I'm always amazed to hear about the death of the publishing industry. True, books and (gulp) magazines are often fighting for their lives, and the state of journalism is in tatters.

In my last article, I started discussing Compojure, a Web framework written in the Clojure language. Clojure already has generated a great deal of excitement among software developers, in that it combines the beauty and expressive elegance of Lisp with the efficiency and ubiquity of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Lisp is one of those languages that people either love or hate. Count me among the Lisp lovers. I was brainwashed during my undergraduate studies at MIT to believe that Lisp is the only "real" programming language out there, and that anything else is a pale imitation.

Let's give credit where credit's due: Unicode is a brilliant invention that makes life easier for millions—even billions—of people on our planet. At the same time, dealing with Unicode, as well as the various encoding systems that preceded it, can be an incredibly painful and frustrating experience.

In the early 1990s, my first job out of college was as a software engineer at a startup company. We were building a commercial product using a well-known open-source network security project. In those days, Agile software development practices (not to mention the World Wide Web, or even widespread public awareness of the Internet) still were in the future.

How'd Ya Do That? I tend to read science fiction or fantasy for entertainment and/or escape from reality.

From my perspective, one of the best parts of being a Web developer is the instant gratification. You write some code, and within minutes, it can be used by people around the world, all accessing your server via a Web browser.

As I write these words, many Ruby on Rails developers are worried.

Mom always said, "It's not nice to point." I'd argue Mom didn't manually enter long, cumbersome URLs, however. We're all familiar with services like TinyURL, but because we're Linux folks, we tend to prefer doing such things on our own. As with almost everything in Linux, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and in this article, I explore a bunch.

Varnish is a program that can greatly speed up a Web site while reducing the load on the Web server. According to Varnish's official site, Varnish is a "Web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy".

What if, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, you could wake up to a fresh and identical development environment completely free of yesterday's experiments and mistakes? Vagrant lets you do exactly that.

Everyone planning and building Web solutions with Drupal benefits from understanding what a "hook" is—and why Drupal is not a CMS.

JavaScript has had a long-standing monopoly on client-side Web programming. It has a tremendously large user base, and countless libraries have been written in it. Surely it is the perfect language with no flaws at all! Unfortunately, that is simply not the case.

Although it sometimes might seem as if relational databases have gone the way of the dinosaur, making way for non-relational (NoSQL) databases, such as MongoDB and Cassandra, a very large number of systems still depend on a relational database.

Do you find yourself repeating the same steps whenever you start a new Drupal project? Do you always download and enable the same modules, and make the same configuration changes every time? As we start doing more and more Drupal projects at Nomensa, I noticed that we were doing exactly this, so I started to look into ways to streamline our initial project setup process.

Want to send messages to all the browsers connected to your site? The pub-sub paradigm, run through Web sockets, might be just the solution.

How many times have you heard, "there's an app for that"? But sometimes, there actually isn't "an app for that", or the apps that do exist don't meet your needs. As Linux users, we tend to like to scratch our own itches, and if that means we write some code to do it, so be it.

One of the great new things about Drupal 7 is that it's now easier to customize your site content. In Drupal 6, you typically had to use the CCK (Content Construction Kit) module for fine-grained control in customizing content, but that has been folded into core for Drupal 7. Drupal 7 is now a true content management framework (CMF).

Create applications inside the Chrome browser with standard Web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I'm the author of the article "Introducing Dart, the New Web Language from Google" in the March 2013 issue. I wrote the article in late December and submitted the article in early January of this year. During the time I was writing it, I was using Dart M2 (version 0.2.9.9). I made sure to have my colleagues check over my code and worked to make sure that everything was perfect!