Month: January 2018

Exploratory Programming with jQuery

jQuery is a widely used framework for inspecting and manipulating the DOM in modern browsers. It’s often one of the fundamental libraries that’s used in major websites, even underlying higher level frameworks like Backbone and AngularJS. But JQuery can also be used as a tool for experimentation, prototyping, and testing ideas and features interactively in

Java 9 Gets an Interactive Shell

With the release of Java 9, an interactive shell (otherwise known as a REPL – read, eval, print loop) is now available. Many languages like Python, Ruby, PHP, and MySQL have had interactive shells since their inception. Javascript got a REPL with the introduction of node (although the developer consoles in browsers have offered a

Saving and Restoring JSON Data in Python

I recently had a need to save some data off to be used (and augmented) each time a python script was run. Python offers a very simple-to-use API to save data in JSON format. JSON stands for “Javascript Object Notation”. Originally developed for Javascript, writing and reading JSON is supported now in a wide variety