Protractor, Saucelabs and File Upload

I’ve been doing quite a bit of work with Protractor recently using both Saucelabs and browserstack, up until now Ive never had a need to do file uploads. I have usually worked around any reason to upload files due to known issues people have had with uploading…

Paul Mcilwaine

Aug 25, 2014

Playing around with Youtube and Speech Recognition

I’ve had an interest in learning the Speech Recognition API for sometime, in this time I have seen some nice uses of the API. So in my spare 30mins I decided to develop a very simple application which would allow a user to control Youtube…

Paul Mcilwaine

Feb 2, 2011

Google maps detecting markers in a particular boundary

Its been a very long time since I last used the Google Maps API, think v2 of the API had just come out of Beta when I last used it which shows just how long ago it was. Thankfully v3.0 adds many cool features and makes things a hell of…

Paul Mcilwaine

Dec 16, 2010

Zend and the Youtube API

The Zend Framework comes with a rather handy module called GData. The GData module handles basically everything Google Apps contain including support for the Youtube API. Youtube’s API documentation when first viewed can be rather scary to look at but thanks to the Zend_GData libary a…

Paul Mcilwaine

Apr 14, 2013

Is jQuery needed anymore ?

I’ve recently been thinking about completely ditching jQuery. The reason being its main purpose is no longer required. The reason jQuery came to be was to allow a single API to manipulate the DOM easily. Before we had to use a syntax like this:

Paul Mcilwaine

Sep 7, 2014

Unit Testing with Web2py

I am a big fan of web2py, however it does have its short comings one being the difficulties of unit testing. This is actually not surprising, it was only in the last 18 months or so the web2py framework got serious about doing unit testing, which means unlike other frameworks testing…

Paul Mcilwaine

Jul 8, 2011

Your toolkit — The editor

Amongst developers this topic is a religious battleground as to which editor is the best to use, however like religion there is no wrong or right answer. So how do you choose the correct edtior ?

Paul Mcilwaine

Aug 19, 2011

Don’t over complicate the issue

When working in a team of developers you will more often than not bounce idea offs one another to try and determine the best approach to solve a problem. Sometimes these can be quite complicated problems, or sometimes you just cannot decide appropriately which choice to…

Paul Mcilwaine

Apr 29, 2011

HTML5, CSS3, and DOM Performance

Paul Irish talks about HTML5, CSS3 and DOM Performance. I highly recommend any frontend developer to watch this, there some very interesting techniques to help speed the rendering of a web page. The talk is mainly focused on the Google Chrome browser however most…

Paul Mcilwaine

Apr 25, 2013

My experience with Web2py

I have been using Web2py for over a year at the place I work, and I believe its time to give my thoughts on it. I believe I am in a unique position to give my thoughts on this working on small projects, high traffic sites, and larger scale projects.