Tag Archives: ajax

Computer Algorithms: Data Compression with Run-length Encoding

Introduction

No matter how fast today’s computers and networks are, the users will constantly need faster and faster services. To reduce the volume of the transferred data we usually use some sort of compression. That is why this computer sciences area will be always interesting to research and develop.

There are many data compression algorithms, some of them lossless, others lossy, but their main goal aways will be to spare storage space and traffic. These algorithms are very useful when talking about data transfer between two distant places. Perhaps the best example is the transfer between a web server and a browser.

In the last few years a lot of research has been done on compressing files, executed on the client side. Such files are javascript, css, htmls and images. In fact servers and clients already have some techniques to compress data, like using GZIP for instance, that can dramatically decrease the transfer. In the other hand there are lots of tools and tricks in order to decrease the size of the data.

Actually when a file is executed by the client’s virtual machine, it doesn’t matter how “beautifully” it is formatted from a programmer’s point of view. Thus the spaces, tabs and the new lines don’t bring any significant information for the environment. That is why such compressing tools like YUI Compressor, Google Closure Compiler, etc. remove those symbols. Well, they can achieve even more in order to improve the compression rate. In this post I won’t cover this, but this shows how important data compression algorithms are.

It would be great if we could just compress data with some tool. Unfortunately this is not the case and usually the compression rate depends on the data itself. It is obvious that the choice of data compression algorithm depends mainly on the data and first of all we must explore the data.

Here I’ll cover one very simple lossless data compression algorithm called “run-length encoding” that can be very useful in some cases.

Run-length Encoding

Overview

This algorithm consists of replacing large sequences of repeating data with only one item of this data followed by a counter showing how many times this item is repeated. To become clearer let’s see a string example.

aaaaaaaaaabbbaxxxxyyyzyx

This string’s length is 24 and as we can see there are lots of repetitions. Using the run-length algorithm, we replace any run with shorter string followed by a counter.

a10b3a1x4y3z1y1x1

The length of this string is 17, which is approximately 70% of the initial length. Continue reading Computer Algorithms: Data Compression with Run-length Encoding

Object Oriented JavaScript: Inheritance

Objects and JavaScript

JavaScript, being a functional language, differs from most of the procedural/object oriented languages we know. The object oriented approach in JavaScript is rather strange. However there is much power in making objects! The syntax is really odd and there are several approaches.

Literal Notation

As many of you may know the most used notation is the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).

{ 'key1' : 'val1'
, 'key2' : 'val2'
, 'key3' : 'val3'
}

Of course this is the very basic example. You can use as value any JavaScript object – another similar object or a function.

{ 'key1' : 'val1'
, 'key2' : { 'inner_key1' : 'inner_val1' }
, 'key3' : function() {
			return 10 + 5;
		 }
}

The two examples above are showing an anonymous object in JavaScript, but you can assign this code to some variable.

var myObject = 
	{ 'key1' : 'val1'
	, 'key2' : 'val2'
	, 'key3' : 'val3'
	}

or

var myObject =
	{ 'key1' : 'val1'
	, 'key2' : { 'inner_key1' : 'inner_val1' }
	, 'key3' : function() {
				return 10 + 5;
			 }
	}

and then you can call the properties of these objects with the ‘.’ operator:

myObject.key1;
myObject.key2.inner_key1;
myObject.key3();

So far so good – this is the literal object notation in JavaScript. However there is another “objects” in JavaScript.
Continue reading Object Oriented JavaScript: Inheritance

jQuery.unbind()

Binding Problems

jQuery JavaScript Library
jQuery JavaScript Library

Typically in jQuery when you bind an HTML element with some event this event is fired every time the user (client) triggers it. Thus when you’ve a click event attached on a button you can click it as many times as you want. In some rare cases this can be tricky. Let’s imagine the following scenario.

  1. The user clicks on a “vote” button.
  2. Some AJAX calls are performed.
  3. After a successful AJAX call you setup a cookie to deny further votes from this machine.

This seems to be pretty well known scenario, but as the click event is attached to the button there is enough time to click several times on the “vote” button and to vote several times. In this case before the cookie is set the user can vote more than once. Continue reading jQuery.unbind()

Diving into Node.js – A Long Polling Example

Node.js vs. The World

What is typical for most of the web servers is that they listen for requests and respond as quickly as possible on every one of them. In fact the speed of the response is one of the main targets of optimization for developers. Fast servers are what everyone needs. From web developers to website visitors!

In the field of the that battle different web servers have different “weapons” to gain time. While this is useful in most of the cases, when it comes to a chat-like applications and Node.js approaches, the response is not always immediately returned. As I described in my posts until now about Node.js, a simple web server may wait for an event to be emitted, and than return the response. Continue reading Diving into Node.js – A Long Polling Example

Diving into Node.js – Very First App

What do I have till now?

After Node.js is istalled, described in my previous post, I can simply run this command:

stoimenpopov:~# node server.js

and this will start the server with the code within server.js. But what’s the code of server.js?

Following the instructions of Node’s homepage and most of the tutorials I’ve found, I can simply copy/paste the code from the first lines of Node’s page:

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
  res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(8124, "127.0.0.1");
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8124/');

There are several things I find interesting in this code, making it different from JavaScript as we know it. First of all what is

var http = require(‘http’)

and why I need it? What is the purpouse of 8124 and 127.0.0.1?

Node is built in modules and to use one of them you must first include it with require. Just like the example above with require(‘http’). In the same manner you can include every module of Node.

What are the Node’s modules are pretty well described in the API page. Well I’d like to say that the API page is quite insufficient. That is very bad, cause most of the code you’ll need developing a node.js applicatoin isn’t described/explained there. Continue reading Diving into Node.js – Very First App