Early this week the book HTTP: The Definitive Guide
Continue reading ‘HTTP: The Definitive Guide’
Like many other web developers out there I started developing in PHP somewhere around six years ago (it’s already been that long). In a time when PHP 4 was the king, and the community was producing less than acceptable code in large quantities.
It was a time when having a guestbook on your website made you a rock star; a time when PHP development consisted in browsing scripts on hotscripts and hacking them to your needs. A time when development time was primarily focused on trial & error, without all the fanciness you get nowadays with framework and well implemented design patterns.
Even so, it is not a stage of PHP adolescence that I would likely relieve, quite the opposite… I would rather remove it from my memory, eternally and undisputed.
Continue reading ‘The state of PHP frameworks’
As mentioned in my last article, I started doing some challenges from the Programming Praxis website. And here comes my PHP solution to the second challenge.
Continue reading ‘Sieve of Eratosthenes in PHP’
I’ve found this nice little blog a couple of days ago called Programming Praxis (it’s in my blogroll as well) which poses a series of programming challenges.
The challenges found there are much more interesting than the other usual ones you can find online. This being the first reason why I’ve decided (as my time permits it) to fool around and have some fun solving them.
And that is why in the lines to follow I will share my PHP solution to the RPC calculator challenge.
Continue reading ‘RPN Calculator in PHP’
A couple of days ago, while being at home, I had to access a couple of services for testing, that are under normal circumstances only accessible from the companies intranet.
While there is a VPN which I can access, my current internet provider lacks the desired bandwidth for normal work to be done via the VPN. For commodity reasons, or for others unknown to me, the company has a backdoor server, which grants me easy access on companies intranet.
Never having done before port forwarding, I looked it up a bit, and found the PuTTY articles of doing it rather confusion, from one point of view: not being verbose enough for the ones who never had to deal with port forwarding before.
Continue reading ‘Port forwarding with PuTTY’
In all this time doing client side Javascript, I never had the need to fire HTML events, right until this day.
It all started with this simple task: intercept a form submission, process it to a custom URL which provides additional data to fill in the form, and afterward submit it to the action provided in the form (without intercepting it the second time). I had gone with the straight forward approach.
Continue reading ‘Firing HTML events’
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
I can not complain about how the book is structured and the case study it starts with. But from that point onward it’s going straight downhill. As I and other colleagues have come to realize after reading it, no sense of gratification is fulfilled, like other good technical books we’ve read. Basically I have finished the book with the same knowledge I’ve dived into it.
The book is too technically verbose, and lacks a simple way to describe the problems that the patterns solve.
If I weren’t familiar with most of the patterns provided in the book, I don’t think I would have managed to make sense of most of them while at the first read, and that is the excuse the book has to offer. The more you read it, the clearer it gets. Unfortunately that is not an excuse, especially for a book… and that is why I clearly wouldn’t make this book a recommendation for any fellow developer. It may have been da funk when it was first published, but it’s content does not shine that much in current days when we all are already used with design patterns, and do not see them as things that mystically solve problems.
Baseline: the easiest way to learn design patterns, is by facing the problems they solve on a daily basis; through programming.
Like any other developer in the years I’ve done web development (not many, but enough to experiment with a variety of application) I, as well, have come to form an ecosystem
for my web development work. So if you are looking alternatives for the tools you currently use or you are in the mood of experimenting with others, than maybe my suggestion would be to interest to you.
Continue reading ‘Tools of trade in web development’
Lately I have read articles which were comparing, bashing and dissecting multiple Javascript libraries (or framework, but I wouldn’t go that far with their definition). And as each of those articles took a side for their favorite and disregarding the others. I as well would like to show my appreciation to my favorite Javascript library Prototype, and this without bashing the other ones.
So what do I like about Prototype?
Continue reading ‘Why I like Prototype?’
