Basic PHP Programming

Widgets are a good way of getting a page to earn a buck whenever people click on them but with thousands of them around, throwing a couple of hundred on your sidebars will make for a very slow page. Widgets as designed are not supposed to take up too much processing speed out of a page but like all the elements of a page, too much of a good thing can be bad for your health, your page’s health that is.

Keep things clean and neat and you could do that with proper cycling of widgets should you need to place a lot of them on your page. Remember, a page that’s well thought of and laid out is better than a cluttered one.

Then you could try Hyperpolyglot.org, a place where most development pages are represented side by side giving you an idea of how they work. One of the most common problems with web development is that some pages are developed using different languages. The site caters to developers who need information on how to best get all these development platforms to work together with samples and a forum where you could send in questions and get answers from developers like yourself.
Opens as a reference page that more or less presents most development languages and their kin. Describing similarities as well as differences making for one brief and concise development reference page.

Freelance programming is becoming more and more popular, and many people are trying to find the language that suits them best in order to get into the market as soon as possible. PHP is easily one of the most popular languages in that department, and the number of people writing PHP programs as freelancers can be quite inspiring. However, if you’ve got no experience in it, can it make the right choice for your freelance ventures?

The truth is, PHP is a double-edged knife when it comes to newcomers, though its positives tend to outweigh the negatives. It’s easy to get into and learn the basics, but also leaves a lot to be explored and perfected, creating plenty of opportunities for building your skills. However, perhaps the most important thing to consider about PHP is the database interaction – as a freelance programmer offering PHP services, you should be well-acquainted with at least one major database suite, and this creates additional things to learn and master, which can easily make the whole job more daunting.

Then there’s the whole issue with security – something which really deserves its own note, but it’s sufficient to say that any freelance PHP programmer worth their salt must have top notch security in their websites, and it’s one of the points where newbies fail most often. Security in Internet applications is a whole philosophy in itself, and you’ll have to dedicate a lot of time to learning that as well – so take this into consideration too.

PHP now known as “PHP Hypertext Preprocessor”, but originally “Personal Home Page Tools” is a widely used open-source programming language used primarily for server-side applications, to develop dynamic web content such as the MediaWiki software. It can be seen as an open source alternative to Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) system and to the CGI/Perl system.

Its ease of use and similarity with the most common structured programming languages, most notably C and Perl, allows most experienced programmers to start developing complex applications with a minimal learning curve. It also enables experienced developers to get involved with dynamic web content applications without having to learn a whole new set of functions and practices.

Editing or creating a php page can lead to migraines and irregular sleeps due to the complicated nature of its coding. However, you can actually save time (and get more sleeps too!) if you will use a WYSIWYG php editor. WYSIWYG stands for “What You See Is What You Get” and it is basically a visual editor. It was made specifically for those who wish to make web pages but do not know anything about coding. TinyMCE is a nice program for those who wish to make websites using javascript, html and php. You can even control the pictures you are going to use in the website you are making, allowing you to preview and move the pictures as freely as possible—of course, without the hassle of inputting codes you cannot understand.

Photo taken from http://www.thesynapticleap.org

Who says php programmers can’t be game programmers? Of course they can! But do not expect them to create a Grand Theft Auto kind of game out of php coding. They can’t. All they can make are simple, yet fun games such as quizzes, sudoku and puzzles. LizQuiz is a downloadable snippet, wherein you can just change the variables you will use for the quiz you are making. You can configure the quiz using an XML file, so you don’t need a database to store your pool of questions. You can even add multiple answers to a single question if the question sees fit. You can get the snippet here.

Photo taken from http://www.sliver.com

All over the world, people are using PHP in their daily internet experience and with companies working hard to make it into a more powerful tool for the internet of tomorrow, updates and add-on’s are a fact of life. Zend Technologies, one of the developers who work with PHP has announced the release of their new and improved Zend Framework release 1.8 which makes PHP better by bringing Rapid Application Development (RAD) to the industry. The ability to do RAD allows easy business application development using PHP that is set to fuel business ventures into the cloud. Read the rest of this entry »

This year’s TestFest 2009 is almost here and people from all over the globe work together, each devoting a few hours of their time to the proper testing of the newer and enhanced versions of the platform to allow a wider testing program. Most testing is done by a select few who work their best to test, isolate and address issues that come out with previous releases that should have been addressed by current updates. The test group, spanning 20 countries with a multitude of talents hopes to try out and see if all errors, vulnerabilities and enhancements are up to par with programming standards previously implemented. Read the rest of this entry »

As the internet evolves and the many people who work hard to make it possible try to issue improvements into the already forever present PHP platform, the newest version of PHP 5.3.0, release candidate 2 has been released for evaluation and testing. The update is in efforts to address security vulnerabilities that have been found with the last release only a month or so ago and it is deemed as part of the continuing evolution of PHP into one of the best and most secure web platforms ever. Project managers are advised to download the latest version fro testing with current projects so compatibility issues can be addressed early. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s surprising how many PHP programmers make the mistake of ignoring many of the basics, such as resizing big files. Big files make load times significantly slower, and are a bane to impatient people and people with slow internet connection speeds.

Failing to resize you large files makes you an unintentional elitist – it’s like you hung a sign on your site that says “Folks with slow internet connections speed are NOT welcome here.”

It’s a simple enough tip, but many ignore or overlook it precisely because of that. You might have a fast internet connection, but chances are many viewers don’t enjoy the same luxury. And maximizing viewership is a must for every website, and big files that cause delays in loading times totally defeat the purpose, especially with the shot attention span many people have when browsing the net.