Code Performance and Understanding Metrics

Being concerned for the performance of your code should be important to you… but if you’re not using a dedicated profiler, getting metrics isn’t something well understood. Here are some basic techniques to get you equipped with the tools to improve the responsiveness of your code. Isn’t this just a matter of pride? Everyone should

[Read More](/content/measuring-performance-timing-your-code/ "Measuring performance: Timing your code"/index.html)

Understanding APIs

The strength of the Net isn’t just what you put on it – it’s also how you interact with the world around you. According to Wikipedia: An application programming interface (API) specifies how some software components should interact with each other.

[Read More](/content/creating-client-side-apis/ "Creating Client Side API’s"/index.html)

Lasso 9: Web Requests

Lasso 9’s new web_request->param behaves quite differently than action_param found in previous versions of Lasso. It’s lower-level, and a little more verbose, but significantly faster – which makes it an obvious tool to master. Simple usage: web_request->param(‘myparam’) … returns the GET or POST param “myparam”. However, it returns it as a “bytes” type.

[Read More](/content/dealing-with-web_request-param-in-lasso-9/ "Dealing with web_request->param in Lasso 9"/index.html)

Error Handling in Code

Appropriate error handling is essential to any code – and yet it’s often included as an afterthought to systems large and small. I’m going to cover some basic Lasso 9 techniques for handling errors in this article that you can easily add to existing code as well as use as you construct your systems from.

[Read More](/content/effective-error-control/ "Effective Error Control"/index.html)

Understanding JSON

JSON is the communications backbone of the modern data-responsive web. It is actually quite simple – and yet I’ve been surprised how many developers are daunted by it. So let’s demystify it and make it simple. First, let’s get out of the way the two most common questions I get about JSON.

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Troubleshooting Login Issues

A while ago my company experienced a weird problem where users were logging into a system we’d built for a client and yet inexplicably, it told them they could not view their content because they were not logged in. The common theme: every affected user was using Internet Explorer, but that wasn’t the whole story.

[Read More](/content/conquering-internet-explorer-double-cookie-madness/ "Conquering Internet Explorer Double Cookie Madness"/index.html)

Using Traits in Lasso 9

When Kyle Jessup first introduced me to the concepts of Traits in Lasso 9, I thought “cool, that will be really useful”, then promptly forgot about the feature amongst all the other awesome new things in Lasso 9. Many months later I was getting tired of adding a delete method to every object.

[Read More](/content/creating-reusable-code-with-lasso-9-traits/ "Creating reusable code with Lasso 9 Traits"/index.html)

Lasso and JavaScript Integration

I got asked recently about how to use Lasso and JavaScript together, and while it’s a technique we’ve been coping with for years, it’s one of those things we just assume people know and therefore it’s not “out there” in the public domain. Lasso can use square brackets for including code in.

[Read More](/content/protecting-lasso-and-javascript-from-one-another/ "Protecting Lasso and JavaScript from one another"/index.html)