



Remembering Spidey

Back before Google was born, and even longer before it became a verb, the

World Wide Web was often searched by a little spider on a surfboard.

Webcrawler was to many of us in the mid 1990s what Google is to the entire

planet now. Of course, now I use Google to search the Internet, but in its

day, that little spider was the gateway to knowledge. Times have changed,

and the Internet has grown. Likewise, Web development in general has

changed drastically during the past 20 years. Gone are the blink tags and

"under construction" animated GIFs. Gone is Geocities. Even the giant AOL

is a shadow of its former self. This month, we look at Web development as it

is today, built on the best Web development platform available, which in

our opinion, is Linux.

Our own Katherine Druckman starts the issue with a look at Drupal

and what to expect with Drupal 8—specifically from the perspective of Drupal community members from all over the world.

It's no secret Katherine loves Drupal, and she's able to share with us the

views of kindred spirits. Feeling right at home himself this issue, Reuven M. Lerner

teaches how to use Watir, a tool for browser-testing Ruby code

without the need to start up and navigate the various browsers manually. If

you test your code (and you should), Watir is worth checking out.

Dave Taylor continues his series on Cribbage this month, and turns a game I

have always called "that one with the pegs" into an interesting and fairly

complex script. If you like math, you'll fall in love with Dave's version

of Cribbage. Kyle Rankin deals with Pi this month, but unlike Dave, Kyle's

Pi is of the raspberry variety. He returns to his beer fridge,

and makes it both more efficient and more modern. We're sure there are

things the Raspberry Pi can't do, but so far, they elude us.

Even I get into the spirit of Web development a bit this month. Granted my

contribution is about three lines of PHP, but it's an integral part of my

column on problem solving with Linux. My dynamic DNS service decided to

delete my account one day, so I decided to use Linux tools and scripting

hacks to fix the problem on my own. If you need a primer on thinking

outside the box, I guarantee my method doesn't exist in any box.

Alexander Castillo describes all the things a front-end developer should

know about Drupal. Every version of Drupal brings new features, and for

the last few releases, the learning curve has been declining steadily.

Whether you're creating entire Drupal themes or just want to customize

some CSS, Alexander's article is invaluable.

Developing code on your own dev box is a noble tradition and one that

works well for many environments. Once the environment grows to include

multiple developers, multiple environments for test and production and

multiple locations, keeping things similar can be a nightmare. Ben Hosmer

looks at Salt Stack and Vagrant this month. Although the two might sound like

pirate names, they're actually a set of applications that can keep your

development environments similar, with very little effort.

If you think JavaScript has had its day in the sun, and it's time for

something newer, you're in luck. This month, James Slocum demos a completely

different tool for interactive Web programs—Dart. The language is from

Google, which implies it's not a fly-by-night idea. Dart is still very new,

but the idea is exciting. James explains how it works and even gives a

demonstration of it in action.

The Internet and the World Wide Web aren't going away any time

soon. In fact, as Web sites become more and more complex, scaling to meet

demand is a challenge. Pablo Graziano shows how to use Varnish as a

reverse-caching proxy to speed up server response time and help scale

heavy loads. Pablo walks through setting up, configuring and tweaking

your system to squeeze every bit of performance possible out of your Web

servers.

When Spidey the surfboard-riding Webcrawler was first introduced, it

indexed a whopping 4,000 Web sites. The Web has grown significantly since

then, and thanks to Web developers, its usefulness has grown as well.

Whether your first search engine was

Webcrawler or you were born after Google became a verb, this issue should

be interesting. I know we liked putting it together.

Available to Subscribers: March 1