Facebook Applications

The Facebook platform has been released for a while now, and believe you me, I’ve been doing development on it since day 1 of that until now, non-stop. I think I can say with fairly good confidence that I’m an expert Facebook developer in PHP.

Facebook applications originally provided something with very good potential, but unfortunately, it isn’t really working in the way I would hope it should.

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Where do you draw the line between designer and developer?

As web 2.0 applications get more and more mature, the roles of web designers, web developers and web application developers become more and more blurry.

Years ago, web designers simply design web sites. They aren’t very different from traditional print designers. Sure, some of them might not only do the design, but also code up their designs in HTML. But a lot of times, web designers are only responsible for the visual designs, and they pass on their work to web developers to convert the visuals into actual web pages. Back then, there wasn’t even much of a term as “web application developer” — what is a web application in 1998? A form mail script? A guestbook? Nobody would do that for a living. Let’s rephrase that — you won’t make a living doing that.

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Multiple Browsers Testing

It’s been a while since I last posted something. I apologize for that, but I have been fairly busy in my job recently. So, this time I’m going to give you some useful information I’ve learned in my job lately.

It started from a time when one of my clients was using (are you ready for this) Firefox 1.0. If you are one of the unlucky souls who don’t understand the meaning of this — Firefox 1.5 had been the “standard” Firefox for about a year or more, and Firefox 2.0 has been out for at least a month or two (or more; and I’m not even the type who keeps myself that updated). He told me that the page didn’t look right and he was using Firefox, so I wondered for a while before finding out that he was on Firefox 1.0.

So I figured there is actually a need to install multiple versions of Firefox for testing. Surprise! There are actually ways to install multiple versions of Firefox as well as IE on your computer, without having multiple computers or doing any sorts of virtualization. Oh, and this guide is for Windows users. If you’re doing any sort of frontend design, Windows testing is your main target, no matter how much you like Mac or Linux yourself.

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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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“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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