I’ve been trying for MONTHS to get the very excellent XDebug PHP extension, written and maintained the PHP Jedi Master, Derick Rethans. XDebug offers some serious debugging capabilities to PHP that are second to none. It also offers some excellent profiling tools, which I should really make better use of in development. It’s easy to see why I was so desperate to get it working. Continue reading
For quite sometime now, I’ve been developing all the projects I’ve been working on directly on my machine. This is handy for a number of reasons, the most important of those reasons being that I don’t have to be online while I’m working and I don’t have to upload to any servers. Continue reading
After working in the web development industry for the last 6 years or so, dealing with older browsers that lack decent support for CSS and Javascript is something I face and deal with on a near-daily basis. Why near-daily? Well, I do a lot of Server side development which tends to be browser agnostic.
Dealing with older browsers is a problem that MUST be solved, or handled, one way or the other. Some solutions are more involved than others and some solutions will not be accessible under certain situations. One option that I think gets ignored all too often, is the possibility that older browsers simply get a different experience, visually and behaviorally. Continue reading
Recently, I read a blog posted by an old workmate in New Zealand about CSS Hacks. More specifically, it dealt with CSS rendering differences between IE7, IE6 and browsers that actually render CSS correctly (ie. Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome… to name a big ones). Continue reading
I’ve been working in and around the web development industry since early 2001. I was a Computer Science student at Waikato University, in Hamilton, New Zealand. One day, a friend of mine, who happened to be a freelance web developer and designer asked me if I wanted to do a small PHP job for him. He was well versed in ASP and didn’t feel like learning a new language for what would probably be a one off PHP project and he knew I was already comfortable with C++, so the learning curver for me would be much lower. He offered me $400 for my part in the project and being a student, I said “HELL YEAH!” I haven’t looked back since. Continue reading
These last few weeks, I’ve been working away on a couple of projects that have REALLY made me appreciate just how important good architecture and planning really is, even with the smallest of projects. Continue reading
Well, over the last 3 days or so, I’ve been doing some serious unit testing with PHPUnit. Unfortunately, I didn’t start writing any serious tests until two days AFTER I started having problems testing my class hierarchy.
One of the problems that arose while I was writing the first couple of unit tests, was I realized that I didn’t know how to test Abstract classes. In my search to find a solution, I vaguely remembered a tool called phpUnderControl. Continue reading
For some time I’ve been toying with the idea of building my own, custom data access layer. Sure there are plenty out there. Some of them are HUGE (just think PEAR::DB, or ADOdb), which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself if, and only if, they still perform well. I believe ADOdb performs pretty well, but I’ve not actually run the benchmarks to confirm this, so I won’t enter in to that argument. A quick Google search will bring up plenty of articles discussing the pros and cons of Database Abstraction Layers. Continue reading
Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of developing a bunch of tools that will make my professional life just a little bit easier to manage. The most important of these is a timesheeting system and an automated invoicing system. Continue reading