The New Breed of Version Control Systems

CVS, part of the glue that holds open source development together, is showing its age. Many competitors have emerged recently, fixing misfeatures and adding new ideas. Shlomi Fish explores several current open source version control systems that may be better than CVS for your needs.

Fish, Shlomi. O'Reilly and Associates (2004). Articles>Content Management>Programming>Databases

Content Management System APIs

Panellists talk about two vendor-neutral programming interfaces for content-management systems. Joel Amoussou discusses JSR 170, a vendor-neutral Java API designed to work across many different content management systems. Michael Wechner discusses Neutron, an Open Content Management User Interface based on XML.

Amoussou, Joel and Michael Wechner. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Content Management>Programming>XML

What APIs Can Tell You About a Product

I always try to get a look at a vendor's APIs before (or in the process of) evaluating a product. And I recommend you do, too. If you are involved in a product-selection effort, get input from your developers -- have them evaluate APIs as part of the product-evaluation process. Don't wait until after the deal is inked to find out whether the product's APIs are so problematic that your rollout schedule might have to undergo serious changes.

assertTrue (2009). Articles>Content Management>Programming>Collaboration

Hone Your Regexp (Regular Expression) Pattern-Building Skills

Add to your bag of tricks several handy techniques for crafting real-world regular expressions (regexps). Building regexps is a part of the daily life of any administrator. Learning to think in terms of pattern matching, in order to construct successful regexps that return the desired criteria, is a skill that takes both time and practice.

Stutz, Michael. IBM (2006). Articles>Content Management>Programming

Coding Horror: A Modest Proposal for the Copy and Paste School of Code Reuse

If you use copy and paste while you're coding, you're probably committing a design error. Instead of copying code, move it into its own routine. Future modifications will be easier because you will need to modify the code in only one location.

Atwood, Jeff. Coding Horror (2009). Articles>Content Management>Programming