Rewind a little more than 10 years to December 18, 1997. Internet Explorer 4 had been released 3 months earlier. The Mozilla Foundation had not yet formed, and their Firefox web browser was years away from public release. There was no XMLHttpRequest… there wasn’t even XML. On that day, over a decade ago, HTML 4.0 was published as a W3C recommendation. Read the rest of this entry »
I read a lot of tech-related blogs and other tech-news, and I’ve caught a number of very talented programmers and intelligent technologists using the terms thread and process interchangibly. Forgive me for being pedantic, but they’re not the same thing! It’s true that threads and processes are very similar: they’re both methods of parallelizing an application. But the similarities pretty much stop there. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve been following Linux kernel news then you’ve probably heard about the new Completely Fair Scheduler that has been merged into the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel release. It’s been a while since I’ve done much Linux kernel hacking, so the initial announcement was mostly over my head. After reading about the new scheduler in several places, I decided to do a bit of research into how the current Linux scheduler works, and what makes the new scheduling algorithm so interesting. Here’s what I learned. Read the rest of this entry »
Giving users mobile access to data is the latest vogue, but unless you’re a mega-corporation, or have a boat load of funding, it can be prohibitively expensive. If you’re looking into getting a short code and building your own SMS gateway, be forewarned: it’s an arduous process that’ll cost you upwards of $15,000. For the rest of us, 4INFO’s Open Platform is a pretty cool (and FREE) alternative that enables developers, content providers, and bloggers to utilize the 4INFO short code to deliver mobile content. Read the rest of this entry »
John Resig, a programmer working for the Mozilla Corporation and creator of the wonderful jQuery JavaScript library spent last weekend putting together a server-side browser/DOM environment that he’s released on his blog. The application, written entirely in JavaScript, runs on top of Mozilla’s open source JavaScript implementation called Rhino. Read the rest of this entry »
Pownce is “a way to send stuff to your friends.” It’s a one-to-many “social messaging” application like Twitter, but it packs a bunch of additional features (full review). Backed by Digg.com founder and web wunderkind Kevin Rose, Pownce is a high visibility project with a good chance of success. The site held up fairly well to a barrage of traffic after its launch, which made me wonder what makes it tick. Lead developer Leah Culver was kind enough to answer some questions via email. Read the rest of this entry »
After more than a year of development, the long awaited stable release of Zend Framework is finally here. Zend Framework is a fully object-oriented PHP 5 class library that was carefully designed to be modular and flexible. It includes components for authentication & authorization, internationalization, efficient database access, and utilities for consuming and exposing web services, among many other things. Broadly stated, the project’s goal is to “provide the most commonly required 90% of the value you need… leaving you the ability to custom build that last 10% to meet your specific business needs.” Read the rest of this entry »
This tutorial is intended for advanced audiences. If you’re new to regular expressions, or if you could use a quick refresher, go read my intro to regular expressions, and work through a few examples. Trust me, it’ll be one of the most rewarding twenty minutes you’ve ever spent. If you’re familiar with the basic regex concepts then read on and learn all you need to know to be a regex pro. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s a common problem among programmers. Elegant code becomes obfuscated by a series of hacks and kludges that are supposed to “improve performance.” Two months later when your partner goes back to ajaxify your login form, or implement a bugfix, they lose three days trying to understand 1,500 lines of spaghetti code. Despite the long-term repercussions, many seasoned programmers continue to optimize prematurely with no regard for their partners’ happiness or their own well-being. Read the rest of this entry »
The most basic presentation pattern is probably that old standby, the Model View Controller (MVC). Rather than re-hash MVC, which has already been covered elsewhere, I figured I’d jump ahead to something a bit more interesting: the Front Controller.
Presentation patterns in general are designed to promote the independent operation of the business logic (model) and presentation (view) tiers of a system. The controller is responsible for coordinating the operations of the other two layers by taking user input, manipulating the model, and causing the view to react appropriately. The Front Controller pattern goes a step further by exposing a single entry point to your system, and delegating incoming requests to objects that implement the proper behavior. Read the rest of this entry »
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