Parsing lines from CSV files using Regular Expression

Maybe I’m still a newbie at regular expressions, but I searched for a long time yesterday for something that actually works, failing with many code snippets that I found. I finally found something that actually works, so I am posting it here for the benefit of all.

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Separation of POST/GET requests in PHP

Last time we talked about MVC application design. There is something I want to write about, stemming from the topic of the last article. It is the separation of POST/GET requests in PHP web apps, which I am an advocate of. It is sort of like a VC (View-Controller) architecture.

This is strictly an application-design topic. I’m not introducing any new fancy functions or features in PHP. It’s about how you design your web app, for better usability. (I happen to be pretty serious about web app usability, which, IMO, all software developers should be, for any software they are working on. This is why so many of my articles focus on what you could do to improve usability — it’s something too many programmers neglect.)

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MVC architecture in PHP development

MVC stands for Model-View-Controller. It is a type of architecture for developing software, recently pretty popular in web applications development. In short, the three things are pretty simple. Model is what interacts with the database, it would be the backend class code for an object-oriented language like PHP, Ruby on Rails, or C++. View is basically the user interface. Controller is the logic that operates everything in between.

They are easy to explain, but sometimes the concept is a little abstract and it’s hard to grasp for someone who doesn’t know what MVC is to begin with. To be honest, all my years in web development I never really understood exactly what MVC is, until recently when I started doing development in Ruby on Rails. In this article, I hope to explain MVC architecture development in PHP terms, so the average web apps programmer may benefit from understanding this powerful architecture.

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Web Applications Innovation

Since we talked about web applications last time, I just wanted to say something more. Something I’ve been telling others in conversations, but never had a place to write in before I started this blog.

Next-gen web applications really need innovation. If there is one thing I hate about the world wide web and web technologies, it’s bandwagon-jumpers who only learn the surface of things. There are more than enough web developers (or so-called developers) who only learn the latest tricks and start abusing them. JavaScript tricks and Flash were such things back then.

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