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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 23:21 | Comments (8)
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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 13:41 | Comment (1) | Trackback (1)
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Thursday, January 31. 2008

Development projects @ Ibuildings

For several years Ibuildings is known as a partner in PHP development projects for our clients. Last year the type of customers and the type of projects have changed. Several 'New media' customers found their way to Ibuildings and asked for specific custom made front-end and back-end solutions within a fixed budget and time scale.

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Posted by Erno Tramper at 15:49 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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Wednesday, January 30. 2008

Different methods of caching

Because we encounter PHP more and more in the enterprise market, the performance demands of websites we build are becoming ever more challenging. The usefulness of caching is often underestimated by developers (myself included). When using a lightweight framework like Code Igniter it is easy to assume caching is not needed or not necessary; still there are websites where performance optimization is needed and it is important to think about the performance and caching strategy beforehand. When writing the technical specifications for a high performance website the developer needs to be able to make the best choice for optimization.

For optimizing the performance of a website there are several techniques.The choice of the framework or CMS is important and the performance demands are a factor when determining which framework or CMS will be used, but it doesn't stop there.


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Posted by Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems at 14:00 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)
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Four ways to become a better developer

I was just reading my daily portion of phpdeveloper.org and encountered this article with 4 ways to become a better developer.

The four options discussed might be obvious to most, but I know from experience that they're not obvious to everyone, so I think it's a good read. I especially like the fourth item, on how PHP developers should focus not only on PHP, but also look at Javascript, CSS and HTML. I think it's hard to build an application that consists of PHP only, and even if you have dedicated graphical guru's to do the difficult HTML/CSS stuff (like we do), developers still encounter a fair share of CSS/HTML and Javascript. And in general, it's good to widen your scope and also read about technologies that you might not use directly, but might encounter in the future.
Posted by Ibuildings at 00:11 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
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Thursday, November 1. 2007

ATK's hidden gems, part 1

ATK contains lots of hidden gems. Most of them are hidden because they are undocumented or because they are only documented in the API docs (which nobody seems to read...). In the past few years we've tried to improve the documentation for ATK. We've created a Wiki with lots of how-to's, the "Pizza Guides", a demo application and improved the API documentation. However there are still some features of ATK nobody seems to know about. In my next few blogs, starting with this one, I will write about some of them.

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Posted by Peter C. Verhage at 16:31 | Comment (1) | Trackback (1)
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Thursday, February 1. 2007

Prototype Windows

Nog even en dan gaat Mockatoo online. Wat het precies is, blijft nog geheim. Om een tipje van de sluier op te lichten, kan ik verklappen dat in deze gloednieuwe Web2.0 applicatie gebruik wordt gemaakt van in-page windows. Dat lijkt een mooi woord voor 'popup', en eigenlijk is dat het ook :-).

Het verschil is echter, dat deze Prototype Windows in de pagina verschijnen, waarbij verschillende effecten kunnen worden gebruikt, zoals fade-in en fade-out. Daarnaast is elk window te verslepen, mimimaliseren, maximaliseren en is het met behulp van CSS compleet te stylen.


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Posted by Jeroen van Sluijs at 13:40 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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Monday, December 18. 2006

Veelzijdigheid van documenten

Microsoft introduceert met Office 2007 een nieuw documentformaat, XPS (XML Paper Specification). Afgelopen week heeft Adobe, marktleider op het gebied van digitale documenten met PDF-formaat, aangekondigd zelf ook een open formaat uit te brengen.

Maar wat is nu allemaal de bedoeling van die op XML gebaseerde formaten?


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Posted by Laurence Keijmel at 16:32 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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Monday, December 11. 2006

Zend Studio Demo Nu Online

Op veler verzoek is de demonstratie van Zend Studio Professional versie 5.5 online beschikbaar.
klik hier als u de demonstratie nog eens wilt bijwonen. Of wanneer u verhinderd was is dit de mogelijkheid alsnog kennis te nemen van de vele nieuwe mogelijkheden die de nieuwe versie biedt.
Posted by Jan-Willem Wisse at 17:10 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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Sunday, November 19. 2006

PHP Session Clustering

More and more websites are using PHP sessions. In my opinion session support is one of the coolest features of PHP. HTTP is in its nature a stateless protocol and with PHP sessions you are able to preserve data across subsequent requests. With PHP sessions you can easily maintain state in your web-application. For example a PHP session is a good place to store a user's shopping cart or user data like name and address when a user logs in.


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Posted by Martin Roest at 21:32 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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