Ubuntu for PHP and Web Developers

Blog (Posts about Web Development)

How to make offline web applications load responsively

loading

Two of the bigger challenges of taking a web application onto mobile are:

  • Working offline with HTML5
  • Creating a fast and responsive feel like native applications

You can find quite a lot on these topics, and I'll repeat some pointers, but for me the big issue is combining the two; making an application load responsively, regardless of online state.
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Symfony2 goes live

symfony2.1

At Alaress we have been using Symfony to develop our large scale applications for over 6 months now. We recently released Hotels.com.au based on the 1.4 framework.  On July the 25th we were excited to note that Symfony 2.0 was released.  This milestone is an important evolution in Symfony.  We are particular excited by the introduction of Doctrine2 and Twig as primary functions.

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A jQuery Plugin for Form File Inputs

file-input

While trawling through my google reader I stumbled across this post from the guys at Viget. I love their blog and some of the web development work coming out of there is inspiring and really innovative. The blog comes up with a solution to a problem I’ve always had with html forms; the way that browsers deal with file inputs so differently. This makes design difficult for designers trying to create a design that has a consistent look and feel to it. CSS is lacking in its ability to style these fields and the javascript solution that Trevor came up with is efficient and simple.

While the post from Viget deals with transforming a single file input in reality what a developer needs is a plugin, something that can allow any file input to be styled simply by giving it a class or ID. Essentially I wanted to turn the following slightly awkward solution;

$('.file-wrapper input[type=file]').bind('change focus click', VIGET.fileInputs);

into

$('input[type=file]').prettyFileInput();

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IPN and PDT Paypal Responders Demystified

ipn-featured

Building robust paypal integration into your site isn’t entirely straight forward. Here we use custom eCommerce solutions tailored specifically for our clients but sometimes the more basic solution is quicker albeit much less user-friendly. The basic integration of a paypal button is simple enough but if the client requires something heavier that can deal with writing to a database or the payment process? The IPN and PDT paypal setup can allow all of this and more through some careful tweaking of its default options and PHP scripts.

On top of the user’s feedback let’s assume that any order that has been completed needs to be added to your own personal database for record keeping and invoicing. This is where the paypal documentation gets a little bit hectic and difficult to decipher. The aim of this blog is to explain how to deal with this situation using a mix of two types of paypal auto-responder, IPN and PDT.

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Stripping down CSS

stripping-down-css

As a front end developer one of the constant things I have to deal with is the fact that CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can explode way out of proportion to the site they are being used on. If a site goes beyond a simple blog or set of static pages and morphs into a web app CSS becomes cumbersome and bloated.

This is largely due to the fact that classes like “float”, “color” and “background” are applied in nearly every individual div that is used to present a site. The common way around this is to combine classes into a single line like this: Continue reading this post ›

Ubuntu for PHP and Web Developers

ubuntu-php

I have been using Ubuntu on my development desktop for around 3 months now in our digital agency, Alaress.   Its about time I write about my experiences using Ubuntu as a development platform for PHP.

Firstly let me say my experiences in general have been very positive. The people working on Ubuntu have done a great job and I am extremely excited about the way things are going.

As a firm believer of using the best tool for the job, I have been using Windows with Putty, Dreamweaver, TortoiseSVN, SQLyog, Firefox, Thunderbird and Filezilla as my primary development toolset.  These applications have performed admirably apart from a few issues with Dreamweaver in the early days it now is a very stable and reliable tool.

In the past I have toyed with Linux desktops but found the graphical polish lacking and the IDE’s either nonexistant or overwhelmingly complex and slow. With the Jaunty release from Ubuntu things have really changed.  Coupled with a PHP specific version of Netbeans and we now have a platform that can be used on a daily basis, and after 3 months, does not look like I will be going back.

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