Bitcoin Faucet - And I actually got paid by one of them

In the past weekend, there was a Bitcoin-themed hackathon in Hong Kong. Although I didn't participate, it did bring my attention to bitcoin again and I did a little bit of research about it.

While I was doing my research, I learn about these little sites called "Bitcoin faucet". For those of us old enough to know about those get-paid-to-surf-the-net-schemes back in the 90s (e.g. AllAdvantage, are the still around?), are they back?

At first I was skeptical, but I figure I will give them a try. Of the 7-ish Bitcoin faucets I tried over the week, one of them actually did payout. The faucet that paid out is http://freebitco.in/

And here is a screenshot of the transaction receiving the bitcoin!

That's right. A Grand Total of $0.14 USD. Is it worth the time? Probably not. But at the end of the day, what intrigues me is the ability to enable micro-transactions. After all, paying out $0.14 USD by any other means, the transaction cost is probably more than the actual amount transferred.

Like it or not, Bitcoin or some other crypto-currency technologies like this will open a whole new world for us.

P.S. Wanna try out the bitcoin faucet? Here is the link to it again.

Javascript oddities #1

var func = function() {}
console.log(func.prototype.constructor == func); // return true

JHipster: A code generator with a truck load of tech for AngularJS and Spring Boot based projects

I recently came across a JHipster - a Yeoman-based generator, which generates a based project which includes a truck load of technologies (taken directly from JHipster's Technology Stack page):

Technology stack on the client side

Single Web page application:

• Responsive Web Design
• HTML5 Boilerplate
• Twitter Bootstrap
• AngularJS
• Full internationalization support with Angular Translate
• Optional Compass / Sass support for CSS design
• Optional WebSocket support with Spring Websocket

With the great Yeoman development workflow:

• Easy installation of new JavaScript libraries with Bower
• Build, optimization and live reload with Grunt or Gulp.js
• Testing with Karma and PhantomJS

And what if a single Web page application isn't enough for your needs?

• Support for the Thymeleaf template engine, to generate Web pages on the server side

Technology stack on the server side

A complete Spring application:

• Spring Boot for easy application configuration
• Maven or Gradle configuration for building, testing and running the application
• "development" and "production" profiles (both for Maven and Gradle)
• Spring Security
• Spring MVC REST + Jackson
• Optional WebSocket support with Spring Websocket
• Spring Data JPA + Bean Validation
• Database updates with Liquibase
• MongoDB support if you'd rather use a document-oriented NoSQL database instead of JPA
• Cassandra support if you'd rather use a column-oriented NoSQL database instead of JPA

Ready to go into production:

• Monitoring with Metrics
• Caching with ehcache (local cache) or hazelcast (distributed cache)
• Optional HTTP session clustering with hazelcast
• Optimized static resources (gzip filter, HTTP cache headers)
• Log management with Logback, configurable at runtime
• Connection pooling with HikariCP for optimum performance
• Builds a standard WAR file or an executable JAR file

Although I did not use it for any of my projects (yet), it is a great reference to see how to setup a project which truly separate the front and back development. What I meant by that is the project is setup where the front-end can be served via 'grunt serve', i.e. NodeJS, decoupled from the back-end Spring Boot server. Yet, we all these goodies, you can still easily call 'mvn package' to build a complete Spring Boot powered executable JAR.

It is a great project to get a glimpse of all these technologies and how they can integrate together. More importantly, it set up a viable project which separates but integrated workflow for front-end and back-end. After working with it for a bit, I do have some reservations and comments, but that for another post.

Have you used JHipster in your projects? In a production setting? If so, I love to hear your comments.