Sustainable JavaScript

JavaScript is certainly one of the most popular programming language [1] [2] [3] and the never increasing popularity of complex web application will not cut that trend soon.
Despite some intrinsic flaws of the language and environment, trends have emerged to turn JavaScript into clearer, more structured, deployable, testable environment. In this post, I will go through some of them. As a subjective point of view, they will reflect some techniques we daily use in the scope of large scale projects, computing and displaying rich information in bio-informatics.

I will mainly make here a short introduction to underscore.js, require.js and jasmine as the tools that recently made my day change and shine again. I will skip discussions about jQuery, chrome developer tool, html5 and backbone which also are invaluable, among many others.

Example code, usable as is or in an eclipse (aptana studio is perfect) is available on google drive

Part of a large scale tech jobs ad campaign in the Bay area

Continuous Deployment in Perl: Code & Folks

pre-reviewed version, published in a Perl issue in the Software Developer's Journal (May 2012 issue)

This article was written together with my friend Pierre-Antoine Queloz (paqueloz@gmail.com)

Continuous Integration is the tactic of decreasing the latency between the implementation of a new piece of code and its integration in the overall project. It is the backbone of Continuous Deployment that is often defined as releasing software very frequently in order to satisfy customer needs and get their feedback as soon as possible. Both have shown their benefits and play an important role in the success of the current Agile software development trend.