Category: Technology (Page 6 of 12)

Technology, software development, FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and the web. From languages like PHP to specific tools, books and anything else.

Follow a new Zend framework book

January 4, 2009 / Ernie

Pádraic Brady is in the midst of creating a book about the Zend framework. On its own, not huge news, but the way its being done is most interesting. It will be free to read, and new chapters will be added as they are written. Also each paragraph can be commented on. So think something is not clear or not correct, tell the author right there. Bruce Eckel has in the past done similar things with his ‘Thinking in …’ books, and he believes it makes for a better book.

The new zend framework book is called Surviving The Deep End, and can be found on its own site. 2 chapters are currently available

Eclipse PDT 2.0 is released

December 30, 2008 / Ernie

The Eclipse plugin – PHP Development Tools (PDT) has released version 2.0 for download.

This new version uses the Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit and with reduced dependencies is claimed to be lighter and faster. There are numerous enhancements, with the best improvements around support for object oriented programming, code highlighting and builds.

Your team must have a coding standard

December 22, 2008 / Ernie

This post uses PHP in examples, and links to existing code standards, but could easily apply to any language.
Every developer is different, and most believe that their way is THE way. Some have a Computer Science degree, some learnt on the job. Some have 20 years experience across multiple languages, while someone is on their first day with PHP as their first language. There are so many differences, but 1 commonality: shared code. Unless you run your own company, and will never have anyone edit your code, you need a standard so that all these different programmers with their diverse backgrounds are working in a common way.
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PHP advent in full swing

December 21, 2008 / Ernie

PHP advent is on again this year. Different people from around the diverse PHP community write an article on a topic of their choice. Submissions so far run from code to structure to changing jobs. Read through in a quiet time.

PHP developer blogs to read

December 21, 2008 / Ernie

The internet is full of good and bad content, not just when it comes to PHP. Here is a list of the PHP related blogs that I consider most interesting.
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Learn with the Opera Web Standards Curriculum

December 18, 2008 / Ernie

In the deep dark past of the web, many programmers learnt about how to code HTML, CSS and Javascript by a mixture of books, other developers and hacking apart existing web code. This lead to some very messy outcomes with cut and paste solutions that allowed bad code to live on. Web development is now a mature profession, and has an abundance of quality resources available. For a new front end web developer the Opera Web Standards Curriculum is one of the best resources.

The site is a fantastic collection of 37 articles and counting that lead from a general web introduction through HTML, accessibility and CSS. There are great articles on colour theory and web typography. The site is aimed at students and educators in the hope they will teach their students the right way to do things on the web.
The W3C may publish the standards but the Opera Web Standards Curriculum is a great practical resource to learn them.

Introduction to PHP with Xdebug

December 17, 2008 / Ernie

This article is an introduction to some of the ways Xdebug can help you with your PHP code. Xdebug is a stable and mature PHP extension that can be invaluable in debugging and profiling your PHP code.
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Qcodo forked again

December 13, 2008 / Ernie

It has been announced that Qcodo PHP framework has been forked into QCubed. The stated reason is

[t]he inactivity of the Qcodo project has proved frustrating to many. I’m happy to announce that Open Source has triumphed, and several community members have banded together to fork Qcodo.

This is the second time a fork of Qcodo has been made. Earlier in the year Qcodo was forked to Zcodo but attempts had been publicly announced to merge the project back together. It seems this has been a failure, and QCubed has been created based on Qcodo 0.3.43. A 1.0 RC has been made available and work has begun in areas like documentation which had fallen well behind in Qcodo.

PHP 5.27 replaced by 5.28

December 11, 2008 / Ernie

PHP version 5.27 was officially released and quickly replaced with 5.28. The regression errors introduced in 5.27 affects configurations where magic_quotes_gpc is enabled. So skip 5.27 and go straight to 5.28.

PHP 5.3 for 2009

December 9, 2008 / Ernie

PHP 5.3 is getting closer. The third alpha release is now public. The current plan is for betas and release candidates every 3-4 weeks and a full release by the end of March 2009.

The most high profile new feature is namespaces. This has been a while coming and not without complaint, especially regards to the seperator chosen – . Many other languages and a number of developers wanted :: , and for a while this was going to be the choice. A number of possibilities did get a look in.