Using local npm executables

When developing NodeJS apps, it used to be common practice to install module dependencies in a central node_modules folder. Now, it's recommended to install dependencies for each project separately. This allows fine-grained control over specific modules and versions needed for each application and simplifies installation of your package when you're ready to ship it.  It does require more disk space, but these modules are mostly very small.

For example if your project had this package.json file, running npm -install would create a node_modules sub-directory and install express and mocha into it:

{

  "name": "awesome-app",

  "version": "0.0.1",

  "dependencies": {

    "express": "3.0.0rc3"

   ,"mocha": "latest"

  }

}

It's also fairly common to install some modules globally, using npm -g, if they provide command-line utilities. For example, if you wanted to have jslint available to all users on your system, you'd do this:

sudo npm -g install jslint

which would place this in /usr/local/bin/jslint.

If you specify a dependency in your package.json file, and that module includes an executable -- like jslint, for example, or mocha -- then npm install will automatically place those executables in your project's node_modules/.bin directory. To make use of these, add this prefix to your $PATH in your ~/.bashrc file:

export PATH=./node_modules/.bin:$PATH

This allows each one of your NodeJS projects to independently specify, install and use not only packages that are required in your JavaScript code, but also the command-line tools you need for testing, linting, or otherwise building your app.

Top Music Picks of 2011

When I started thinking about my top music picks for 2011, I had a hard time thinking of any one album that had really took the prize.  Instead an odd collection of material surfaced: a couple of web videos of studio footage, online music clips from a film composer, a few of one-off tracks, plus a couple of albums that had been on the shelf long enough to qualify as "rediscoveries".  It turns out there were also a bunch of new additions that got a lot of airplay last year. I've singled out a few of the favorites here and listed the rest in point form, and at the end included links to some of those music and video clips. Check them out!

Maria Joao and Mario Laghina - Cor (rediscovery)

This particular album has long been near the very top of my list of all time favorites, but it sat on the shelf long enough that when I took it out for a spin, it was a very nice rediscovery. It holds such a high position on my list of favorites that it definitely deserves a mention.  Maria Joao is a very gifted and unusual vocalist from Portugal. She's able to do amazing things with her voice, and isn't afraid to experiment. Her long-time collaborator Mario Laginha's performance on the piano is technically dazzling, and Trilok Gurtu amazing percussion work rounds out the album to create something that is really hard to classify, a mix of avant-garde, world music and European jazz . For a while, I had the opening track set to play as my morning wake-up alarm. The hushed sounds of an early-morning city scape and the soft, slumbering opening chords accompany an almost hymn-like vocal melody that slowly rises, flitters and then soars like a bird into a new day. This is an album that not everyone can appreciate, but those who do are likely to cherish it.

Daniel Goyone  - l'heurs bleu (rediscovery)

The French jazz composer and pianist Daniel Goyone may not be well known in North America, but those whose musical tastes extend to European jazz have probably heard of him. Like other European artists, Daniel Goyone has taken the Great American Art Form and combined it with local influences to create something unique and highly sophisticated. His evocative compositions meander between plaintive and sanguine, floating somewhere between major and minor, never seeming to settle. The unique combination of instruments, including bandeon, violin, marimba, oboe, and the aforementioned Trilok Gurtu on percussion, create something that's again hard to classify but sits somewhere between jazz, chamber music and traditional French folk music.  There are a few albums by Daniel Goyone that I've tried to get hold of; unfortunately they are very hard to find.

Brian Browne Trio - The Erindale Sessions

My biggest musical influence is undoubtedly the great Canadian jazz pianist Brian Browne. I first saw Brian playing at the Ottawa International Jazz Festival in 1999, and later was fortunate enough to study piano with him.  A couple of years ago, Brian told me of an old acquaintance who had discovered a collection of master tapes from a series of concerts that the Brian Browne Trio gave at the Erindale Secondary School library.  A teacher there by the name of Marvin Munshaw, who happened to be a huge jazz fan, brought the trio to the school and recorded them on a reel-to-reel deck. After some extensive remastering, the result is "The Erindale Sessions", featuring the original Brian Browne Trio as they sounded in the late 70's.

I mentioned this album last year before it was commercially available. It now is available, on iTunes and also direct from brianbrowne.com by mail order.  My favorite tracks are probably "Blues for the UFOs", "Stompin' at the Savoy", and "St. Thomas", but the whole album is a treasure.

Yellowjackets - Timeline

The Yellowjackets are my favorite band of all time. For many Yellowjackets fans, the return of William Kennedy must have seemed too good to be true.  Although Peter Erskine and Markus Baylor both did some fantastic drum work over the years since he left the band, William Kennedy's unique, polyrythmic style was a big part of the sound that people came to identify with the 'Jackets.  And he doesn't disappoint on this album, which marks the band's 30th anniversary.

The opening track "Why Is It" features all the rythmic and melodic intensity you'd expect from the Yellowjackets, but the overall tone of the album more reflective, characterized by several richly crafted ballads, especially the title track "Timeline", the lush ballad "A Single Step", and the lyrical closing song "I Do".  Beautiful work from an exceptional band, who after 30 years is still producing some of the finest electro-acoustic jazz ever.

Peter Martin - Set of Five

The piano music of Peter Martin was an exciting Youtube discovery, with his great 3-minute jazz piano clips.  His short-play album "Set of Five" features five solo piano pieces that are all excellent, range from hard-bop to ballads, and wrap up with an amazing jazz cover of Coldplay's Viva la Vida.

Peter Martin's playing is technically brilliant, easy to listen to, and steeped in the best jazz piano traditions with a flair for originality and innovative arrangements. Definitely recommended.  The album is available for download on iTunes. Check out Peter Martin's web site http://petermartinmusic.com for more on this talented pianist.

Bernie Senensky - Rhapsody

Bernie Senensky is another great Canadian jazz pianist. He has recorded quite a few albums, but it wasn't until my musical mentor Brian Browne played a few tracks from this CD for me that I got switched on to his music.  The interpretations of standards on this album are creative and technically impressive. Top notch jazz piano trio music.

Other albums that were favorites of 2011 include the following, all of which are highly recommended!

• Bob Van Asperen, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment - Handel's Organ Concerto's Opus 4
• Brad Mehldau - Highway Rider
• Charlie Haden & Hank Jones - Steal Away
• Lyle Mays - Solo Improvisations for Expanded Piano
• Bruce Cockburn - Life Short Call Now
• Keith Jarrett & Charlie Haden - Jasmine
• Pat Metheny - Secret Story
• Empire of the Sun - Walking On a Dream (Special Edition)
• Bill Evans - The Paris Concert

And to finish off, here are links to those video and audio clips I mentioned: David Norland, who composed the instrumental soundtrack for "Anvil: The Story of Anvil", and the legendary Lyle Mays performing on MIDI-fied piano and Spectrasonics software synthesizers with Alex Acuna on drums.

David Norland - Instrumentals from the Soundtrack to "Anvil: The Story of Anvil"
It seems a little strange that a film about a heavy metal band from Toronto could feature such nice background music. Somehow it worked, and contrasted beautifully with the over-the-top metal tunes Anvil is known for. The movie is actually a hilarious and moving documentary about a band that never quite made it to the big time, but refused to give up. David Norland's scoring for the film lent it a very human touch. Especially the tune "Shibuya", which you can hear in the Audio section, which is played in the film's closing scene, really captured the feeling of the story.

Check out the audio clips here:
http://www.davidnorland.com/

Lyle Mays demos Spectrasonics Trillian with Alex Acuna 

Lyle Mays album "Solo Improvisations for Extended Piano" was mentioned above. It's excellent, but here you can actually watch him performing live on a MIDIfied grand piano and synth, together with Alex Acuna, in HD video and high-quality audio.

http://vimeo.com/11854911
http://vimeo.com/11852047

A Simple Intro to MVC, PubSub and Chaining in 20 Lines of JavaScript

In this post I want to present three JavaScript topics - MVC, Chaining, and PubSub - using the simplest possible examples in code.

Javascript MVC frameworks have been getting a lot of attention, as sites like TodoMVC demonstrate, but the number of choices can be a little overwhelming. It really helps to have a good understanding of MVC first before you delve into some of the more sophisticated frameworks.

MVC

Model-View-Controller is mainly about separating the concerns of managing data (the Model), displaying it to the user (the View), handling user input and performing actions on the data (the Controller).  Exactly how the data in the Model makes its way to the View varies, but organizing your application in terms of these roles can help prevent messy, unmaintainable spaghetti code.

To follow this tutorial, use the Firebug console, or Chrome's developer tools to type in and run the code. Here's the full example running in Firebug; as you can see it's not a lot of code.

As you'd expect, our code will include a model, a view, and a controller.



Our model should hold some data. Since this is the simplest possible example, it will just hold one variable, a counter.



Our View is also going to be super simple: just printing to the console. It has a function called "update" to print something to the console.



The Model and the View don't know about each other directly.  The Controller knows about them both, though, and it handles user input. To keep things simple, user input is via the console, too. The controller is going to have a function called "count" that we'll invoke from the console.



Here it is all together: MVC in 20 lines of JavaScript. After all it's not that complicated.




Each time we invoke the Controller.count function, it updates the model and passes it to the view, which displays the new data.

Of course this is over simplified. It leaves lots of room for improvement. So, let's move on to JavaScript chaining.

Chaining

If we call Controller.count() several times, we can see the data incrementing. If you're using Firebug, you'll see the data being displayed in our View (the console), followed by the word "undefined". That's because the count() function isn't returning any value; the result of running this function is undefined. If count() returned a value, the console would display it instead of "undefined".  So, what if our count() function returned "this", i.e. it returns the Controller object itself? Then when we call Controller.count(), it would return the same Controller object back to us again, and we could do this:


This is pretty easy to implement:



So that is chaining explained with two lines of JavaScript. Neat, huh?  Now let's move on to the last concept.

PubSub

Notice that in the simple MVC example, the Controller updates the Model and then it has to tell the View to update, passing in the new data. This is fine if you only have one view, but what if you have several views of the same model? And what if you want to be able to add or remove views? This is when manually updating views in the Controller starts to become a pain. It would be nice if the model could just announce that it got updated, and the views could listen for this announcement and update automatically whenever the model changed.

Publisher-Subscriber (aka. PubSub) is a variation of the Observer pattern that implements this idea. I'm not going to implement the whole PubSub pattern here, just the bare minimum to get the idea across.

To start with we'll have a list of subscribers, and a function to publish information to them. It just loops through all the subscribers and updates them.


Then our Model needs to announce that it was updated, so instead of modifying the counter directly, we'll give it a function called "incr" and use that to increment the counter. This function will modify the data and then announce it to the subscribers using the "publish" function.


Finally the Controller, instead of manually updating the model and view, will just call the model's incr function and let the PubSub pattern take care of updating the views.


Here it is all together:


So there is MVC, Chaining and PubSub stripped down to their bare-bones essentials in about 20 lines of JavaScript. Obviously, this isn't a complete implementation of any of these patterns, but I think it makes the basic underlying ideas clear.  After reading this and trying out the code in a JavaScript console, you might have a better idea of what a JavaScript MVC framework is good for, how it works, and what kind of features you like best.

Serve gzipped files with Express.JS

Assuming you have minified, gzipped versions of your static javascript files already available (i.e. jquery.min.js.gz) you can serve the compressed files relatively easily. You don't really need to use on-the-fly gzip compression. The obvious benefit is faster page loading.  Although it might seem like a small thing, saving a few kilobytes here and there in the midst of MB-sized downloads, such small performance optimizations can and *do* have a noticeable impact on responsiveness and overall user experience... just ask Thomas Fuchs.

If you had, for example, myscript.js, you could simply do this:

uglifyjs -nc myscript.js > myscript.min.js

cat myscript.min.js | gzip > myscript.min.js.gz

And then with a simple bit of URL re-writing, serve the compressed version whenever a supported browser requests the minified version:

Express 2.x :

// basic URL rewrite to serve gzipped versions of *.min.js files
app.get('*.min.js', function (req, res, next) {
  req.url = req.url + '.gz';
  res.header('Content-Encoding', 'gzip');
  next();
});

Express 3.x :

app.get('*.min.js', function (req, res, next) {
  req.url = req.url + '.gz';
  res.set('Content-Encoding', 'gzip');
  next();
});

Now, if the browser requests "./js/myscript.min.js", it will actually get a copy of myscript.min.js.gz from that URL, without doing a redirect, and the browser will automatically decompress the file and use it in the normal way.

If your scripts are small to start with, the benefits won't be that great. Concatenating all your scripts together, then compressing them, could offer a major improvement over several smaller files.

Note that this doesn't check to see which files actually have gzipped versions available, so you would need to be diligent about keeping your files current, or write a simple function to cache a list of the available gzipped files at run time.