Hollands Pies reviewed

So I’m slowly working my way through the pies I purchased the other day and he’s what I think of them so far.

Meat pie – this is a little pie, about the size of a standard pork pie but heated up. It contains pork and beef and tastes pretty yummy. My only complaint is the scalding hot liquid contained within which burnt my mouth first time, although this was easily rectified second time around by slicing the pie in half.

Cheese and onion – many years ago when I was a vegetarian, this was one of the few pies I was able to partake of. That and the butter pie, which seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth, probably due to its unfortunate name. It did contain more than just butter, which is why I didn’t collapse from heart failure. But back to the cheese and onion pie. Unfortunately this was disappointing, there was very little evidence of onion, just some bright yellow gloop that may well have originated at the Sellafield reprocessing plant (I joke of course, before anyone tries to sue me).

Potato and meat – before some government organisation got involved, this was known as a meat and potato pie. Now it’s just a perfectly decent pie with a silly name.

Steak and kidney pudding – this is where things get interesting. This is not like any other pie you’ll ever experience. With most pies the pastry is essentially just some hard packaging to keep the contents together, with little merit of its own. But with the steak and kidney pudding, the suet case is an essential part of the whole experience. Not only are the contents tasty, but so is the pastry. Even the cooking instructions are unique. No oven for this pie, but a pan of boiling water. There is one downside to this. Whereas pies are generally a pretty portable food stuff, the steak and kidney pudding needs a plate and fork.

So in conclusion, I would recommend all of these pies from Hollands, except the cheese and onion. But for ultimate pleasure, order ten steak and kidney puddings…

FreeFlow now open source

I don’t really have time to maintain it anymore, so I’ve open sourced FreeFlow, my little toolkit and administration tool for Metastorm BPM. Go grab it from CodePlex and make it better!

Using PUT and DELETE in WCF web services

I’ve been doing a little work on a web page that needs to grab some data from a web service and then update that data via PUT and DELETE requests. I haven’t got access to the web service currently so decided to write my own dummy implementation using WCF.

The first problem I encountered was that by default PUT and DELETE calls won’t be allowed at all by IIS. This can be resolved by fiddling with the Handler Mappings options in IIS7 to allow the required verbs, as shown on the left.

My next problem was that I wanted to use the same URL for both PUT and DELETE requests. The WebInvoke attribute that is applied to your WCF method doesn’t support multiple HTTP verbs, so I was a little stumped at this point. The solution is actually pretty straightforward, have multiple methods pointing to the same URL, like so

[WebInvoke(Method = "DELETE", UriTemplate = "EditFolder")]
public void DeleteFolder(Stream input)

This is actually probably a good restriction by WCF. If you want different verb types on the same URL, the chances are that you have two different operations anyway.

Unminifying Javascript files

Am I a web developer? I dunnow, I’ve spent a lot of time building web sites but I don’t really feel like a web developer. The web just plain scares me. Debug any web application and you’re faced with shedloads of anonymous functions, eval code and general weirdness. Look at the poster boys of Web 2.0, JQuery and its children JQuery UI and JQGrid. Yes they are fecking marvellous bits of technology but try stepping through the code and tell me you have the faintest idea what on earth is going on. It feels like the web is held together with a pile of JavaScript sellotape.

But in some kind of sado-masochistic twist, the web is now even more convoluted because the JavaScript is even less readable because it’s all been minified in an attempt to save bandwidth. So now if I find myself in a debugger trying to figure out what some JavaScript is doing, I see one long line of code with useless function names and I go off to bang my head against a wall because it’s less painful. But I have found one tool that improves the situation, JS Beautifier, which will attempt to make your minified code more readable and understandable by a human. Beyond the initial rant, this is primarily a reminder to myself.