“Web 2.0″ and “Next-gen Web App”

We have had mostly only PHP-related articles lately (even though this claims to be a web dev blog!), so for today let’s get away from that topic for a little bit and talk about something else.

You’ve surely heard of the term “Web 2.0″. However, not everybody seems to have the same definition for Web 2.0 — especially when it was just conceptualized. As time progresses, people have gotten more educated. Still, there seems to be many common misconceptions. Let’s look at them…

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Controlling outputs in PHP

PHP has provided developers with many ways to control outputs, but not many scripts put them into use. Output buffering and flushing are great ways to enhance the usability of your web applications.

In a normal request sent to the web server from the browser, the web server typically responds with the header information and the actual content requested. The header contains numerous things, including the name of the server software, the last modified date and content-type of the document, and others. After the header comes the content. For an HTML page (or any scripts that produce HTML output), that would be the HTML source code of the page.

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Inheritance to improve performance

For those of you who went through a CS major in college, you probably know inheritance like the back of your hand. You know how to use it, when is a good opportunity to use it, and you know why… or so you’re told.

If you are a CS student, or a fresh grad working in some company as a programmer, you might be working on object-oriented code with tons of inherited classes — because you were told to do so. However when you get to work on your own projects, especially in a language like PHP, you may not think about it. After all, PHP is a web scripting language — for many small scripts, even procedural code is good enough. You may not even need to use an object-oriented design. How would inheritance come into play?

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References in PHP

References in PHP are important!

This is something I never paid much attention to in the past. I only started using references in my current project. I know for a fact that many less advanced PHP coders never use references, because on the php.net documentation contribution notes, there are actually people who advocate never using references because they are “confusing”.

References are not confusing at all! They work in PHP exactly as they do in C and C++. Keep in mind that references are not pointers, and if you don’t know what references are, I suggest you look it up in a tutorial elsewhere, because I won’t start explaining it, as that will probably take a whole other entry.

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Grand Opening

Hi everyone!

This is Bigi. It’s been a long time since I last owned a “public” blog - must’ve been a few years. The purpose of this particular one is to share what I find interesting in the topic of Web Development. When I say Web Development, it means everything from PHP, MySQL in the backend all the way to XHTML, CSS, JavaScript in the frontend.

I’m recently working on a project and I ran into many interesting things that I don’t want to just pass up without mentioning. It may be things you already know if you’re an expert, or it may be something you can learn from if you are a beginner, and it also just serves as a good record for myself to keep track of what kind of interesting things I’ve been picking up.

That’s all for the first entry. Any comments?

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