you checked out the code into with cd esqlate
Clone eSQLate Server with [ ! -d "esqlate-server" ] && git clone git@github.com:forbesmyester/esqlate-server.git esqlate-server.
Clone eSQLate Front with [ ! -d "esqlate-front" ] && git clone git@github.com:forbesmyester/esqlate-front.git esqlate-front.
Bring up the services using docker-compose build && docker-compose up.
Customize the docker-compose.yml to meet your needs.

Directly on VM/Metal Method

Installation is relatively simple. All you need to do is install:

PostgreSQL The most awesome SQL database.
eSQLate Server Which is provides the API functions and does the actual database queries.
eSQLate Front talks to eSQLate Server and provides a web based interface to the user.

Running the Integration Tests

There are some basic integration tests that run using Cypress. To run them first bring up testing docker compose and then run the tests:

docker-compose -f ./docker-compose-integration.yml up

What still needs to be done?

SERVER: Currently results persisted to the local disk. I plan to add an AWS S3 persistence option.
SERVER: Support other types of databases.

License / Downloading

This project is released under GPLv3 or later. You can find this project at GitHub

Other articles

EsqlateQueue now supports parallelism!

Published: Sun 20 October 2019
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: typescript nodejs parallelism

Previously I wrote about EsqlateQueue, which is a mini library allowing a queue of work to be set aside and worked on out-of-process. This is useful for things which could be IO intensive and take a while, but don't take a lot of CPU time.

Because this was the first …
read more
Esqlate Cache
Published: Tue 15 October 2019
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: typescript javascript caching io types race-condition library

Why does this exist?

Esqlate Cache is a really basic in-memory cache which has a few interesting properties:
- You initialize the cache with the function to retrieve the value from the original source, enabling you to write cache(params) everywhere, whether the item is cached or not. The reason for …
read more
Esqlate WaitFor

Published: Mon 23 September 2019
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: typescript javascript algebraic data types polling library

A simple TypeScript function will wait for a condition to be satisfied.

Why

The Esqlate project, which is a way to design an API using PostgreSQL is modelled as a queue based system, so when you issue a request, you don't get back the result immediately, you need to poll …
read more
EsqlateQueue - Push to a AsyncIterableIterator

Published: Mon 16 September 2019
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: typescript queue

Why

Sometimes you want to process something, but you're not interested in the result immediately because the task is not a priority to you, or maybe even the user.

For this you may well use a Queue of some variety, something like RabbitMQ, Amazon AWS's SQS or maybe even ZeroMQ …
read more
ndjson-env - Loads environment from ndjson files, selected by `jq ._name`
Published: Wed 24 July 2019
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: postgresql unix linux environmental variables

Description

I have a tool called pgpass-env that, given a suitably commented PostgreSQL ~/.pgpass file will allow you to easily set the environmental variables for software that doesn't support reading from that format.

Thinking about this problem, it seems to be a general problem:
- Given a file, which somehow has …
read more
jdbc-pipe
Published: Fri 05 July 2019
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: postgresql unix linux

Quick JDBC queries respecting UNIX conventions (environmental variables, STDIN, STDOUT etc)

Installation
1. Install the Java SDK, preferably avoiding Oracle.
2. Install Leiningen.
3. Check this project out and cd into it (git clone git@github.com:forbesmyester/jdbc-pipe.git && cd jdbc-pipe)
4. Run lein uberjar.
5. Create the destination directories in to ~/.local/bin …
read more
Hacky tools for PostgreSQL

Published: Fri 14 June 2019
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: linux unix cli command-line postgresql

Hacky tools for PostgreSQL that makes interacting / extracting / analysis of data in PostgreSQL easier.

NOTE: Examples are from a PostgreSQL version of ergast.

psql-out

Sometimes I find I have requests like the following:

Run this query and give me the results [in an Excel file so I can look at …
read more
CSV Guillotine - First Rust Program / Library

Published: Thu 02 May 2019
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: csv data-cleaning linux rust unix

I have just published my first rust program, first rust library and crates.io package.

It’s a library/program for removing metadata from above the (real) header of CSV files, which gets in the way when writing software to parse the CSV’s

The Git Repository includes full source …
read more
Code In PostgreSQL: Combining data from multiple tables with INNER JOIN
Published: Mon 04 March 2019
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: code-in-postgresql javascript postgresql
This series of articles
This is the third of the Code in PostgreSQL series of articles.

Articles in this series

You can do lots with just IN, ORDER BY and LIMIT

You can use WITH to name specific parts of SQL

Combining data from multiple tables with INNER JOIN

A …
read more
Code In PostgreSQL: You can use WITH to name specific parts of SQL
Published: Mon 04 March 2019
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: code-in-postgresql javascript postgresql
This series of articles
This is the second of the Code in PostgreSQL series of articles.

Articles in this series

You can do lots with just IN, ORDER BY and LIMIT

You can use WITH to name specific parts of SQL

Combining data from multiple tables with INNER JOIN

A …
read more
Code In PostgreSQL: You can do lots with just IN, ORDER BY and LIMIT
Published: Sun 03 March 2019
By Matt Forrester

In postgresql.

tags: code-in-postgresql javascript postgresql
This series of articles
This is the first of the Code in PostgreSQL series of articles.

Articles in this series

You can do lots with just IN, ORDER BY and LIMIT

You can use WITH to name specific parts of SQL

Combining data from multiple tables with INNER JOIN

A …
read more
Creating a custom aggregate in PostgreSQL

Published: Fri 09 November 2018
By Matt Forrester

In postgresql.

Why use an aggregate instead of returning all the data?

Sometimes you do not need all the data brought from the database into your normal programming language. Using normal aggregate functions such as [SUM, COUNT or AVERAGE](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/functions-aggregate.html) you may save your …
read more
Jekyll: How to get <section> in Jekyll markdown based on <h2> tags.
Published: Sat 01 September 2018
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I wanted to make a blog post which a future LNUG talk will be based on to compare achieving the same output in both NodeJS and PostgreSQL.

While doing this I realised that it would be best to have the code shown side by side like the following:
```
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                           |
|         # Joining Two …
```
read more
Great Emulator Frontend

Published: Sun 01 October 2017
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: computer games emulators linux

After struggling with libretro / retroarch I've settled on Attract-Mode for my emulator frontend but couldn't find a good package for my Debian Stable system. Luckily compilation was easy... ``` sudo apt-get install libsfml-dev libopenal-dev zlib1g-dev vflib3-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libopengl-dev libglu1-mesa-dev checkinstall make checkinstall ``` Running was not immediately obvious... It could … read more
Replacing Cron with AWS Lamda

Published: Sun 01 May 2016
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

We're running a mix of AWS Elastic Beanstalk along with some random EC2's, SQS, RDS and a few other things at work.
Currently we have some Cron running on these EC2's which bothers me as if these servers fail we need to re-instate it. Sure we are using Ansible to …
read more
LNUG Talks

Published: Sat 30 April 2016
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I recently did a talk at LNUG about GraphViz and how using diagrams can really help you explain your ideas to other people. I know it is cliched but pictures (diagrams) really do say a thousand words.
LNUG stands for London Node User Group and as such mostly everything covered …
read more
Investigating HashiCorp Terraform

Published: Sun 17 April 2016
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I am a big fan of proper provisioning tools, such as Ansible to get repeatable processes for setting up servers. I am also used to using things like Docker to control installation of the actual project onto the machine. This always leaves the question of how to get the machine …
read more
Looking at Docker's new tools.

Published: Sun 27 March 2016
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Linux users have very easy native Docker
Being a Linux user I always had native Docker access. Once I had installed Docker and added my user to the Docker group docker build etc would always just work. What's more the integration with networks etc is fantastic. I was happy.
The …
read more
Merged Into Quramy/tsuquyomi

Published: Wed 02 September 2015
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

In general when I am developing I tend to have unit test results on the right with my code on the left as apposed to having two files open. This means I tend to use C-^ keystroke a lot, which is jump back to last buffer in VIM.
The last …
read more
'Weekend Project: DB DiaYAML'

Published: Sun 26 July 2015
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Why
When thinking about problems I sometimes come up with ideas on how to solve them. It might be a great solution, but more often than not they need some finesse and I may want to discuss them with other developers.
I find diagrams are a highly effective way of …
read more
Move Panes and Windows in Tmux

Published: Wed 15 July 2015
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I have a pretty well customized tmux configuration, as do lots of people but there is one thing that I've found difficult to do and isn't in most peoples configuration (that I've seen). This is the ability to move panes between different windows or re-order the windows.
Configuring tmux for …
read more
Require Parts
Published: Sat 04 July 2015
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Noticed this when requiring Ramda:
```
[BABEL] Note: The code generator has deoptimised the styling of "/home/fozz/Projects/siac-ui/node_modules/ramda/dist/ramda.js" as it exceeds the max of "100KB".
```
Now I love Ramda, you should read about, it's awesome, but I am only actually using a few functions …
read more
Network Manager Hell

Published: Sat 13 June 2015
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I recently re-installed my laptop (which has loopback, WIFI and wired network connections) from scratch and I found that it has "NetworkManager is not running" displayed when I click the NetworkManager applet, which is apparently not that strange. This was straight after an install which was disappointing :-(
My installation method …
read more
Wanting to build my own Virtual Network

Published: Tue 02 June 2015
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

When I was about 18 and living at my parents, my bedroom was full of old computers which I'd turned into servers and managed to wire up using a BNC network and HowTo's printed out on the college computers... I didn't have internet access. I tought myself TCP/IP networking …
read more
When.js Vs Ramda

Published: Sun 31 May 2015
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Something unfortunate happened to me over the weekend... I was writing code using the great Ramda, there was promises going on and the code was wonderful... Then along came the awesome When.js to solve my more complicated future based problems but this made me write code like the following …
read more
'SyncIt: Storing Data In LocalForage Now Possible'

Published: Sun 29 March 2015
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Over the last few weeks I've done a few commits making storing data in LocalForage possible. I knew this would be quite easy as even though SyncIt has up to now only been backed by LocalStorage it was wrapped in a way that all access to data had to be …
read more
Init Provisioning

Published: Sat 28 March 2015
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I have a desire set up virtual machines on my laptop using scripts for testing things like microservices. Unfortunately I don't much like BASH as a provisioning system and would prefer to work with Ansible.
The Init Provisioning scripts are designed to allow easy development of Ansible based virtual machines …
read more
json-array-diff

Published: Fri 16 January 2015
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

For most of my working life I've been doing RDD (refresh driven development) but in the last 3-4 years I've been using more and more TDD. It's got to the point that pretty much all functionality new that I write is written using TDD, life is sooooooo much better but …
read more
Me and Functional Programming.

Published: Sat 11 October 2014
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: functional programming clojure javascript

Some of you may know that I'm pretty interested in Functional Programming with some of the code that I write day to day having a somewhat functional style (while hopefully not being completely alien to our imperative friends). I have spent quite a bit of time trying to learn Haskell …
read more
'Installation of glFrontier: Elite 2 on Ubuntu 14.04'

Published: Mon 25 August 2014
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Why
When I saw the Elite Kickstarter I knew about the old Elite games which I never played but I knew had an amazing reputation. I looked around the page watched some video's and decided to back it. Since then I have read all the news releases and watched all …
read more
UI Experiment for PhoneGap Android App

Published: Mon 21 July 2014
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I currently have a personal project which will almost certainly involve creating a mobile app. I'd ideally like to make it a hybrid native/Phonegap app to maximize the time spent writing cross platform code as apposed to duplicating work between different mobile platforms... The fact that the bulk of …
read more
'Neo4J: Introduction to Graphs'

Published: Wed 09 July 2014
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Went to a great talk about Neo4J at their London offices last night. It was great to hear (new to me) ideas about how to store data.

If I were to sum it up in a really short amount of words I would say that it is somewhat like an …
read more
Begin all Docker files with...

Published: Sat 21 June 2014
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I've just had an extremely frustrating mostly wasted day with Docker. It turns out that, at least with Ubuntu 14.04 the root user is quite messed up, for example it's home directory ends up being just / and worse than that putting files like .ssh/known_hosts in the root (or …
read more
Brackets.io Select TextObject plugin

Published: Fri 14 March 2014
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I am currently (and have been for a long time) in a state of flux with my current editor selection... For a while about 6 months ago I thought I would end up using VIM and even started reading a book about it. I learnt about VIM Golf, the amazing …
read more
Airport Drinks

Published: Mon 24 February 2014
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Gatwick Airport
Today I am flying to Dublin for 7 days so I can continue my work with CityHook / Indigo and I am currently in the airport passed security... Of course they confiscate all drinks from you... so where to get a drink?
I found that you can get bottled …
read more
New Release... returnFuncToAsyncFunc
Published: Sat 08 February 2014
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Sometimes you have a function, that you're planning to use within something like async.waterfall but it's wrote to be synchronous and returns a value instead of using a callback. This function will accept that function, along with a context and return an asynchronous version of that function
Example
```
var …
```
read more
React Mixin Manip

Published: Sun 19 January 2014
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I have created a simple React Mixin which enables you to use the power of Manip with the awsomeness of React.
When you want to alter data within React you can use the component.setState() or component.setProps() methods. This is wonderful if you want to modify top level data …
read more
Reusable Releases

Published: Sat 18 January 2014
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I am intending to take the React demonstration from TodoMVC and use it as a basis for demonstrating SyncIt. To enable me to do this I have released two seperate pieces of code, which for contractual reasons were always integrated directly into SyncIt and are now available seperately via GitHub …
read more
PHCurry - An implementation of Curry similar to what is found in functional

Published: Sat 07 December 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

programming languages.
Currying is a concept from functional programming where you allow you a function that would normally need n arguments to be called with fewer arguments. When you do this it will return a function with you current arguments stored, but waiting for the extra arguments. When all arguments …
read more
Merged into Zepto!

Published: Sun 24 November 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Merged into Zepto!
Today my patch fixing some serialization when calling $.param() which was also used in AJAX calls was merged into Zepto!
read more
Uncle Bob at SkillsMatter talks about Design Patterns

Published: Wed 20 November 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

This week is incredibly busy for me as I am going to a meetup every day but it started with a great talk by Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin) about Design Patterns at SkillsMatter. In it he gives what appeared to be a completely unrehearsed a run through of some …
read more
Git Hooks... Have been planning this for ages but it's sooo easy!

Published: Sat 02 November 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Currently when I get home from work and I want a bit of a change I'll do a bit of work learning Clojure, which at the moment is writing a script to generate HTML photo albums from a directory structure with images... I'm looking forward to getting it working and …
read more
Registering a Package on Bower

Published: Thu 10 October 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Registering a Package on Bower
Up until now I have only wanted to use me_map_reduce in Node.js, but today I wanted to use that functionality on a website too.
This proved to be a very easy exercise even though I have not done it before or even done any …
read more
Require.JS Shims - Working with Non AMD code
Published: Fri 20 September 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I'm pretty much settled on using Require.JS for loading front end JavaScript code because:
1. I like the way it allows me to precisely control the libraries that are available within a JavaScript file.
2. Gives me the ability to write small re-usable libraries, thus aiding re-usability.
3. Avoids polluting the global …
read more
Creating really reusable application code using a method of Dependency Injection
Published: Fri 30 August 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

inspired by Curry from Functional Programming
In this post I want to look at a method I used for writing decoupled easily reusable code within one of my personal projects using a method inspired by Functional Programming.
How your code might start...
routes/user.js
```
var emailSender = new EmailSender( /* SMTP …
```
read more
DIY Fix for Sony MW600

Published: Sun 18 August 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I have a Sony MW600 Bluetooth Headset:
And I have lost the spring that goes between the clip and the body of the device... But using two sets of pliers and a the spring from a Mini Wooden Peg:
I could bend bend it into the shape required and get … read more
Sinon.js Vs Dojo
Published: Sun 07 July 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Problem...

I was coding along quite happily on a project (soon to be unveiled) and got to testing my code that interacts with the server. I was intending to using Sinon.js to mock this, but the response was never coming back... My code was like this:
```
xhr("/dataset", {
    handleAs …
```
read more
Graphviz

Published: Thu 27 June 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Often as a developer I want to explain something that is either very complicated or very abstract to other people and this is not easy always.

In this situation I might use a diagram but I am not particularly skilled at doing this and I find the whole process incredibly …
read more
getTLIdEncoderDecoder.js - Locally unique, shorter, sortable timestamp based Id's

Published: Mon 17 June 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

tags: nodejs release

I have recently wrote getTLIdEncoderDecoder.js which is a component of SyncIt's upcoming Path based storage.

Given a supplied epoch it will generate you TLId, which is a word I just invented!

What is a TLId? It stands for Time Local Id and gives you a reference based on a …
read more
Matt was at London AJAX

Published: Sun 16 June 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Last Tuesday I presented SyncIt to London AJAX. I was surprisingly not that nervous going in, thanks to all the practice, but I feel I was no less nervous throughout the presentation either.
You can see the presentation at the skillsmatter site, who are the really nice people who host …
read more
Just got back from MondoDB London 2013

Published: Wed 10 April 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

So I just got back from MongoDB London 2013 and here is a quick run down of some of the highlights for me...

Optimising for Performance, Scale and Analytics - David Mytton, Server Density. Talked about spotting problems with your deployment and the things you should watch out for as signs …
read more
Asciiflow

Published: Sun 07 April 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Today I disovered a great little tool for helping to draw small flow diagrams and then being able to export them into ASCII! It does not try to be a complicated tool, but instead gives you simple very simple ones just for drawing boxes lines, writing text and moving that …
read more
A method of loading a basic library in AMD, Node.JS require(), jQuery and Javascript's

Published: Fri 05 April 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

plain old window namespace...
Using a combination of IIFE and Dependency Injection I have created a method of writing libraries that is compatible with jQuery, Node.js require(), Dojo AMD and plain old Javascript window. This is available via a public GitHub Gist

After creating this Gist I decided that …
read more
Me Map/Reduce

Published: Tue 02 April 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Me Map Reduce is inspired by MongoDB's map/reduce functionality.

In javascript you can easily do map/reduce in modern browsers using those methods already on the Array Class. But using these functions would always cause the output to be the same length as the input and there is little …
read more
MongoDB London 2013

Published: Wed 27 March 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

I have just registered for MongoDB London 2013 which I won for getting distinctions on the MongoDB online courses... Excited! read more
Ansible Server Init

Published: Fri 08 March 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

Installing a Development Server
Today I wanted to get started on writing the server code for SyncItStore so needed to set up a dev server. I started installing Ubuntu Server and was keeping notes on the steps I needed to replicated it.
I created virtual guests on my laptop using …
read more
NAS Adventures...

Published: Mon 25 February 2013
By Matt Forrester

In uncategorized.

The Product
I currently am an owner of a Thecus N3200pro NAS. I bought it because it has three disk bays, so can do RAID5 and was similarly priced to a very cheap PC. I was happy with it at first...
The Problem
Later on I wanted to try out …
read more

Other articles

Why does this exist?

Why

Why

Description

Installation

psql-out

This series of articles

Articles in this series

This series of articles

Articles in this series

This series of articles

Articles in this series

Why use an aggregate instead of returning all the data?

Linux users have very easy native Docker

The …

Why

Why

Gatwick Airport

Example

Merged into Zepto!

Registering a Package on Bower

How your code might start...

routes/user.js

Problem...

Installing a Development Server

The Product

The Problem

links