GitHub Rebase #26

Welcome to Rebase #26! If you’ve got an interesting project you’d like to see on the column feel free to shoot me a message. I’d love to see more themed Rebases, like the book edition. Perhaps we could have a JSON edition, a hardcore C edition, unknown language edition, and so on. I follow some simple guidelines that you can check out here too.

Featured Project

asi-http-request is the Steven Seagal of HTTP libraries for Objective-C. Drop this guy into your OSX or iPhone application and it’s guaranteed to kick ass. Well, at least your HTTP calls will. The library makes it easy to interact with RESTful services as well as submit multipart/form-data if you’re in the need for it. It also has a boatload of other features including progress delegates, a streamlined interface to uploading files from disk, and background/queueing support. Take a gander at the docs here, including a nice look at what applications are using it. Fork away, punk.

Notably New Projects

deadweight deals with a common problem that many developers face: unused CSS rules. What do you do with them? Comment them out? Leave them for that annoying team member to deal with instead? This project takes the higher ground by analyzing your stylesheets and some given views to determine what selectors you can safely dispose of. You can even use Mechanize to submit forms and make sure you’re shedding your unnecessary CSS.

jquery-visualize is a really nice way to get simple graphs in your application that’s both accessible (read: degrades into tables) and really spiffy looking. It’s as simple as filling up a table with data and then calling @$(‘table’).visualize();@. Of course, there’s plenty of configuration options like colors, the type of graph, line weights, and more. Try out a demo or download it for yourself.

tokyo-recipes is a collection of Lua scripts that plug directly into Tokyo Cabinet, an extremely efficient and speedy key-value store. There’s plenty of awesome recipes in this cookbook including expiring data based on TTL, map reduce and even a simple high-low betting game If you’re just getting started on writing your own Lua scripts for Tokyo Cabinet or are looking for some real examples of how you can use the plugins to your advantage, take a look at this repo.

weberl is a small Erlang webserver that’s based on web.py. It’s essentially a bare-bones web framework that doesn’t assume much, which is certainly ideal if you’re just getting off the ground or you don’t like too much baggage. This project has just started up and could certainly use the help of both experienced and greenhorn Erlang coders if you’re up for it. Go forth and clone!

Redisent is an interface to the Redis key value-store for PHP. Unlike memcached, Redis persists data, and now with this library you can easily hook in your code to it. It also supports clustering, which allows you to hook up more than one key-value store and set aliases for each. Read up more about Redisent on this great blog post/tutorial for using it.

Written by

Nick Quaranto

@qrush