Most developers will have to skirt around a great many different technologies, from their main base language (Java, C#, C++, etc), to various scripting and expression languages (regex, cron expressions, ant, etc).
Some of these additional languages are only touched upon from time to time, so it's difficult to become an expert unless working with them daily.
Fortunately, there are various web resources which we developers can take advantage of to make our lives much easier when working with these universal, but infrequently used languages.
I always forget absolutely everything I know about regular expressions, because my use of regex is infrequent at best, so I'm never able to cement the knowledge permanently. Fortunately this website exists:
It's basically a sandbox for constructing regular expressions and checking that they capture the intended text.
Here's a rundown of the website elements:
I personally find this to be extremely useful when constructing any regex for any technology or platform; just bookmark the link, open it up, create your regex and check it against various pieces of text. Once you're happy it matches properly, just copy it out and use it!
I find this particularly useful in eclipse, as the search functionality allows the use of regular expressions. When you have a code base that's over a million lines long and you need to perform a complicated global find and replace; using a regular expression can make a potentially month-long task take a few minutes instead:
And of course this website becomes incredibly useful when using Groovy's built-in regex functionality, as it allows you to construct your regex separately in real time, without endlessly re-running a piece of code just to check that you've written the right regular expression!
So, whenever you need to write a regular expression, remember regexr.com
Some of these additional languages are only touched upon from time to time, so it's difficult to become an expert unless working with them daily.
Fortunately, there are various web resources which we developers can take advantage of to make our lives much easier when working with these universal, but infrequently used languages.
Regular Expressions
I always forget absolutely everything I know about regular expressions, because my use of regex is infrequent at best, so I'm never able to cement the knowledge permanently. Fortunately this website exists:
It's basically a sandbox for constructing regular expressions and checking that they capture the intended text.
Here's a rundown of the website elements:
I personally find this to be extremely useful when constructing any regex for any technology or platform; just bookmark the link, open it up, create your regex and check it against various pieces of text. Once you're happy it matches properly, just copy it out and use it!
I find this particularly useful in eclipse, as the search functionality allows the use of regular expressions. When you have a code base that's over a million lines long and you need to perform a complicated global find and replace; using a regular expression can make a potentially month-long task take a few minutes instead:
And of course this website becomes incredibly useful when using Groovy's built-in regex functionality, as it allows you to construct your regex separately in real time, without endlessly re-running a piece of code just to check that you've written the right regular expression!
So, whenever you need to write a regular expression, remember regexr.com
Cron Expressions
Whether you're using a unix based operating system, and need to schedule a shell script at 10:00am every second Tuesday of the month, or you're using a Quartz Scheduler in your Java application and want to print "hello" to the console every minute; it's inevitable that most developers will at some point or another use CRON expressions.
Cron expressions can be used to schedule events according to a set of rules. They're extremely flexible, and allow us to establish conditions such as 'at 11:01 pm on the 15th January 2016' or 'every hour in the month of July'. Unfortunately they look more like this in the actual scripts '0 1 11 15 1 ? *' or '0 0 0/1 1 7 ? *' this isn't easy to remember, let alone master; however luckily for us there are such websites as www.cronmaker.com
This website allows us to do two things:
- Put in a schedule in a logical manner (e.g. 'every 10 minutes'), and generate a cron expression for that schedule.
- Put in a cron expression and check that it is valid, and check when the next scheduled dates are for that expression.
This is a life saver when trying to come up with complex cron expressions, and saves a lot of trial-and-error in development as we can use the website as a sandbox to validate our expressions. It doesn't cater to every scenario in the generator, but we can tweak the generated expression and validate the next dates for it.
So for everything CRON - try cronmaker.com
Dependency Management
Most (Java) developers will end up using some kind of dependency management in their time, such as Ivy or Maven. But where do you get the resources from? How do you know what to put in your pom or ivy.xml? What if you need a jar file that's hard to find?
For all of those scenarios, there's mvnrepository.com
The website allows you to look up libraries and modules, select a version, and then gives you a link to the jar, as well as the appropriate entries for your favourite dependency management software. It supports maven, ivy, gradle, grape, Buildr and SBT:
The ability to copy and paste the dependency declarations eliminates any human error in writing these configuration files manually, which inevitably saves a lot of time!
Formatting XML and JSON
Whether you use SOAP or REST; most web developers will have to deal with XML or JSON at some point. Sometimes the code we get isn't properly formatted, and reading it is a nightmare. For the sake of a copy-and-paste, there are a couple of resources available where we can nicely format our XML or JSON to make it pretty and readable:
JSON: http://jsonformat.com/
Both of these sites need little instruction; just paste in your nasty un-formatted code and hit 'process' or 'submit' and it spits out the nice formatted version, ready for reading!
Bonus Links - XSLT and HTML/CSS/Javascript
Finally, here are a couple of handy links for getting to grips with XSLT and HTML/Javascript/CSS:
Javascript: http://jsfiddle.net/
Both of these sites allow you to play around with various scripts and transformations and simply hit 'run', and you can instantly see the effect of what you've written. They're great for playing around with ideas or getting started with complicated scenarios before you get to developing in anger.
So; remember to bookmark these websites, and keep them handy when you're in a bind!
Comments
Post a Comment