I’ve compiled a list of 8 features that are inherent to all badly designed software. This list is in regards to code design — it’s about architecture. Read the rest of this entry »
Just a quick post today around the topic of scalability. This is really a broad topic, but I wanted to give sortof a “starting point” or overview of how to create very scalable websites. The newest of my projects requires the system to scale infinitely, so I had to do a lot of research. I found enough articles on the subject but I never really found a checklist of sorts that pointed me in the right direction, everything was so open-ended. Read the rest of this entry »
Now that I’ve already covered what Unicode is in another post, it’s time to talk about actually using it. Today I’ll talk about how to create PHP applications that correctly handle Unicode. Read the rest of this entry »
I have a lot of developer friends who are still confused about the idea of character sets. The internet is a global phenomena; in today’s world, every developer must understand character sets if they are to create applications that work around the world. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been using the Zend Framework a lot lately and have come to really appreciate it. Today I want to write about ZF and how to use the MVC components. This post will be all about ZF itself, how the MVC components work, and getting a simple example up and going. I will write another post later on some more advanced usage. Read the rest of this entry »
So many web developers know just a little about Javascript. Enough to use a library like jQuery somewhat effectively, but not enough to understand how to create properly structured applications. I’m not going to get into how objects work in Javascript, or how to use them, I’ll leave that for another day. I just want to touch on the topic of member visibility (that is, private/protected methods and properties). Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a lot of talk these days about design patterns. The most talked about pattern in the realm of web development seems to be the MVC pattern, or the Model-View-Controller. It is this pattern that many of the most popular frameworks are built around. Frameworks like symfony, CakePHP and CodeIgniter enforce this pattern and offer tools to help make using it a breeze. Ruby’s famous Rails framework and Perl’s Catalyst also make use of the MVC pattern. So what is the big deal? Should you care? In this post I’m going to briefly try and explain the MVC pattern, why you should use it, and how. Read the rest of this entry »
I wanted to make a quick post about how the end user interacts with our applications, and how we as developers sometimes get it completely wrong. Sometimes we are so engrossed with the code, the how, that we entirely forget how an end user would look at it. Read the rest of this entry »