| NASA
Software Engineering Laboratory |
| A list of software engineering documents derived from over 20
years of software development practice at NASA. Here are the ones i
found most useful:
-Recommended Approach to Software Development PDF
-Manager's Handbook for Software Development PDF
-Software Process Improvement Guide PDF
PS: These methods are an insight into how to manage a very big
project. For smaller projects, many of these details are bureaucracy
and are not needed. I found the requirements and planning parts
particularly useful as it has several checklists on things to
consider...
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| Bending over
backwards with PDF and RTF |
| I will be pretty busy for the next few weeks. Don't know how
frequently I will be posting. Doing heavy software development work,
building the next generation of our workflow software. Anyway here's
a little titbit about how we generate documents dynamically in our
workflow system...
There appear to be tons of PHP libraries out there that generate
PDF, presumably for creating reports and form letters. However I
don't think PDF is a very programmer-friendly format. You have to
bend over backwards to do anything nice with PDF. Page-sizes are
hard-coded. Doing word-wrap, calculating page sizes is a pain.
I believe a much more flexible method of generating reports is
Rich Text Format (RTF), a text markup format used by word
processors. Documents formatted in RTF will do all the hard work of
calculating word-wrap, page sizes, the amount of text to fit in a
table, headers and footers for you. And because all modern word
processors support RTF, its as ubiquitous as PDF.
Vadim Paggard has a nice
commercial PHP RTF library that we bought over a year ago. You
write pseudo-HTML markup, and it converts it to pretty nice RTF.
And RTF is extremely flexible. If your end-users have existing
standard form letters that they want generated dynamically with PHP
for download, then save the form letter in RTF format. As RTF is a
text markup format, it becomes trivial to write a macro-substitution
program to search for all variable fields in the RTF letter.
For the example below, the variables {$ADDRESS}, {$NAME} and
{$REASON} can be macro-substituted with a simple RTF parser: {$ADDRESS}
Dear {$NAME},
Thank your for your request to {$REASON}...
The only real limitation to RTF is that it is not a read-only
format. But for most uses, you can bend
it like Beckham.
 RTF
specification.
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| Inheritance
Considered Harmful (PDF) |
| It could also be argued that inheritance falls into the class
of programming language features which are accepted and instigated
without thorough analysis, only to be subsequently rejected when
experience has shown them to be unhelpful. It would appear that
encapsulation is more relevant and applicable than inheritance, and
its benefits to the maintenance process are more obvious. In [12],
it is suggested that in future systems, architectures based on
aggregation will be more appropriate than those based on
inheritance. This is particularly true of systems incorporating
multiple inheritance whose structures have tended to be elaborately
concocted... Lastly, contrary to what was originally thought, it may
be that most OO systems are simply not amenable to the use of
inheritance, and their functionality does not lend itself well to
use of inheritance. -- Rachel Harrison and Steve Counsell
Not an easy article to read, but basicly it's saying
complex inheritance trees (more than 3 levels in depth?) are
difficult to maintain, and many designs use inheritance
inappropriately. That is why the big thing in C# and Java today is
generics,
and why I was such a fan of templates in C++, even if the syntax was
terrible. PHP has less need for generics because most of its
operators and functions are polymorphic (thx to dynamic typing). See
also Objects Have
Failed.
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| Objects
have Failed: A debate between Gabriel and Steele
|
| This debate was held at OOPSLA 2002. Both are well known for
their work on Common Lisp. Guy Steele is currently Mr Java Spec at
Sun, while Richard Gabriel is researching next generation systems
for Sun.
Objects, as envisioned by the designers of languages like
Smalltalk and Actors—long before C++ and Java came around— were for
modeling and building complex, dynamic worlds. Programming
environments for languages like Smalltalk were written in those
languages and were extensible by developers. Because the philosophy
of dynamic change was part of the post-Simula OO worldview,
languages and environments of that era were highly dynamic.
But with C++ and Java, the dynamic thinking fostered by
object-oriented languages was nearly fatally assaulted by the
theology of static thinking inherited from our mathematical heritage
and the assumptions built into our views of computing by Charles
Babbage whose factory-building worldview was dominated by
omniscience and omnipotence.
And as a result we find that object-oriented languages have
succumb to static thinkers who worship perfect planning over runtime
adaptability, early decisions over late ones, and the wisdom of
compilers over the cleverness of failure detection and repair.
-- Richard Gabriel
Counterpoint by Guy
Steele
The debate
notes (pdf) contain a long list of interesting ideas and
thoughts on object technology. Also see Inheritance
Considered Harmful.
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| Enemies
of Usability |
| It's easy for an individual to spot usability problems, but
it's often impossible for an individual to solve those problems. In
fact, in most organizations, the design of usable information
systems requires collaboration across teams, departments and
disciplines.
These collaborations are notoriously messy. Perhaps our tribal
heritage underlies our fear of difference. Perhaps organizations
fail to align goals and incentives across groups. Perhaps we
secretly enjoy being difficult. -- Peter Morville
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| Software,
Jim, but not as we know it |
| As we boldy explore the new universe of service-oriented
architectures, we should not be surprised if software begins to
assume unfamiliar, alien forms. Here are some of the unusual
phenomena to look out for when plotting a course for your enterprise
-- Phil Wainewright
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| PHP
Architect's new year present - Jan 2003 issue is FREE
|
| To celebrate the success of their launch, they are giving away
the January 2003 issue of php|architect for free!
php|architect is a monthly magazine dedicated to PHP
Professionals. It's published in PDF format and available worldwide.
In the second issue:
- Theo Spears: Writing Secure PHP Code
- Jayesh
Jain: Using the .NET Assembly with PHP
- Marco
Tabini: Writing A Web-based PDF Viewer
Plus, articles on creating your own Full-Text Search with MySQL,
accessing the Win32 API, implementing database persistence layers in
PHP, tips & tricks, and much more!
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| Google
Zeitgeist |
| The term "zeitgeist" comes from the German "Zeit" meaning
"time" and "Geist" meaning "spirit". The term is defined in English
by Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary as "the general
intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era." Google
believes that this word and its definition appropriate to describe
the program it implemented to share global search statistics and
trends from the world's most popular search engine.
A new word to impress my friends with...if only i knew how to pronounce
it :-)
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| PHP 4.3.0 Release
Announcement |
|
After a long and arduous 8 months of development and testing, PHP
4.3.0 is out! With regard
to scope, time, and effort, this is the largest 4.x release of PHP,
and it further elevates PHP's standing as a serious contender in the
general purpose scripting language arena.
Command line interface
This version finalizes the separate command line interface (CLI)
that can be used for developing shell and desktop applications (with
PHP-GTK). The CLI is always built,
but installed automatically only if CGI version is disabled via
--disable-cgi switch during configuration. Alternatively, one can
use make install-cli target. On Windows CLI can be found in
cli folder.
CLI has a number of differences compared to other server APIs.
More information can be found here:
Streams
A very important "under the hood" feature is the streams API. It
introduces a unified approach to the handling of files, pipes,
sockets, and other I/O resources in the PHP core and extensions.
What this means for users is that any I/O function that works
with streams (and that is almost all of them) can access built-in
protocols, such as HTTP/HTTPS and FTP/FTPS, as well as custom
protocols registered from PHP scripts. For more information please
see:
New build system
This iteration of the build system, among other things, replaces
the slow recursive make with one global Makefile and eases the
integration of proper dependencies. Automake is only needed for its
aclocal tool. The build process is now more portable and less
resource-consuming.
Improvements
PHP 4.3.0 has many improvements and enhancements:
- GD library is now bundled with the distribution and it is
recommended to always use the bundled version
- vpopmail and cybermut extensions are moved to PECL
- several deprecated extensions (aspell, ccvs, cybercash, icap)
and SAPIs (fastcgi, fhttpd) are removed
- speed improvements in a variety of string functions
- Apache2 filter is improved, but is still considered
experimental (use with PHP in prefork and not worker (thread)
model since many extensions based on external libraries are not
thread safe)
- various security fixes (imap, mysql, mcrypt, file upload, gd,
etc)
- new SAPI for embedding PHP in other applications
(experimental)
- much better test suite
- significant improvements in dba, gd, pcntl, sybase, and xslt
extensions
- debug_backtrace() should help with debugging
- error messages now contain URLs linking to pages describing
the error or function in question
- Zend Engine has some fixes and minor performance enhancements
- and TONS of other fixes, updates, new functions, etc
For the full list of changes in PHP 4.3.0, see the ChangeLog file. 
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| Seminar on
The Future of PHP 5 and the Zend Engine 2 |
| Michal asked me to post this about their iSeminars. These look
really cool because you can talk interactively in the seminar. And
there are transcripts of previous sessions too. Unfortunately the
last time i tried it, the packets couldn't get through my firewall -
bummer...
Date: January 8, 2002
Zeev Suraski, one of the designers of PHP, gives an overview
of the new language-level features developed in the Zend Engine 2,
and the way they address the limitations of Zend Engine 1 in PHP 4
including:
· New object oriented model
· Integration with external object
oriented models, such as COM and Java
· Exception handling
·
Stack tracing
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| what i want for
christmas |
| the fedex guy pulled up, so exciting, then he walked to the
next house with a ll bean package, rats, but then he came over and
said "i have a big package for you" oh muh gawd...
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Spend some time with
the ones you love. Postings will continue next year!
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|
| Top Ten Web-Design
Mistakes of 2002 |
| Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst
mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number
one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by
overly literal search engines -- Jakob "The Man" Nielsen
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| Software,
Jim, but not as we know it |
| As we boldy explore the new universe of service-oriented
architectures, we should not be surprised if software begins to
assume unfamiliar, alien forms. Here are some of the unusual
phenomena to look out for when plotting a course for your enterprise
-- Phil Wainewright
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|
| Comparing
C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and TCL (pdf)
|
| Google
HTML version. The key conclusions of the research paper are
- Designing and writing the program in Perl, Python, Rexx, or
Tcl takes no more than half as much time as writing it in C, C++, or
Java and the resulting program is only half as long.
– No unambiguous differences in program reliability between the
language groups were observed.
– The typical memory consumption of a script program is about
twice that of a C or C++ program. For Java it is another factor of
two higher.
– For the initialization phase of the phonecode program (reading
the 1 MB dictionary file and creating the 70kentry internal data
structure), the C and C++ programs have a strong run time advantage
of about factor 3 to 4 compared to Java and about 5 to 10 compared
to the script languages.
– For the main phase of the phonecode program (search through the
internal data structure), the advantage in run time of C or C++
versus Java is only about factor 2 and the script programs even tend
to be faster than the Java programs.
There is also an interesting
debate at Lambda the Ultimate on my previous Developing Reliable
Software with Scripting Languages essay.
Some people have got the impression the Developing Reliable
Software essay advocates scripting languages as the best way to
write software. That's simply silly - some things can only be done
in a 3GL due to their better performance characteristics. All that
was written was "This seems to be a pretty good justification for
using scripting languages." Whether the justification fits the
problem domain is up to you of course.
Also I am more interested in finding ways to make coding
scripting languages more reliable, and not proving that they can be
reliable. I am not interested in proving whether Python is more
reliable than PHP or C# or vice versa. I just want our code to suck
less.
Lastly the reason (which was never elaborated) why scripting
is the now and future of computing is because the
price/performance ratio of computers is still dramatically going
down. The 68000 assembler that I wrote for the Macintosh in the 80's
that I (hopefully) thought was highly tuned runs slower than the
slowest Perl code I could write today. More and more problems over
time have become amenable to the use of specialised domain specific
scripting languages. One non-PHP example being the numerical
processing now done using Python
and MatLab.
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| Why JSP Sucks So
Hard |
| once again my UI engineers will be taking perfectly good HTML
written in Dreamweaver and tearing it apart, throwing out some of it
and rewriting other parts of it, just to make it work with the JSP
they're writing. Once they're done, the HTML author will have
absolutely no clue what the page does any more, and will have no
desire or ability to edit it. When we insist that no really we need
this redesigned, we'll spend twice as long doing it (doubling our
costs, negative ROI, bad technology choice, yadda yadda yadda) since
the HTML author will need that long to write in sample data and then
have the JSP author tear it out again. -- Marc Hedlund
Is Adam Bosworth saying the
same thing?
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|
| Interview
with Maryam Mohit, VP Site Development, Amazon |
| Q: What's Amazon.com's "secret sauce," the secret of your
success?
I wish I knew. I do think that the relentless focus on creating a
great experience has to be part of it. It's not just a great
experience on the website, because we think about it as a 360 degree
experience, which includes what happens after you click to order.
What's the experience of waiting for the order to arrive, of getting
the box, what happens if something goes wrong? Each of those is part
of the customer experience.
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| Tim
Perdue Interview (PHPBuilder & SourceForge
founder) |
| A little bit of background. As the rest of the company
imploded, we had a lot of those people come over and all of a sudden
they cast themselves as the "experts" on everything from building a
great development platform to running the development process. And
of course, I didn't know shit from shinola, which I always found
rather amazing since I built much of what they were fighting
over.
Thanks to Keith Devens for the
link.
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| The PHP Sharp
Research Project |
| Alan Knowles just posted on php.dev that he is starting to
develop a PHP compiler for the CIL (.net bytecode). Anyone looking
to develop a commercial PHP# compiler? Alan's for hire...
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| You gotta love a guy
who puts his life on his weblog |
| The latest episode to Russell's life is that in his new job,
he's moving back to the States from Spain.
All my software on my laptop is paid for. Spain doesn't put a
lot of weight on paying for their software.
Everyone has a desk and a phone. The Spanish normally share their
phones - especially developers who are treated like shit and given
no respect whatsoever.
Airport Security: I was anal probed at the airport. Somehow I
beeped as I passed through the machine and ended up going through a
5 minute routine which included taking off my shoes (to be x-rayed
again), holding up my legs like a high-kicker, taking off my belt,
folding down my pants, etc. Additionally, some lady dropped her
scarf as she was walking down the concourse and some airport guy
comes running up behind her (passing the scarf on-route) telling her
she dropped her scarf, and escorted her back to pick up the scarf,
walkie-talkie by his face ready to call in the big-guns if this
scarf turns into some sort of James Bondesque blast-o-scarf...
Fucking ridiculous. And this is in Seattle.
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| Harald
Radi: Multi-Tier Web Applications |
| PHP is attractive as a language because of its simplicity and
ease of learning, in return PHP lacks important features needed for
building complex web applications. These are mostly required when
following the multi-tier pattern to achieve a separation of
presentation, logic and data storage and to reuse already existing
interfaces of your information system. Because of its
straightforwardness PHP is best suited for building the presentation
layer of a web application. The extensions bundled with PHP enable
you to integrate existing components that are available as Java
classes, CORBA- and (D)COM components or .NET assemblies. Another
advantage is that most of these component models already provide
various frameworks for transactions and messaging between processes
and furthermore message queuing if these processes are not running
at the same time. Efficient process communication can therefore be
realised with very little effort.
There's a little bit of history to this article. Harald
was one of the writers who was going to contribute a chapter to a
book i was writing. For reasons beyond my control, the book got
cancelled. It looks like a lot of what he wrote is inside this
article. It's a pity that the book was cancelled because most of the
book was written to this article's standard. Harald also converted
this article into a set of slides
for a conference. The slides are much more readable.
Thx to PHPDeveloper
for the link.
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| Piracy is Progressive
Taxation |
| For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity,
being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning
achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may
shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists
(and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange
for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may
lead to increased revenues.
Our current distribution systems for books, music, and movies are
skewed heavily in favor of the "haves" against the "have nots." A
few high-profile products receive the bulk of the promotional budget
and are distributed in large quantities; the majority depend, in the
words of Tennessee Williams' character Blanche DuBois, "on the
kindness of strangers."
Lowering the barriers to entry in distribution, and the
continuous availability of the entire catalog rather than just the
most popular works, is good for artists, since it gives them a
chance to build their own reputation and visibility, working with
entrepreneurs of the new medium who will be the publishers and
distributors of tomorrow. -- Tim O'Reilly
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| Few Good
Solutions have the Luxury of Staying Simple |
| There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way
is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies.
And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no
obvious deficiencies. --C.A.R. Hoare
Before commenting on this quotation, I was in full agreement with
Professor Hoare. However after some reflection, I now believe that
this quotation is misleading. I do not think that the defining
characteristic of a successful design is simplicity anymore -- it is
adaptability.
I have 3 examples to illustrate my point.
First is Microsoft's Windows NT. Novell had at one time the best
PC file server on the market. It had the dominant market share. It
had a robust and simple architecture tuned only for file-serving and
it did it very well. Then Windows NT came along. NT was slower and
not as reliable as a Novell server. But because NT was more
adaptable and improved more and more, it became the numero uno PC
server.
Second is the Linux monolithic kernel. Many academics condemned
Linux in its early days because its monolithic kernel was inferior
and more "complicated" than the microkernel. Today most modern
operating systems do not use a microkernel - and this old debate
over "simplicity" is irrelevant. Moshe Bar recently benchmarked a
real microkernel OS (MacOS X) against Linux running on the same
hardware. Linux won easily.
The Intel 8086 instruction set is my last example. True it's not
a pure software example, but it's apt. Anyone who has studied 8086
assembler and compared it to its contemporary, the Motorola 68000,
knows that the Intel chip was an ugly duckling. But of course we
know who won this battle. Then came the RISC chips that promised
infinite scalability (compared to Intel) because of its superior,
simpler technology. Intel did such a good job improving the chip
that many
people still do not believe Intel when it says that we should
upgrade to Itanium.
Of course simplicity is still a good goal, but these examples
show in today's complicated world, few good solutions have the
luxury of staying simple.
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| Smacked
by PHP Traveller |
| Finally, pay attention to the fourth paragraph of this
article where the author describes why he is against the MVC
architecture. Now, MVC is *not* meant to help you with viewing
permissions. The author doesn't know that but that is not stopping
him from speaking against "Smalltalk consultants turned Java
advocates". It is important to note here that I do not think
everyone should know MVC. What I object against is people not being
humble.
Well i have criticized others in the past, so i don't expect
anything less than a good smack like this when i get things wrong!
Fixed.
New Damn
the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!
I get a lot of negative energy reading the responses to this
post. Phhhhhtttttt! Make that two farts! Then breathe in your own
shit :-)
When you write or release open source code, there will be bugs.
When you make comments or post articles, you will make mistakes. If
you write enough articles you give people plenty of ammunition.
People will point out your errors - that's normal - after all, I
will point out yours.
Fixing bugs is no big deal. It's your dreams and what you build that
matters.
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| Golden
Rules for optimizing your PHP pages |
| PHP invites beginners to insert complicated scripts and
database queries in their sites, while possessing only superficial
knowledge of how the internet runs. I often read this and think of
my own web experience: I felt that I was able to create anything
(because I believe that you can materialize ANYTHING if you are
creative, determined and patient enough) but I was not a good PHP
builder.
So I began to read manuals, magazines and PHP forums around the
web in search of background information. How could I optimize my
portal? It began to get heavier from week to week with my new
features based on queries that made my sites slower and slower
(maybe not for those on ADSL, but at any rate I started to get the
feeling that things could be optimized by applying some golden
rules). -- Marion Weerning
In an unrelated item, Zend is having a free
seminar. It will discuss the issues of intellectual property
protection, and highlight the business and technical benefits that
Zend SafeGuard Suite offers.
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| Design
Pattern Snobs |
| Have you noticed lately how the word pattern seems to be
creeping into general musings and dialogue more and more? Like
name-dropping, it's consciously woven into the fabric of the
conversation as a way to assert a certain level of understanding and
credibility. Mention the latest design pattern and suddenly your
peers will see you as a genius of software engineering, "...you see
I have employed the Decorator pattern for this particular class..."
While you're fighting the urge to give them a good slap, allow me to
let you into the big secret. There is none! -- Alan Williamson
Alan is correct in saying that patterns have produced a
lot of jargon and people misuse patterns all the time; unfortunately
calling patterns "data structures" suggests he doesn't know what
he's complaining about. Ted Neward has a good counterpoint.
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|
| Quote of the
Day |
Q: How many software programmers does it take to change a
lightbulb ?
A: It can't be done; it's a hardware problem.
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|
| Design
Really Matters |
| When it comes to design, most folks have one of three common
attitudes. The first is, "Yes, design is vital to accurately
communicate our brand." They pony up the bucks and pay professional
designers for their talent and ideas.
Others say, "Heck, it's technology that matters. We'll have our
in-house designers put a pretty face on it." They create development
budgets to match their priorities.
The third contingent is convinced information is more important
than looks. "What matters is what we say. We don't want all that
graphic stuff to get in the way of our copy." They go with a spare,
Jakob Nielsen-like approach that emphasizes text with a Wall Street
Journal-like look.
They're all wrong. -- Sean Carton
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| Phrame |
| Phrame encourages application architectures based on the
"Model2" approach, a variation of the classic Model-View-Controller
(MVC) design paradigm. Phrame provides its own Controller component
and integrates with other technologies to provide the Model and the
View. For the Model, Phrame can interact with any standard data
access technology, including Pear DB/DataObjects, and ADODB. For the
View, Phrame works well with PHP, Smarty Templates, XSLT, Flash MX,
and other presentation systems.
Phrame provides an extensible development environment for your
application, based on published standards and proven design
patterns. Phrame is sponsored by the Software Development department
of Texas Tech University and is released under the GPL
This set of classes looks really nice if you use
the MVC model. But a word of advice: chefs say one of the hallmarks
of good cooking is that the natural flavours of the ingredients
should be retained, and not disguised; it seems silly to make roast
beef taste like chicken. Similarly, when using PHP, we should be
using natural built-in PHP constructs. The designers rejected the
more idiomatic foreach loop and PHP arrays, and decided to reinvent
the wheel in their HashMap (just a hashed array), ListIterator
(foreach) and ArrayList (array), Stack (use array_pop and array_push
instead) classes. Can't get that taste of Java outa my mouth.
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|
| First English PHP Magazine
Out |
| php|architect is the monthly magazine dedicated to PHP
Professionals. It's published in PDF Format and available worldwide.
In the first issue:
Zeev Suraski/Brad Young:
Performance Management
Opportunities
Harrie Hazewinkel:
SNMP Management with PHP
Marco Tabini:
Console scripting with the nCurses
bindings
Plus, articles on creating your own webmail system, distilling
PDF files for free, writing a database independent abstraction
layer, tips & tricks, and much more!
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| Quote of the
Day |
| You can either have software quality or you can have pointer
arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time. -- Bertrand
Meyer
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| Understanding
the Importance of Release Early, Release Often |
| What Often Happens when Commercial Source Developers "Go
Open"
This is a pretty common tenet in the Open Source world and where
commercial developers often go wrong. If you are an ex-commercial
developer then you want desperately to reach a "1.0" stage or a
"near functional", "mostly baked" stage before going live. You
wouldn't want to release something piece meal, would you? After all
-- that's the way it's done. -- Scott Johnson
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| A
Programmer visits China |
| I recently married a nice Chinese girl. We then travelled to
China, partly to visit her family and friends, but also to do some
sight-seeing, and to be tourists for a few weeks. This article sums
up my experiences during this trip. -- Dino Fancellu
I just visited China and read this with interest. Have a
look at the responses - some really weird people went ballistic over
his frank (and funny) comments.
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|
| Internationalization
and Localization with PHP |
| While everyone who programs in PHP has to learn some English
eventually to get a handle on its function names and language
constructs, PHP can create applications in just about any human
language. Some applications need to be used by speakers of many
different languages. PHP's internationalization and localization
support makes it easier to make an application written for French
speakers useful for German speakers. -- Adam Trachtenberg
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| Tip of the
Day |
| There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is
to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And
the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
deficiencies. --C.A.R. Hoare
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|
| Flash and
Web-Based Applications |
| The Internet is changing. Although people have primarily used
it to read email and Web pages, more functionality-oriented
applications are now emerging, with the goal of providing new
features that do more for users. Developers are creating many of
these applications using Macromedia Flash, because traditional Web
pages are better suited to what they were invented for -- reading
articles -- than to the new goal of manipulating data objects.
This possibility [of using Flash] sounds good. However, in the
usability field, we've learned that more technical capabilities and
a broader set of design options usually translate into more rope for
hanging the users. Designers almost always use new features to
excess, and it takes some time to discover the most appropriate way
of applying new technology to suit human needs. -- Jakob "I told
you so" Nielsen
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|
| The
Object-Oriented Evolution of PHP |
| Few people know this, but when PHP as we know it today was
being molded, back in the summer of 1997, there were no plans for it
to have any object-oriented capabilities. Andi Gutmans and I were
working to create a powerful, robust and efficient Web language
loosely based on the PHP/FI 2.0 and C syntax. As a matter of fact,
we got pretty far without having any notion of classes or objects—it
was to be a purely structured language. However, on August 27th of
that year, PHP's object capabilities changed.
When classes were introduced to the code base of what was to
become PHP 3.0, they were added as syntactic sugar for accessing
collections. PHP already had the notion of associative array
collections, and the new classes were nothing but a neat new way of
accessing them. However, as time has proven, this new syntax proved
to have a much more far-reaching effect on PHP than was originally
intended. -- Zeev Suraski
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|
| I have a
Nigerian Investment Scheme for You... |
| As usual, lots of disinformation out there. Just read an article
at Zend that suggests storing your login id in cookies as an
authentication mechanism! Of course this is bad -- just find out his
userid, and place a cookie with the userid on your browser and you
have stolen his identity. Then there was an article at phpcomplete
that suggests that using objects is substantially faster than
associative arrays. As objects are implemented as associative arrays
internally, that sounded fishy. A bit of testing revealed there were
bugs in their benchmarks.
In my opinion, the best thing to do with such articles is to
quietly delete them. They do more harm then good. Now for all of you
people who don't agree with me, I have a plan to export Nigerian
goods that will make us tons of money...
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| Replacing
Perl Scripts with PHP Scripts |
| With the introduction of version 4.2, PHP has started
supporting a new SAPI (Server Application Programming Interface)
called CLI (Command Line Interface). This facility was introduced to
help developers create small shell applications (scripts) with PHP.
So, now you can kiss Perl goodbye forever. -- Jayesh Jain
Hear hear. Thanks to my influence, other developers at Natsoft
are using PHP for their batch scripts too. Hmm maybe it is because
they report to me...
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| Zope
versus Cocoon |
| Evaluating a Content Management System or Portal Solution? This
excellent survey gives you a better idea of what to look for. It
compares Zope, a CMS written in Python, with Cocoon, a Java
framework.
I must say that most PHP systems such as PHP-Nuke or Post-Nuke still cannot compare with
Zope, although they are improving. The only one that comes close
AFAIK is EZ Publish. Midgard is another one
that's supposed to be very good, but I've never figured how to
install it (remember I am only a generalist).
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|
| Interview - Bĺrd
Farstad of eZ systems |
| Bĺrd Farstad is the lead developer at eZ systems, the company
behind eZ publish. As a PHP developer from a C++ background, he's
pretty much done all there is to do with PHP. For this 25 year old
programmer from Skien, Norway, coordinating an international
development team and turning an Open Source software project into an
enterprise-level commercial success was just a matter of adjusting
his stride. Aside from the computer keyboard he's also a master of
the guitar fret board. Ask him nicely and he might send you his
band's latest single on mp3...
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| Book
Review: Beginning PHP4 Databases |
| Many people think that i'm some kind of database guru because i
wrote a popular database abstraction library. Well you want to know
a secret... I'm not an expert of databases, i just muddle my way
through MySQL, i could never figure out how to compile PostgreSQL on
Windows, I don't know so many things.
I'm actually a generalist. I can code a bit in Javascript, I know
some C++, PHP and a thousand other useless languages. A generalist
is pretty good thing to be in technology, because computers and
software changes so fast and if you spend too much time specializing
you're already a dinosaur before you turn 40.
So what has this got to do with the book Beginning PHP4
Databases? Well it turns out that this book (sent to me by Wrox)
appears to be for beginners but is actually meant for a different
audience, people like me: generalists. In typical Wrox fashion, we
get an army of smart programmers to write about their fields of
expertise. The may know their databases, but the writing is a bit
too technical for real beginners.
I still liked the book, and it took me a couple of days to
realize why. The book is actually an overview of different database
technologies, including relational databases, XML databases and
object-relational ones. The book goes into some technical depth on
each type of database, shows you how to model and normalize
databases, and has examples using the native database api's and PEAR
DB, shows us how to interface to Xindice (an XML database), and use
the object-relational stuff in PostgreSQL. You get to learn a lot
about databases you might never use!
Conclusion: The book has decent content covering many
database topics, but is more like a collection of essays on
different databases than a cohesive whole. In other words the book
has all the advantages and defects of the Wrox team of authors
approach. The book is good value if you are someone interested in
database technology and want to learn more about what's available
today for PHP.
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|
| Michael
Radwin blogs ApacheCon |
| Watching the Alpha Geeks: Tim O'Reilly gave this
morning's keynote address. (Actually, what's bizarre is that he's
actually giving the keynote address right now and I'm blogging via
an 802.11b WLAN.)
O'Reilly spoke about early adopters being a good predictor for
technology trends. He compared the models of Napster and MP3.com
(distributed vs. client-server models) and how it often takes
someone to look at technology in a completely different way in order
to make progress -- cheap local storage and always-on networking are
changing the computing landscape. He says the killer apps of today
are all network applications: web, mail, chat, music sharing.
The best laugh came at the moment when he said that he thinks the
phrase "Paradigm Shift" gets overused so much that it is starting to
generate groans the way the phrase "The Knights Who Say Nee!" has
done for years
Thx to Jeremy
Zawodny for the link.
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|
| Intranet Usability:
The Trillion-Dollar Question |
| Poor search was the greatest single cause of reduced
usability across intranets we have seen, aside from the general lack
of executive support and budget. Search usability accounted for an
estimated 43% of the difference in employee productivity between
intranets with high and low usability. -- Jakob Nielsen
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|
| Comparing
Python to Java |
| Java was designed to be an incremental step up from C++, with
the rationale that for the price of a small bit of efficiency, you
gained a huge amount in terms of simplicity, ease of development,
maintainability, and portability. Python on the other hand "turns
all the knobs to 10." It offers a beautifully simple, clean design
that can result in programs that are extremely clear, easy to
maintain and very quick to develop.
In my mind, what is true of Python holds true for PHP
also. Furthermore I can train a C or Javascript programmer to code
in proficiently PHP in 2 days. I cannot say the same for Python.
Python enjoys a certain intellectual cachet among the digerati, but
I think PHP is the better language, especially when PHP's support
for threads and unicode is fixed.
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|
| New
features of C#: Generics and Iterators (Word doc)
|
| An interesting presentation for language geeks.
I'm a fan of templates (generics). When I was using C++, STL was
a big plus-plus for me. The question arises - does PHP need
templates? I don't think so because PHP's data is loosely typed. It
couldn't care less if the data was about strings or potato fritters.
What is required though for effective template usage in PHP is some
standard conventions for object naming and object reflection.
And does PHP need iterators? Not if you dump your potato fitter
objects into an array - PHP's type-less array structure provides a
natural format to loop over.
There is one use of iterators that could be useful and isn't
available now - iterating through a data structure that's larger
than can fit into memory. But provided we don't expect PHP to do
everything, we could let the database do the processing for us.
That's what databases are good for. Munching through tons of banana
and potato fritter data.
Techie Glossary: What are templates? code templates that
can handle different data types gracefully, eg a list or tree class.
And iterators? That's a foreach loop going through a collection of
data/records.
Thanks to Andrew
Stopford for the link.
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|
| Comparing PEAR
DB to ADOdb |
|
PEAR DB is the default
database abstraction library for PEAR. ADOdb is a high end database
abstraction library modelled on Microsoft's ADO that is also very
popular.
1. Feature Comparison
Where we try to put you to sleep
by showing you the similarities between PEAR DB and ADOdb
2. Features Missing from PEAR DB
Now we try to wake you
up with some teasers
3. Criticisms of ADOdb
Read what other people are
moaning and complaining about
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| Jean
Paoli (co-creator of XML) on XML in Office 11 |
| Our goal is to enable end-users to use XML properly. The
result is not for developers. We are for the masses. That's why we
had to invent this mode where the XML guy or Web developer would be
able to introduce a schema into something an end-user can
understand, a template, and then the end-user is going to use that
template. I know that in general the XML developers do not think
about this kind of thing. But we are not here to enable XML
developers to be happy creating XML. We are putting XML
generation into the hands of people who do not understand XML at
all.
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|
| Using
Amazon Web Services With PHP And SOAP (part 2) |
| In this concluding part, I'm going to spend some time
discussing the search features built into AWS, showing you the
various types of search options available and illustrating, with
examples, how they can be used to improve the user experience at
your store. I'll also show you how to link your store up to Amazon's
transaction system, by adding support for both shopping carts and
wish lists to your site. All that and more, inside! -- icarus
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|
| Real-time
Animated Graphing using Flash MX |
| Macromedia Flash MX has now become the professional standard
authoring tool for producing high-impact Web experiences. Whether
you are creating animated logos, Web site navigation controls,
long-form animations, entire Flash Web sites, or Web applications,
you'll find the power and flexibility of Flash MX. In this article,
we will go ahead to crank out an impressive but simple (and
flexible!) real time animated graphing solution in Flash MX! --
Pallav Nadhani
This is actually an ASP article, but I think there are
cool ideas here, and a bit of cross-pollenization is kinky.
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| Comparing
Databases |
| Generally speaking, there are four different types of
databases available on Linux: key/value, relational,
object-oriented, and XML. Each has strengths and weaknesses. When
choosing a database you should consider whether it:
- Can handle simultaneous access from multiple users
- Can be easily accessed from programs written in different
languages (especially object-oriented languages)
- Can handle large amounts of data
- Can ensure that multiple operations either all happen at once,
or not at all ("transactions")
- Can perform complicated searches ("queries")
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|
| The
Law of Leaky Abstractions |
| TCP is a way to transmit data that is reliable. By this I
mean: if you send a message over a network using TCP, it will
arrive, and it won't be garbled or corrupted.
We use TCP for many things like fetching web pages and sending
email. The reliability of TCP is why every exciting email from
embezzling East Africans arrives in letter-perfect condition. O joy.
By comparison, there is another method of transmitting data
called IP which is unreliable. Nobody promises that your data will
arrive, and it might get messed up before it arrives. If you send a
bunch of messages with IP, don't be surprised if only half of them
arrive, and some of those are in a different order than the order in
which they were sent, and some of them have been replaced by
alternate messages, perhaps containing pictures of adorable baby
orangutans, or more likely just a lot of unreadable garbage that
looks like the subject line of Taiwanese spam.
Here's the magic part: TCP is built on top of IP. In other words,
TCP is obliged to somehow send data reliably using only an
unreliable tool. - Joel Spolsky
One of the most beautiful essays on science and computers
I have ever read. As brilliant as anything Lewis
Thomas has written.
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|
| Picking
a Real World Release Dates |
| I've worked in big software companies, teeny tiny small
software companies and worked with software companies all over the
globe. And one thing remains constant: we all screw up release dates
with the regularity of snow at the North Pole. I have to think that
a big part of it is that managers fail to take into account one
simple thing:
I'm a person first. A worker second.
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| Using
Amazon Web Services With PHP And SOAP |
| Now, your favourite language and mine, PHP, has recently
started shipping with support for XML-based remote procedure calls
(including SOAP) over HTTP. This makes PHP ideal for developers
looking to integrate Amazon Web Services into their Web
applications. The only problem? Not too many people know how to do
it. That's where this tutorial comes in. Over the next few pages,
I'll be demonstrating how you can use PHP, in combination with
Amazon Web Services, to add powerful new capabilities to your Web
applications. Take a look. -- icarus
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| PHP
Cookbook Ch 8: Web Basics (PDF) |
| Web programming is probably why you’re reading this book.
It’s why the first version of PHP was written and what continues to
make it so popular today. PHP makes it easy to write dynamic web
programs that do almost anything. Other chapters cover various PHP
capabilities, like graphics, regular expressions, database access,
and file I/O. These capabilities are all part of web programming,
but this chapter focuses on some web-specific concepts and
organizational topics that will make your web programming
stronger.
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|
| Zend
Performance Suite |
| The new Zend Performance Suite is a suite of three product
modules that provide a complete solution for performance management:
Content Caching, Code Acceleration and Data
Compression. By using Zend Performance Suite, you can reduce the
load on your http and database servers, and also decrease latency
time, execution time, and download time for each request. The net
result is decreased hardware and IT support costs for your server
environment, and a better user exerience for your users. The Zend
Performance Suite includes a performance monitor, which
enables you to measure the enhancement experienced by actual site
visitors in real-time. The Zend Performance Suite installs quickly
and delivers immediate benefits. Compared with hardware solutions to
performance problems (in both hosted and in-house environments), the
Zend Performance Suite delivers far better ROI.
Zend has also cut the price of the Zend Accelerator by half, but
its still hard to compete with free software from ionCube...
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| REST
& SOAP |
| A presentation summarizing REST and SOAP by Peter Drayton,
Program Manager (CLR), Microsoft.
The thesis for my talk was that this area of
intersection (RESTful SOAP) is actually a good thing, as it
provides an opportunity for SOAP to learn valuable architectural
lessons from REST, and an opportunity for REST to benefit from
SOAP's widespread acceptance among corporate developers.
Powerpoint
version.
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| Using
.NET Assembly (Interoperability with COM) in PHP
|
| The .NET Framework is a new computing platform that
simplifies application development in the highly distributed
environment of the Internet. The .NET Framework is designed to
provide a consistent object-oriented programming environment, a
code-execution environment that minimizes software deployment and
versioning conflicts, which guarantees safe execution of code and to
build all communication on industry standards to ensure that code
based on the .NET Framework can integrate with any other code.
PHP has built in functionality which uses COM objects, using the
COM interop feature of .NET we shall create a wrapper around the
.NET assembly and use it in PHP (in fact you could use the same
steps to use .NET assembly for VB6 or any other COM
applications) -- Jayesh Jain
Excellent timing from PHPBuilder. I just installed Visual
Studio.NET yesterday on my notebook, and have been trying out .NET
and Windows Forms. More later...
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| How
to build a mailbot in PHP |
| The fascination with having software automate your mundane
tasks never ceases. One such tedious activity lies in email parsing.
Email accounts can be a useful tool for enabling people to enact a
request or issue a command that may not require the intervention of
humans. One such example is the, now all to common, "unsubscribe"
request to harmless lists and nefarious spammers. The automated
program that handles these requests is called a mailbot. Though it
was adopted early, and has been retired in many cases in favor of
web-interfaces, mailbots still represent a good technique for
performing a number of useful tasks. Nearly anything can be done
with enough creativity, good code, and patience. -- Michael
Galloway
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|
| Comparing
Mac OSX Performance to Linux |
| As good as Mac OS X is for desktops and laptops, one wonders
if the FreeBSD inside is not too restricted by the Apple jacket
around it to also make for an efficient, secure and fast server OS.
Apple is now busy convincing the world that Apples make also for
excellent server appliances in the handy U1 format, thanks to OS X.
That new product is called Apple Xserve. Many potential buyers are,
however, asking themselves if OS X—given its recent introduction—is
ready today to handle their critical apps.
That's why I decided to take one of these sleek Xserve boxes and
test run it both under OS X and under Linux. -- Moshe Bar
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| The Google
Gods |
| So powerful has Google become that many companies view it as the
Web itself: If you're not listed on its indexes, they say, you might
as well not exist.
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|
| Systems Software
Research is Irrelevant (PDF) |
| Systems software research has become a sideline to the
excitement in the computing industry. When did you last see an
exciting noncommercial demo? Ironically, at a time when computing is
almost the definition of innovation, research in both software and
hardware at universities and much of industry is becoming insular,
ossified, and irrelevant. There are many reasons, some avoidable,
some endemic. There may be ways to improve the situation, but they
will require a communitywide effort. -- Rob Pike, Bell Labs
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|
| The
Petstore Revisited: J2EE vs .NET Server Performance
|
| TheServerSide presents a pretty damning report about EJB
servers. They compared 2 EJB servers (most likely Weblogic and
Websphere) against a .NET server implementation. TheServerSide
modified and improved the Java Pet Store blueprint. Unfortunately,
the results were pretty dissapointing. In essence, the .NET servers
performed at least twice as fast and could handle at least twice the
load as compared to the EJB servers.
Rebuttal
by Rickard Oberg.
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|
| phpMyAdmin 2.3.2
|
| I just downloaded phpMyAdmin 2.3.2 today. I've been using 2.2.5
before that. After 10 minutes of testing, my opinion is that it is a
step backward. In previous versions, i could enter SQL from nearly
every important screen in phpMyAdmin. Now I have to click on a
database, then select the SQL tab. Secondly, they have now
highlighted the DROP command in red.
After selecting a couple of test tables that I had just created, I
clicked on DROP to remove the test tables, only to find to my horror
that it was DROP DATABASE!
This just reinforces my opinion that good user interface
designers are too well paid to contribute to Open Source projects
:-)
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| Slashdot
Discussion on Yahoo standardizing on PHP |
| A typical Slashdot debate. Better for laughs than for facts :-)
The UnPEARable Lightness of Being
But there are valid
criticisms, many aimed at the class library, PEAR. The sad fact is
that i used to use chunks of PEAR in my code, but eventually
replaced these bits with my own code as I found PEAR too limiting.
Too much of PEAR is written by journeyman programmers. Like many
other people more famous than me (notably Manuel Lemos :-), I am
unable to contribute to PEAR because I would have to follow the PEAR
coding standards.
PHP is not a 3GL - Thank God!
Others have criticized
PHP for not having the power of Java/C/C++/C#. I agree that that PHP
is not suitable for every job - for example, my company is planning
to migrate to .NET for our future Windows desktop software. But PHP
is very suitable for web pages, or calling business logic components
written in another language. Also from personal experience I find
PHP very useful in many other domains, particularly as a replacement
for shell-scripts.
Unsafe at any Speed?
From the Yahoo
benchmarks it appears that PHP is slower than mod_perl. However
despite Perl's superior speed and wide use internally with Yahoo,
Perl was rejected. When you have 612 software engineers and 3
million lines of Perl code, Perl became a liability for Yahoo. My
guess is that Perl's There's More Than One Way To Do It
mentality has proved to be an excuse for poor and divergent
coding practices.
Yahoo gets slash-dotted.
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| Rescuing XSLT from
Niche Status |
| XSLT is one of the most exciting technologies to come out of
the XML family. Unfortunately, its incredible power and associated
complexity can be overwhelming to new users preventing many from
experimenting with it or causing them to quickly give up in disgust.
In fact, unless the method of teaching and the common style of use
for XSLT is radically changed to make it more accessible, XSLT will
be relegated to niche status like SGML and other powerful
technologies. -- David Jacobs
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|
| The
next tier of web services |
| Decentralization [of servers] works because it mirrors our
own nature, wrote Werbach: "It's the human element that is really
driving the pressure for decentralized solutions. This shouldn't be
too surprising. Biological phenomena like the human body and the
global biosphere have had billions of years to evolve, and they are
the most complex decentralized systems we encounter." -- Phil
Wainewright
And do you think that complex decentralized systems that
take billions of years to evolve are going to be replicated
successfully in computer systems overnight by some form of instant
evolution? There are going to be fantastic success stories of
distributed computing using SOAP and similar technologies in the
near future, but to make claims that decentralization is a force of
nature makes me think of a bunch of lonely hackers working on an
open source project communicating only by email with each other :-)
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| Introduction
to Judoscript |
| JudoScript shall be a powerful programming language that
provides all of Java's programmability in a simpler and scripting
way, plus other useful features and sweet "syntactic sugar". For
many common computing tasks, it would require less coding. The ease
and efficiency of coding stems from its syntax and a large number of
rich data structures embedded in the language.
It shall be able to script Java objects and methods with few
limitations.
For many of today's common application areas, it shall provide an
easy, native and intuitive way to specify the tasks, totally
oblivious to implementation details. A list of common application
areas have been chosen for the first draft. JudoScript will continue
to grow to encompass more and more useful application features as
natively and intuitively as possible.
It shall be easily extensible, particularly by Java libraries.
Ideally, application features can be natively and seamlessly
extended by any Java packages.
It shall be fun! In addition to enterprise computing, it shall
also natively support entertainment computing. -- James Huang
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|
| Nothing stands
still in China |
| Just returned from my 2nd trip to China. The last time I was in
China was 1996. The rate of change is brutal and intimidating.
People are more opportunistic now and many people have no idealogy
except money.
In many ways China reminds me of my country, Malaysia. There are
limits to political freedom in Malaysia and China. However anything
goes when it comes to making money in both countries. Prices are
what you make of it. I went to Shanghai's antique market, and
managed to bargain some jewelry boxes down to 1/32nd of the original
price. I also over-paid for a beautiful clay teapot in Wuxi; I
probably paid 3 times what it was worth.
Overall, i found i liked China a lot. The people there are smart,
dynamic, and eager to regain their status as the greatest
civilization on Earth.
PS: I had 1150 messages in my mailbox.
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| Bury my
backpack in Shanghai |
| Bye everyone. I am on holidays. Back in two weeks - John
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| Interview
with Michael Kimsal, founder of Tap Internet |
| Michael Kimsal runs a company that does PHP training. I thought
it would be interesting in finding out how other people learnt PHP,
so we agreed to an interview.
What do students (of PHP) find hard to learn?
The hardest areas of functionality we used to try to cover in
detail were PDF generation and using GD. Every student *wants* to
know how to do these things, but usually when they start to see how
difficult it is to build PDFs and graphics by hand with the
individual functions, they want to skip it! :)
We've begun introducing JPGraph and HTMLDoc overviews which help
demonstrate the practical benefits of graphic and PDF generation
while giving them an easier way to get those benefits.
In terms of PHP itself, many students trip up over single
quote/double quote issues, variable name case-sensitivity and basic
variable name typos. Variable scope is something which catches
people offguard too, but is normally covered and drilled into them
by the second day - usually no problems with scoping after day 2.
PHP OO, limited as it is, is also mixed. Some students find it
quite straightforward, some struggle, and some reject it outright.
Just like the PHP community at large. :)
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|
| The Parable
of Languages |
| Today, though, the group was quiet, much quieter than usual,
because one of their members, PHP, was not its usual cheerful self.
In fact, one could say that PHP was in a true funk, if one had a
mind to say something like that aloud, or within the hearing of
one's boss. Or doctor.
Why the blues, PHP, the other languages asked. All the languages
that is but C, because all C ever said was "bite me", being a rude
language and hard to live with, but still respected because it was
such a good worker.
And PHP answered...
Thx to Sam
Ruby for the link.
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| Using
PHP to Make Basic vCalendar/iCalendar Events |
| If you maintain a web calendar, the vCalendar/iCalendar
specifications can help you share calendar events with users through
your site. By clicking on a simple link to a text file, your events
can be added to your users' Outlook, Palm Desktop, or scheduling
program of their choice. Such an application can be easy, simple,
and automated if the event data is stored in a database, and the
text file is formatted to the vCalendar/iCalendar specification with
any scripting language. -- Shu-Wai Chow
A return to the high-quality phpbuilder articles we used
to remember!
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| DevArticles
Interview: Vince Oostindie |
| Vince is a programmer with over 15 years software development
experience. He talks about himself and eclipse,
the class library for PHP he created. He's quite opinionated, and
trash talks the average PHP programmer. Well perhaps it's better to
let his code do the talking.
In general, eclipse is clean and clever. Lots of comments too.
However it goes overboard in reinventing everything using
object-oriented techniques. For example, eclipse has a FileIterator
class for reading a file line by line. $it =& new FileIterator('eclipse.txt');
for ( ; $it->isValid(); $it->next())
{
$line =& $it->getCurrent();
echo $line, "\n";
}
$it->close();
Is this an example of "by using Eclipse you can write code
that reads like pseudo-code, allowing you to concentrate completely
on the problem your solving instead of having to sprinkle your code
with hard-to-follow lower-level function calls"?
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| php.weblogs.com
interview with Zeev Suraski |
| Recently i had the good fortune of interviewing Zeev Suraski.
Zeev talks about how he works with his long-time collaborator Andi
Gutmans, the difference between open-source and commercial software
development, and his proudest achievements. I hope you like it.
PS: I also have another interview in the works. I hope to get it
out before I go on holiday on Saturday.
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|
| Database
Refactoring |
| Scott W. Ambler talks about database refactoring, which
is about making simple changes to a database schema to improve its
design while retaining both its behavioral and informational
semantics. For example migrating from a system that assumes
addresses and names are a specific format to one that handles
addresses and names for multiple countries.
On a different topic, here are some discussions on the
ADOdb forums on PHP and
Interbase and Object-Relational
mappings in PHP that might be of interest. Feel free to post
your responses.
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|
| Apache 1.3.27
Released |
| This is a security, bug fix and minor upgrade release. Due to
security issues, any sites using versions prior to Apache 1.3.27
should upgrade to Apache 1.3.27. Read more about the other security
issues that affect Apache 1.3.
Security issues
Fix the security vulnerability regarding ownership permissions of
System V shared memory based scoreboards. The fix resulted in the
new ShmemUIDisUser directive. CAN-2002-0839
Fix the security vulnerability regarding a cross-site scripting
vulnerability in the default error page when using wildcard DNS.
CAN-2002-0840
Fix the security vulnerability regarding some possible overflows
in ab.c which could be exploited by a malicious server.
CAN-2002-0843
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|
| Open
Source Vapourware? Apache 2.0 |
| The 1.x generation of Apache has been out for many years, so it
should have been a big deal when version 2.0 shipped.
But early adoption of Apache version 2.0 was minimal according to
Netcraft, the authorities on what people are running on the
Internet. Over 11 million active sites are running Apache, but about
six months after its release, fewer than 100,000 of them are running
2.0. Why? -- Larry Seltzer
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|
| Criteria for
optimal web design (designing for usability) |
| Some of the questions that Michael Bernard tries to answer:
- How should information be positioned in a typical website?
-
How can I make my website's structure more navigable?
- How
should text be presented within a website?
- How can I
effectively use images on my website?
- Are frames ever
appropriate?
- How can I design a visually pleasing interface
that follows usability principles?
- How can I reduce the major
user annoyances on my site?
- How can I make my site more
accessible to children?
- How can I make my site more accessible
to older adults?
- How can I make sure my site follows general
Web conventions?
- How can my website promote customer sales and
loyalty?
- How can I make my site more appealing to international
users?
Thanks to Pablo Costa for the link.
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|
| CSS Design:
Taming Lists |
| AS EARLY AS JULY OF 1999 I was pontificating on email lists
about the virtues of style sheets. Some things never change.
What has changed is how I think about CSS, and the underlying
structure of (X)HTML to which it is applied. For example, I find
that most pages on the web contain a menu of links in a navigation
area. These are often marked up as a string of links, often in
separate DIVs or paragraphs. Structurally, however, they are a list
of links, and should be marked up as such.
Of course the reason that we don't mark them up in that way is
that we don't want a bullet in front of every link in our navigation
area. In a previous article I outlined several techniques for using
CSS to layout a web page. One of those techniques involved
manipulating a list to display horizontally rather than vertically.
In this article, I'll demonstrate how to use CSS to bring
unwieldy lists under control. It is time for you to tell lists how
to behave, instead of letting them run wild on your web page. --
Mark Newhouse
Thx to http://phpdeveloper.org/ for the
link.
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|
| User-Centered
URL Design |
| But despite the universality of URLs, we often forget that
they're not just a handy way to address network resources. They're
also valuable communication tools. They help orient users in your
architecture, and can suggest whether other options are available.
In Edward Tufte's classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information, he coins the term chartjunk to refer to needless visual
flourishes that contribute nothing to the effectiveness of an
information design in communicating to its audience. These days, our
URLs are loaded down with something very similar: long strings of
characters that exist only to satisfy some technical constraint,
detracting from the effectiveness of our URLs as communication
tools.
Call it CMSjunk. -- Jesse Garrett
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|
| Building
Accessible HTML Tables for the Disabled |
Blind and other severely vision impaired users rely on assistive
technologies to render web content. All text can be fed through a
screen reader or refreshable braille display to be presented to the
user. However, despite containing text, the table above could make a
real mess of things without a few extra behind the scenes
accessibility enhancements. To an assistive browser our table could
well look like this: Time Planned Task Preferred Task What I actually did
10 - 12 Catch up on replying to my emails. Have a lie in. Surfed aimlessly.
12-1 Have Lunch. Have Lunch. Had Breakfast.
1-5 Finish that project. Go to video store. Caught up on my emails.
Ok, we can still kind of make a little sense of it. That is
because we can see it. A blind user can't easily scan back up and
check what the third piece of information relates to. Was it what I
actually did, or what I would have preferred to do? This is why we
need to create relationships within the code of our table.
Thankfully, from HTML4.0 a bucketful of accessibility enhancements
were introduced to enable the conscientious developer to do this.
-- Tim Roberts
Thanks to PHP Developer
for the link.
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|
| The
Past, Present and Future of Web Services, part 1
|
| Web services are somewhere around the crest of their hype
cycle and currently the darling of the prevalent media. This
cresting is like that of other technologies in that it precedes full
development and maturity. Web services, an undoubtedly important
technology regardless of media interest, have a good deal of
development ahead of them. Those who find success using Web services
will be those who understand the technology fundamentally: its
motivations, the reasons why some components are winning out over
others, and the likely course of maturity.
For this reason, I start with the history of Web services. This
is no mere nostalgic side-trip: the business and technical
environment into which Web services was conceived, and the various
players that have waxed and waned in prominence in their history to
date are likely to have a strong effect on the future of Web
services. You can already see this happening with developments such
as the emerging role of Organization for the Advancement of
Structured Information Standards (OASIS) as incubator of security,
workflow and transaction standards for Web services. OASIS was once
seen as the very opposition to mainstream Web services. -- Uche
Ogbuji
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|
| Zeev
Suraski Interview at CodeWalkers.com |
| Zeev, what tips do you have for a beginner using PHP?
There are lots of gotcha's that can be avoided if one follows a
few rules. First - always enable E_NOTICE's while you're
developing/debugging. Make your code E_NOTICE-clean, and you'd be
likely to produce code of much higher quality. Also - use a
debugger, instead of printing out debug info. Once you get used to
it - you become a hell of a lot more productive than you have
before. I went through the same phase (not with PHP, but with C) and
I'm not sure how I managed to get anything done before I started
using debuggers.
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|
| Using Flash for
Intranets |
| Last week i mentioned my interest in using Flash to provide a
richer user experience. However it looks as if this technology has
still some way to go compared to HTML for simple browsing.
Have a look at this forum for
the book Foundation PHP for Flash, written in Flash. It seems much
slower than any database-backed PHP forum. I'm currently on a T-1
line, so bandwidth is not an issue. Perhaps the rapidly spinning
clock makes the refresh seem so much slower.
Other issues are that the scroll-bars don't work like normal
Windows scrollbars, and the page cannot resize.
Flash is still a good tool for dynamic page displays. Much easier
to use and script than javascript and DOM (any reader knows of a
good DOM scripting tool?)
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|
| Frameworks and
Components |
I reread Jeremy
Allaire's essay (PDF) and was struck by the following:
...Components are a major shift in how server-side web
applications can be built, empowering a wide range of RAD and
script-level developers to access the power of object-based
component development, rich client/server models and web services
without the pain of complex frameworks.
I agree completely. The voice of experience is talking. All the
people out there building big application frameworks are great smart
people. I've been using such frameworks since 1987, first on the Mac
with TCL and MacApp, and later MFC on Windows. But to use a
framework you have to be very smart, too smart. The framework ends
up being a barrier to entry. They are hard to learn, and if you
dislike the coding style, tough luck!
Microsoft figured (or stumbled on) it out early with Visual
Basic. VBX and OCX controls were a big hit. No fancy framework to
learn, just plug and play. Internet Explorer for example is a set of
components enclosed in a wrapper application. That's how i am
currently embedding IE into some of my Windows applications without
having to learn any fancy framework - just a few API calls. Just
beautiful.
So in the last few years, I've prefered to build components that
can plug into existing or new systems. Of course i still use a code
framework, but it's now a collection of libraries that share a
similar coding structure and can be mixed-and-matched, and not an
all or nothing proposition of the early monolithic frameworks.
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|
|
|
 Get your site hosted using Manila! |
| Free Software
|
A high quality database library:
ADOdb 4.22 download
New Netezza, LDAP and odbtp_unicode drivers.
ADOdb for Python
ADOdb Help
& Dev Forum
ADOdb Documentation:
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Francais
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Tutorial:
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Chinese
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3rd Party Tutorials:
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Part 1
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Journal Part 1
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FAQ
ADOdb Articles:
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ADOdb
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testimonials
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DB and ADOdb
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SQL
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Services with ADOdb
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library
-Commercial data component: phpLens
|
| PHP Advocacy
|
Interviews
Michael
Kimsal
Zeev
Suraski
-Comparing PHP with .NET
-PHP versus ASP
-Why PHP is better
than ASP
-PHP versus Cold
Fusion
-PHP versus Perl
-What's wrong with JSP?
-PHP,ASP,JSP,CFM
Popularity
-PHP
Humor
|
| Enterprise PHP
|
-Enterprise PHP
scalable, high availability
-Writing Reliable
Software
-PHP
Application Variables
-Sessions in a Server
Farm with ADOdb
-PHP, FastCGI
and IIS
-Optimizing
PHP: tips, methodologies and examples.
-Tuning PHP and
Apache: many tips and links.
|
| PHP Articles
|
-PEAR Tutorials
& Links
-PHP Windows/Unix
Editors
-PHP Caches &
Debuggers
-XML-RPC Web
Services
-ActiveX on
Linux
-PHP: COM
& ADO
-GD on
Windows
-Using
mail()
Some notes comparing PHP, JScript, VBScript and
ASP that might be useful
1. Language
Basics
2. Functions,
Classes
3. ASP Objects and
PHP
-My
Favorite Articles
-CVS
on Windows
|
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