Based on this strong positive response and adoption during the beta, we’re officially moving SSL Endpoint to general availability starting today. It is now the recommended option for any app which needs SSL on a custom domain.

In conjunction with SSL Endpoint’s GA status, we’re consolidating and simplifying our SSL product lineup by deprecating all of the older SSL add-ons: SNI, Hostname SSL, and IP SSL. SSL Endpoint is easier to use, more robust, faster to provision, and offers more features (such as certificate rollback and client IP address as an HTTP header).

Beginning June 18, 2012, these other SSL add-ons will no longer be provisionable via heroku addons:add. Applications that already have these add-ons installed will continue to function normally, and we’ll continue to fully support the SSL capabilities for those apps on an ongoing basis.

For steps in migrating to the SSL Endpoint add-on please read here.

Based on this strong positive response and adoption during the beta, we’re officially moving SSL Endpoint to general availability starting today. It is now the recommended option for any app which needs SSL on a custom domain.

In conjunction with SSL Endpoint’s GA status, we’re consolidating and simplifying our SSL product lineup by deprecating all of the older SSL add-ons: SNI, Hostname SSL, and IP SSL. SSL Endpoint is easier to use, more robust, faster to provision, and offers more features (such as certificate rollback and client IP address as an HTTP header).

Beginning June 18, 2012, these other SSL add-ons will no longer be provisionable via heroku addons:add. Applications that already have these add-ons installed will continue to function normally, and we’ll continue to fully support the SSL capabilities for those apps on an ongoing basis.

For steps in migrating to the SSL Endpoint add-on please read here.

This is a more or less weekly update on the manuscript currently known as Master Space & Time in JavaScript. Today, the update is about the first few chapters and how they change over time. These chapters cover a lot of ground, and getting the order and beats right has been a struggle. But I think I’ve got a good handle on it now.

(If all you want is a pure update: I’m making progress. The biggest factor in when the book actually goes on sale is how much I decide to have completed before I sell it. But I think we’re still looking at a few weeks out.)

The problem with the first couple chapters is that there are a lot of topics to cover right at the beginning. The first part of the book introduces jQuery, but I also want to introduce testing as a practice, so Jasmine comes in immediately as well. I want to use the examples in the book to model a good test-first practice (for the two or three of you that are familiar with my Wrox book, you know that I tried something similar there).

However well intentioned my plan to cover testing is, the fact is that for a reader unfamiliar with both, simultaneous exposure to Jasmine and jQuery has a lot of potential to be confusing.

In my first draft, the reader was presented with a suite of three or four Jasmine tests, which were fully explained, then with the jQuery code. The example is super-simple — just making a detail show and hide based on a user click. That’s on purpose, so nobody gets bogged down in the details of the example. Even though it’s simple, it does touch on a lot of basic jQuery features, which were explained in some detail, while also referring back to the Jasmine.

Some early reviewers found the back and forth confusing, so I tried a few different ways to clean it up:

• I really like starting books with quick demos that show off things that will be fully explained later. So I added one that covered the JavaScript console. More on that in a moment.
• I added a lot of text explaining exactly where the reader was, why we were talking the thing we were talking about and so on. A lot of this was necessary and stuck around, though at one point I wound up with a two-page chapter introduction that was — accurately — described as “apologetic”.

Eventually, though, I tried to separate the chapters, presenting the jQuery code first and then the Jasmine tests after. On the plus side, separating the two led me to write much better explanations of each library. On the down side, the order just felt really wrong to me, it wasn’t really the way I wanted the book to go.

As I tried to bring the material together for the new version, I came up with an answer that I think keeps all the draft material I like, and scraps the stuff I don’t. I mentioned that I really like quick-march introductions for my books. It finally occurred to me that the small example actually works as a quick introduction. So the plan is to work through that example in a kind of strict test-first way, showing the rhythm of a BDD process without a lot of library detail. Then go back and describe Jasmine in more detail, then jQuery in more detail.

Which makes this the current table of contents:

• Introduction. Mostly logistics, explanation of what’s there and so on.
• First Look: The quick walk through Jasmine and jQuery.
• Jasmine in more detail.
• jQuery in more detail — at least the basic selector and element manipulation parts.
• JavaScript functions and objects. How they work. We take the simple code from the first example and apply different JavaScript module and class patterns to it. I like this chapter.
• Developer tools, the console and the WebKit package
• Pulling the first few chapters together on a more complex example — a multi-select autocomplete widget.
• Ajax. How to do it and how to test it.
• JSON. This is an Amazon-style rating widget, so pulling in everything so far plus Ajax, plus JSON.
• Backbone. Probably 2-3 chapters here, covering Underscore, and Mustache. This is the point where we get to things that haven’t been written yet, though I do have an outline.
• Depending on how ambitious I feel at this point, a similar treatment of Ember.js is possible.

The initial release is most likely everything up to the JSON chapter, thought it’s possible I may start putting it out there once I finish reworking the autocomplete widget chapter.

If this sounds interesting to you, let me know by signing up. There’s still time to suggest other tools you want covered. Or leave a note in the comments here.

• Free Weekend on Code School – Coming this weekend. A pretty good deal if you want to improve your ruby skills.
• Vagrant and Weewee: A Repeatable Dev Project Setup – How to set up your own base box to bootstrap your projects from.
• The trouble with light boxes – And what to do about them on mobile sites.
• Three quick Rails console tips – And they’re well worth knowing.
• git-animals – “Animals using git”. And yes, it’s as silly as it sounds.
• PostgreSQL as JSON Document Store – One way to use the stuff that’s coming in 9.2.

• lolcommits – Take a snapshot with your webcam every time you make a code commit. The rise of developer narcissism continues.
• SASS vs. LESS – Long comparison of these two CSS preprocessors. SASS comes out on top, but both are good.
• flotr2 – HTML 5 graphing library with lots of nifty examples.
• Node.js Is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech – 5 minutes of poking fun at hipster rockstar programmers. “You are the reason science was set back a thousand years.”
• rspec-rails-uncommitted – Rake tasks to run specs for all uncommitted, unpushed, or unmerged files in your project.
• Devise Async – Send Devise emails using Resque, Sidekiq, or DJ.
• SourceNinja – Monitor your software to know when there are patches available to the bits you depend on.
• SheetMapper – Connect spreadsheet rows to ruby objects.

Feeds – Get notifications from GitHub, Basecamp, Trello and other services in your Mac menu bar.

• lolcommits – Take a snapshot with your webcam every time you make a code commit. The rise of developer narcissism continues.
• SASS vs. LESS – Long comparison of these two CSS preprocessors. SASS comes out on top, but both are good.
• flotr2 – HTML 5 graphing library with lots of nifty examples.
• Node.js Is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech – 5 minutes of poking fun at hipster rockstar programmers. “You are the reason science was set back a thousand years.”
• rspec-rails-uncommitted – Rake tasks to run specs for all uncommitted, unpushed, or unmerged files in your project.
• Devise Async – Send Devise emails using Resque, Sidekiq, or DJ.
• SourceNinja – Monitor your software to know when there are patches available to the bits you depend on.
• SheetMapper – Connect spreadsheet rows to ruby objects.

Feeds – Get notifications from GitHub, Basecamp, Trello and other services in your Mac menu bar.

Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement now in print and shipping.

Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement now in print and shipping.