Pie in the Sky (February 14th, 2014)

Here are some links for your weekend reading.

Cloud

• Source control credentials issue & fix: Looks like there's an issue with the Mobile Services source control preview feature.

• What's new in Azure Mobile Services: A couple of useful changes here. Oh, and the client SDK was updated too.

• Windows Azure HDInsight preview clusters with Hadoop 2.2: If you're looking for Hadoop 2.2, it's now in preview for HDInsight. Follow the link for reasons you might want to look at 2.2, as well as some links to videos and other resources.

• Visual Studio Online 'Monaco' update: Some new console commands, Markdown, Sass, and others.

• Price reduction for Windows Azure Notification Hubs: Lower prices are nice.

Client/Mobile

• How to use mobile emulation mode in Chrome: It's pretty neat that you can emulate (to a certain extent,) a mobile device in your desktop browser.

• Ember.js and accessibility: A good read. Even if you're not an Ember.js user, the take away should be that you can (and should,) make even JavaScript heavy apps accessible through ARIA.

• Web accessibility - tools and considerations: Some tools and considerations for how and why you should make your web app accessible.

• Multithread.js: A wrapper around web workers.

• Linux design tools: Design tools for those on a budget.

• Visualizing data with D3.js: Nice intro to d3.js.

Java

• Azul Zulu OpenJDK available in the Web Platform Installer: You can now get this through the Web Platform Installer Application Gallery.

• What's new in the Windows Azure plugin for Eclipse with Java: SSL offloading, GlassFish 4, Azul Zulu are a few of the things added in this update.

Node.js

• What's new in node.js v0.12 - multiple instances in a single process: Information on the new multiple instances/single process feature in the upcoming v0.12 release.

• Demi.js: A new API framework.

• Node.js & real-time video encoding: Interesting project for anyone doing video encoding.

PHP

• Deployment time dependency management for PHP with Composer on Windows Azure Web Sites: Using Composer for dependency management on Windows Azure Web Sites.

Misc.

• The lingering seduction of the page: Challenges to information architecture in a world of interconnected devices and complex systems.