How to create a rake cron job in Heroku

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A few weeks ago I had to deal with setting up a cron job that periodically updated some db tables of a Ruby on Rails application running on Heroku. Here’s a brief step-by-step tutorial to make your life easier in case you were approaching the same task.

Server-side pagination with AngularJS

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AngularJS is one of the most used Javascript frameworks nowadays.

A characteristic of this framework is the possibility of binding input or output parts of an HTML page to a model represented by standard JavaScript variables.

Looping through arrays and collections is made easy by the ngRepeat directive.
This directive becomes handy when dealing with lists and tables, especially if associated to the AngularJS filters, which allow you to handle pagination, filtering and sorting by adding just one line of code to your html.

Unfortunately, one of the limitations of this approach is that the filtering is done client-side, therefore it wouldn’t be an optimal solution when dealing with a substantial number of rows/records.

A Lightweight jQuery Notification Bar

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Notifying users with quick messages and alerts in a website is one of the most recurring needs of a web developer.
Every time I need to implement something like that, I start looking around the web hoping to find some Javascript/jQuery plugin that would do the work for me.
The good thing is that a lot of people have already faced this problem.
The bad thing is that the results of the search are way too many and often very confusing.
Chances are that most of the time, you don’t really need a 3MB-super-fancy-hyper-customizable-highly-priced plugin, but you just want something that works, and that you can quickly incorporate into your code.

How to deploy your web app to Amazon EC2 using Capistrano

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What is Capistrano?

Capistrano is an open source tool mainly used to deploy web applications from source code management (SCM) to one or more servers. The aim of this guide is showing how to easily deploy your app to amazon EC2 using Capistrano. We can leverage its multi-stage extension to provide a different deployment strategy in different scenarios.

Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB

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What’s Amazon DynamoDB?

DynamoDB is one of the most recent services offered by Amazon.com. Announced on January 18, 2012, it is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance along with excellent scalability. Let’s quickly analyze its positive and negative aspects in the lists below:

How to set up and exploit an Apache Solr environment on Amazon EC2

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What’s Solr?

Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world’s largest internet sites.