Mobile Devices

We are currently seeing an explosion of mobile devices to the market. A lot of them are more powerful than your average computer was just over a decade ago. This means that in addition to having nice clean, responsive, and functional desktop applications, we are starting to have to make sure the same basic functionality is available to mobile devices. In this article, we are going to be looking at how we can set up mobile devices to be used with Selenium WebDriver.

In this article by David Burns, author of Selenium 2 Testing Tools Beginner's Guide, we shall learn:

• How to use the stock browser on Android

• How to test with Opera Mobile

• How to test on iOS

Creating and configuring a basic mobile application

After everything is configured and prepared, this article by Darko Goleš, author of Magento Mobile How-to, starts exploring the Magento Mobile Admin Panel in order to create our first Magento Mobile application.

Creating Cartesian-based Graphs

In this article by Ben Fhala, author of HTML5 Graphing and Data Visualization Cookbook, we will cover the following topics:

• Building a bar chart from scratch

• Spreading data in a scatter chart

• Building line charts

• Creating the flying brick chart (waterfall chart)

• Building a candlestick chart (stock chart)

Creating Bar Charts

This article by Peter Backx and Dominic Gélineau, authors of ActionScript Graphing Cookbook, will give us all the tools to create multiple bar charts. Be it vertical, horizontal, comparison, or histograms, this article will provide solid bases to improve those charts even more. We will use the same methodology for every chart.

In this article, we will cover:

• Drawing a bar chart with Flex

• Building vertical bar charts

• Creating comparison bar charts

• Drawing histograms

• Creating sparklines to enrich text content

• Making 3D bar charts

Building Your First Application

In this article by Mariano Reingart and Massimo Di Pierro, the authors of web2py Application Development Cookbook we will cover:

• Improving the scaffolding application

• Building a simple contacts application

• Building a Reddit clone

• Building a Facebook clone

The recipes in this article will provide examples of complete applications, comprising models, views, and controllers. They range from simple contacts applications to a more complex Facebook clone. Other recipes in this article will show you how to solve some recurrent problems that new users typically encounter, from adding a logo to creating a navigation bar.

SQL Server and PowerShell Basic Tasks

This article by Donabel Santos author of SQL Server 2012 with PowerShell V3 Cookbook, demonstrates scripts and snippets of code that accomplish some basic SQL Server tasks, using PowerShell. We will start with simple tasks, such as listing SQL Server instances and creating objects such as tables, indexes, stored procedures, and functions, to get you comfortable with working with SQL Server programmatically.

You will find that many of the recipes can be accomplished using PowerShell and SQL Management Objects ( SMO). SMO is a library that exposes SQL Server classes, which allows for programmatic manipulation and automation of many database tasks. For some recipes, we will also explore alternative ways of accomplishing the same tasks, using different native PowerShell cmdlets.

Even though we are exploring how to create some common database objects using PowerShell, I would like to note that PowerShell is not always the best tool for the task. There will be tasks that are best left accomplished using T-SQL. Even so, it is still good to know what is possible with PowerShell and how to do it, so that you know you have alternatives depending on your requirements or situation.

Continuous Delivery and DevOps FAQs

For a while now, there has been a buzz around the IT industry about something called continuous delivery and DevOps—strictly speaking that should be "some things" as continuous delivery and DevOps are actually two separate things.

You may have heard about them but may not fully understand what they are, why they are valuable and, should you wish to implement them, where to start from.

In this article by Paul Swartout, author of Continuous Delivery and DevOps: A Quickstart guide, we have tried to capture some common questions and provide some answers—an FAQ of sorts.