This is the sequel of the post CSS Preprocessors – Introducing Sass to Podcastpedia.org. If in the first part I presented some Sass-features I use to generated the CSS file for Podcastpedia.org, in this part I will present how the .css file generation process can be implemented with the help of Gulpjs.

Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

1. Set up the infrastructure

1.1. Install Node.js

Well, the first I needed to do is install Nodejs:

“Node.js is a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.”[1]

The Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) file of Podcastpedia.org had grown to over 2000 lines and it had become hard to manage. New CSS elements used to, most likely, go to the end of the file. Something had to be done… Well, CSS does have an import option that lets you split your CSS into smaller, more maintainable portions. The only MAJOR drawback is that each time you use @import in CSS it creates another HTTP request. In addition to that, this could have prevented style sheets from being downloaded concurrently. So, what to do? Ta-da, CSS preprocessors to the rescue.

Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

In this post I will present how easy it is to enable HTTP response headers on the server sidein Java with Jersey, as defined by the Cross-Origing Resource Sharing (CORS) specification. For that I have extended the REST API  built in the post Tutorial – REST API design and implementation in Java with Jersey and Spring, with CORS support.

Some time ago I discovered CSS sprites and I said to myself “what a cool thing, I must definitely use it on Podcastpedia.org, for all the existent social, flags and media icons”- by using CSS sprites you send only one HTTP request to get the bigger picture, instead of issuing individual HTTP requests for each icon.  When I finally rolled up my sleeves and built a CSS sprite for the icons, I had another revelation – I recalled having heard about icon fonts, which were supposed to be superior to using images as icons in every way (well maybe except the monochromatic part…).

Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

In this post I will present how to log in a Spring based application with the help of Simple Logging Facade for Java (SLF4J) and Logback. For demonstration I will use the application presented in the post Tutorial – REST API design and implementation in Java with Jersey and Spring, to which I will add now logging capabilities.