While trying to submit a patch to a drupal project, I ran into a problem creating a unified diff that could be suspected. It turns out that the way I was using the built in Subversion diff tool in NetBeans wasn't the way to go. Now, on the command line, I'm used to doing a […]
Another viable option for mobile development is to use a framework like Titanium or Phonegap to quickly build out an app using Javascript. I’ve been looking at Titanium a lot lately and digging into its API. Seems like you can build anything short of a game using its API and there’s a real buzz when
There's a new release of the the one full-blown IDE that I've managed to stick with. If Eclipse doesn't fit your style, give Netbeans a spin – I like its inline code completion, the source-code beautifier, and the integration with SVN and Mercurial. I particularly find the source control usability much better than Eclipse. After
The more that a team can interact and iterate, the better you're final product can be. In my ideal world, I'd skip a detailed wireframing exercise and get to building a prototype as soon as possible. Its so much easier to explain what is difficult to build if there's something to click on. Or you
Guilty as charged – my very early code was littered with functions with horrendously long signatures. All the worse in PHP, which doesn’t have a meaningful way to overload functions. Too many parameters means your function is likely trying to do too many things, instead of doing any one thing well. A simple way to
There’s a lot of good insight in this blog post from the creator of the Views module for Drupal. I’m a big fan of the module, and when I’ve had to dive into the code behind it, I’ve come away pretty impressed. That’s pretty rare for a Drupal module, IMNSHO. Also, if you don’t understand
Drupal – Designers vs Developers, can’t we get along? Read More »
If you’re not familiar with them, anonymous functions seem to be a term of art that very advanced programmers throw around to make others feel dumb. Until now, my closest experience has been in using them with jQuery and javascript, but tonight I found a use for them in PHP. If you don’t read
An example of using anonymous functions with PHP Read More »
I’m a fan of jQuery because it promotes unobtrusive markup and functionality and has a wealth of plugins to take care of common web development/ajax functionality. Marc Grabanski offers some tips for working with it effectively. I’ll need to look at livequery in some apps I’ve put together. If you need to attach events to
I stumbled on this post over at the flickr developers blog while chatting with Jo about web applications designed and built for “the cloud”. An article earlier this week piqued my curiosity about message queues, and got me thinking about how they can be used to move processing tasks out of the way. I’d known
Nicholas has started sleeping through the night, as of last week, and while it hasn’t been every single night yet, its happened more often than not. I’m glad for Staci, since she’s not a night owl like me, staying up past 10 or 10:30 was harder on her. This also means I’ve found some time