March 14th, 2009 by Eric
As I posted in a previous blog, the Gentle Beginnings site that I left over a half a year ago was 90% done, but was missing one core feature – the ability to post and read birthing stories. Recently I revisited this site to add the birthing story component, and learned a couple of hard lessons about Joomla! application development. Hopefully by posting this I can shed some light on the less documented portions of Joomla!, and perhaps save someone else precious time. Continue reading ‘Joomla! Applications: The Basics’
March 2nd, 2009 by Eric
When developing a web application using PHP, it is important to follow best practices for optimizing memory usage, database access, and file sizes. All these thing taken into account for, you will likely still find parts of an application to be bulky, or you may find repeated data calls an unnecessary overhead. When you need it, you should use Cache_Lite.
Continue reading ‘Application Caching with Cache_Lite’
February 15th, 2009 by Eric
While PHP Frameworks have become quite popular with web developers over the last two years, they have their drawbacks. They can be bulky and/or bloated, bringing the simplest of tasks into a fold of dependencies and data calls. They can be difficult to administrate remotely – if you use a shared host, some command-line configurations options are immediately disqualified. You may just be looking for a helper library, but do not want to drag your application through the mud of an entire framework to get one piece of functionality. Continue reading ‘To PHP or not to PHP…Let the Framework Debate Begin! (Part 1)’
February 10th, 2009 by Eric
HTML_QuickForm is a very popular PEAR library that eases form design for the web programmer. It consists of three separate but equally important parts – form components, form renderers, and form validators. The last of these three is the focus of this week’s tutorial.
Web programmers always have to be considerate of the security risks involved in web application design, and user input is one of the top priorities in application security. Thankfully, HTML_QuickForm makes validating forms a simple process, using object-oriented prinicples of inheritence while unifying client and server-side validation. Continue reading ‘Extending HTML_QuickForm_Rule’