Hi!

Next saturday (24th of January 2008) the Dutch PHP usergroup (phpGG) will host an all day frontend event in The Hague (Den Haag).

It features the following talks:

• Bram Veenhof from Microsoft will be talking about User Experience with the Microsoft platform
• Mihai Corlan will be talking about Flex and AIR
• Robert Jan Verkade will be talking about general Frontend development and clean HTML
• and I will host a talk about the 8 reasons PHP developers should love JavaScript

Recently a colleague stated that in theory, caching could be considered 'evil'.

Now 'evil' is a very broad term which is used a lot in the IT community, but what does it really mean when we're talking about technical solutions?

I asked around, but couldn't find a clear cut definition, so I went searching...

Occasionally, I have a maintenance task for one of my programs: something has to be done in the background every so often.
From rsyncing content between servers to importing data received from external parties into my application.

Most of the products we make run on Linux servers, so I use cron to make scripts run every x amount of minutes/hours/days/etc.

With most of these small scripts I want the following:

• Locking (so if a script takes particularly long time, it won't be running twice concurrently)


• Logging (Never blindly trust the machine, or a human for that matter, to always do the right thing)


• Cleaning up aformentioned logs (because over time they can grow very fast)

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.

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.

Een website bestaat vaak uit een verzameling vlakken. Een vlak voor het menu, een vlak voor een paragraaf, een vlak voor contact informatie, etc.

Dit zie je dan ook vaak terug in de vormgeving van een pagina. Een pagina bestaat uit verschillende vierkanten. Nu zijn vierkanten niet meer 'cool' sinds de zestiger jaren ('you square!') en gebeurt het vaak dat vormgevers deze hoeken rond willen hebben.

Zoals mijn collega en teamgenoot Harrie meldde in zijn blog post is PHP meer dan een simpel script taaltje. Vooral met de komst van PHP5 is het goed mogelijk om met PHP een compleet object-geori�nteerde (web)applicatie te maken.

Maar toch wel het mooiste aan PHP is het feit dat het niet nodig is en programma's kunnen groeien.