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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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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“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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