Archive Page 3
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 22nd, 2009 by Eric
With PHP becoming a bigger player in the realm of enterprise web application design, there are several questions that the PHP developer must ask his/herself. One such question is licensing, and whether or not an application should be open or closed source.
Since PHP itself is an open source project, the vast majority of products released using PHP are open source as well. However, there may be a need to license out software-as-a-service, or the need to secure your source. Enter Nu-Coder. Continue reading ‘Product Highlight: Nu-Coder by NuSphere’
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’
February 1st, 2009 by Eric
After last week’s post highlighting the YSlow Firefox extension, I’ve decided to follow up on the topic of best practices with a brief post on the Minify Library. The Library was discovered when one of my coworkers was tasked with reducing the http requests of our various sites. Minify takes cares of that, and much more! Continue reading ‘The Minify Library’
January 24th, 2009 by Eric
As I was working on editing the new theme for my blog, I downloaded the Firebug developer’s toolkit to inspect an HTML element on my screen. After installing Firebug I got a series of other Add-on recommendations, most of which were tools that embedded into the Firebug interface. Once such tool was called YSlow. Continue reading ‘The YSlow Firefox Add-on’
November 21st, 2008 by Eric
These past 3 months have been very exciting for me – I started a new job in Web Development working with a commercial open-source CMS by a company named NStein. We are currently in the 3.x branch of their software, aptly named WCM (Web Content Management…how creative…) 3.x is very extendable, but its out-of-the-box functionality is a bit…limited.
With 4.0 will come drag-and-drop design templates and customizeable dashboards for editors, along with other features even more tedious to the casual reader. As for the web dept., though, we are quite happy, and are looking forward to revamping our sites to utilize these features. Continue reading ‘All Work and No Play Makes Eric Wish He Could Post Here More’
