Recent content by Arbvestor

Encapsulation is an important and very useful concept in programming. It helps keeping side-effects under control. In very small projects you might not feel the need of it, but as soon as your project grows, you probably want to use this concept. Of course you can write correct code without it...

I would go with Java first. For the simple reason that the Google-Android universe is bigger then the iOS universe. Also, with Java you know one of the top used languages in almost all fields of computing, be it enterprise level applications or even normal desktop applications. Objective C is...

If you are already familiar with java you might as well stick with it. there are good libraries out there that help (JSoup, Selenium, JSON simple, apache http client, etc.) If you are new to programming, maybe Python would be the better choice, since it has many built in functions that make it...

Just that you know: The first fix that was sent out by the big linux distributions did not fix the problem (CVE-2014-7169) in full. There is now a second fix available for a related problem (CVE-2014-6271). Please make sure your servers are protected, since there are attacks currently going on...

Did you test current JavaScript engines? I understand the limitations for hard math with JavaScript, since there is no real long type and everything is done in floating point arithmetic, but i found the JavaScript JIT-compilers of modern browsers pretty powerful. Maybe you should consider doing...

You are sure that you want to use a Java-applet in the browser? The only real world application of this stone-age technology these days I know is within companies. In the open internet java-apps are pretty much dead. I still wonder why the hell the applet-programming is still part of most java...

I have quite a bit experience with writing Java bots/scrapers - not for social media sites though. Java should be quite suited for the task, but you can also go with Python, which has a broader scraper-community afaik. Depending on your needs, you may need to use a testing-framework like...

Where do you want the verification to take place? On the client or on the server or both? Client side you can't run PHP, only JavaScript. On the server you can run both, but usually not at the same time. PHP you would chose in an environment like Apache/PHP. The JavaScript solution would be most...

I second that. Try to get involved in an open source project you like and add value to it. Or maybe you have your own ideas of real projects. I always found that solving real problems is most satisfying.

If you are on PHP, then this might be helpful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3369061/edit-doc-or-docx-file-using-php

I think MrBlue's suggestion is very good. OpenStreetMap data is free and very detailed. It is very worth using, even if the api is quite harder to master than Google's or Bing's.

If you are in a Java environment I would look into http://poi.apache.org/

That is a bit broad... What language is the program written in? And are you on Windows, Linux, Mac or something else?

That would work only, if the site to be scraped does not use AJAX. Also, to automate this, you would need a (shell) script to call curl or wget or whatever command line "browser" you may want to use and fire up the regex/XML parser. I think that approach is actually more complicated than...

I would not recommend a public VPN service. You share an IP address with many in that case. I had difficulties logging into my own and very official and not at all phony google developer account over VPNs in the past. It took phone verification to get access back. Luckily, I do not need other...