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Wednesday, February 27. 2008

Dutch PHP Conference - first result of Call for Ideas

We launched the Dutch PHP Conference 2008 last week and already received a lot of ideas to complete the program. Among them suggestions for talks about Zend Studio for Eclipse and new features of PHP 5.3. And of course many people want to see their favourite PHP guru talk.

Most popular at the moment is Derick Rethans. Last year he presented the closing keynote about Test-driven development. And although he had a bad cough, his talk was very much appreciated and many want him on the program again. As we said, the wish of the community is our command for the open slots in the schedule, so we contacted Derick.


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Posted by Joni Overbosch at 00:27 | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)
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Thursday, February 14. 2008

7 Simple PHP Best Practices

I recently read a good quote by Larry Wall (creator of Perl) saying "Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.".
The truth is: writing flexible, robust, elegant and readable/debuggable code is really really really really hard, especially in a language as 'free' as PHP is.
But as with all things, practice (and constant improvement) makes perfect and over the years I've picked up a lot of 'rules of thumb' that I believe make my code just a little bit 'better'.

These last couple of months I've been documenting some of them and today I'd like to share some of the more interesting ones.


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Posted by Boy Baukema at 22:21 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)
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Monday, February 11. 2008

Using the atkMockDb

If you develop an ATK application but do not have the luxury of a separate test-database, and can only test against actual databases, it is not safe to run testcases that actually add records to the database. Even though testcases can be built to clean-up testdata afterwards, this is not without risk. For instance, when a testcase breaks halfway through the code with a PHP parse error, any testdata that was already added will stay there. Besides the fact that this can break any future executions of your testcase, the testrecord stays in the live database and possibly break the live site.

This is where the atkMockDb kicks in :-).


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Posted by Dennis Luitwieler at 10:11 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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Thursday, February 7. 2008

Backward compatibility, bane of the developer

Recently 'A List Apart' posted an article about the new X-UA-Compatible switch that Microsoft will be implementing in Internet Explorer 8.

In short, you can target versions of the IE renderer with the switch; you can say: I want this page to be rendered like IE7 would render it and then IE8 (and IE9 and IE10 presumably) would render it similarly to IE7.

Now this provoked a lot of reactions, and it got me thinking about one of the most painful subjects among developers (PHP and in general): backward compatibility.


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Posted by Boy Baukema at 12:41 | Comment (1) | Trackback (1)
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Monday, February 4. 2008

The usability of a use-case

A impressive website is not only nice to look at and packed with technological wizbang, but is also usable. Usable not only by the people who wrote it, but by the actual users that are going to visit the site.

This is why it's important to think about usability while designing a website, while building the functionality and while putting in the content and the final tweaks.

A good way to analyze the usability of a website is by asking yourself questions about the visitor; Why did they stumble upon the site? What are they expecting? What can they do once they get there, and how can we communicate that as fast as possible.

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Posted by Erik Snoeijs at 11:12 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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