I came across a brilliant project the other day - Esprima from Ariya Hidayat, the author of PhantomJS. What is Esprima? Esprima is a JavaScript Parser written in JavaScript Syntax Validator. It forms the basis of several different tools - a minifier, a code coverage tool, a syntax validator - just to name a few. I was immediately interested in the syntax validation tool. It’s not a linter - it just checks that the JavaScript written is syntactically correct. Why would you want this if you…

A preface to this post: it is hard to find a free SQL Parser for .NET. There is a company that has a terrible library that they charge $150 bucks for. There are a couple of incomplete implementations done for school projects or for narrowly focused tasks. So if you want a no-strings attached free parser for SQL, you’re out of luck. However, since most people who want a .NET parser are writing code on a Windows machine, and use Visual Studio, there is (lightly documented) hope: the…

If you’re a Microsoft Dev, want to learn a bit more about the following products:

I’ve found a neat feature of derby dealing with the ready() function. I’ve been creating a derby app, and in my application I need to load up a client-side calendar. With a standard HTML web page this is straightforward thing to do. On the page you wanted the calendar, you would include the client js for the calendar, some code to load it, and that would be that. Derby introduced some complexity to this relatively simple task. On my first attempt, I put my scripts in the section of…

I just finished the Stack section of Cracking the Coding Interview and came across an old puzzle - The Tower of Hanoi. I struggled with solving this problem. I wrote this elaborate, strange algorithm to try to solve it (which should have been a dead give-away that I had it wrong). Ironically enough, hidden in the 20-30 lines of code I wrote were the three lines of code I needed to solve the problem. Anyways, after beating my head in trying to solve this, I ended up going to the back of the book…

I’ve been going over the Linked List section of Cracking the Coding Interview and most times I get stumped with a problem the solution is the Runner Technique (or slow/fast pointers).

Sublime Text has rapidly become my favorite text editor. Cross platform, easy to use, great feature set. The Command Palette feature, where you can search for a feature without having to know where it is in the application, is an piece of usability brilliance. Somebody cobbled together a great step-by-step set of directions on how to install sublime on ubuntu. I wanted to give a shout-out to them and their work.

This post is going to cover installing and configuring MongoDB to use with Derby. If you’re reading this post looking to add model persistence to your Derby application but don’t know much about MongoDB, understanding MongoDB will help you understand Derby and the model system it uses.

I’ve been learning quite a bit about JavaScript in writing algorithms from Cracking the Coding Interview. I learned something new about strings in JavaScript and how they can be accessed. From MDN:

I finished my third algorithm from Cracking the Coding Interview - the Trie.