Dev Corner 2.7

what's new:

- probably the biggest news this week (or maybe even this year!) that Google is coming out with an OS. Well, it wasn't really unexpected (ie: Chrome, Android) but it definitely scared and/or surprised some people. So far I know, it will be built on the Linux kernel and it will be open source (expected in late 2010).

- very quietly USPS went open source. They replaced their old Sun Solaris machines with shiny new HP Servers and SuSE Linux and they use Cobol as a programming language. Wow.

frameworks:

- Yii framework 1.0.7 got released, mostly new features, some bug fixes:

- Bug: yiic webapp may generate incorrect path to yii.php (Qiang)
- Bug: When using MySQL enum type, AR may incorrectly typcasting the column values (Qiang)
- New #360: Added anchor parameter to CController::redirect (Qiang)
- New: Added userAgent parameter to CHttpRequest::getBrowser() (Qiang)

- Joomla 1.5.12 is out [Wojmamni Ama Woi] "This release marks an important milestone for the Joomla Project due to the upgrade of the PEAR library to the new BSD licensed version"

- Drupal 6.13 and 5.19 released "maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities"

others:

- so apparently Google has posted PHP performance tips (how to improve the WEB) before they actually talked to a PHP expert, so the community didn't take it very well and responded pretty quick ;) good stuff, read it.

- this is an older post but it explains some useful OO practices in PHP.

Dev Corner 2.6

It seems like I gave myself a little vacation time (from posting to this blog), but hey, it IS summer-time. so ... back off :)

what's new:

- PHP 5.3 is out. Holey smokes. I don't remember the last time I got so excited about PHP itself, but finally, here it is. The latest and greatest:

Two and a half years after the release of PHP 5.2.0 and following a slight delay, the PHP development team have announced the release version 5.3.0 of PHP. Version 5.3.0 of the web programming language includes several fundamental new extensions, as well as a number of other new features and is the one of the biggest revisions in PHP's history. Many of the functions originally planned for PHP 6 have ended up in the 5.3 development pipeline.

- FireFox 3.5 got released, so far I have lots of plug-ins that are not compatible yet, but my favorites ie: firebug and personas have already released an update, and that's all that matters to me :)

- Here is a "not-so-new-but-still-very-cool" tool from Google called Google Voice. Didn't have a chance to play with it yet :/

- CodeWorks Conference 09 is a 2 day PHP conf:

* San Francisco, CA (9/22-9/23)
* Los Angeles, CA (9/24-9/25)
* Dallas, TX (9/26-9/27)
* Atlanta, GA (9/28-9/29)
* Miami, FL (9/30-10/1)
* Washington, DC/Baltimore Area (10/2-10/3)
* New York, NY (10/4-10/5)

cool posts:

- Rails vs. CMS or Rails w/ CMS - what is the deal here? Can Ruby (and Rails) really change the, already strong, CMS world (ie: Drupal, Joomla etc...)? The author points out the differences between web application and web site. read it!

- how to put the OLPC's OS on a USB drive and power up a long forgotten PC? Very cheap solution, love it.

- I always excited to see how the UI (user interface) is designed for a specific site. Here are 10 UI design patterns you should be paying attention to.

- just a cool lookin' site (watch for the squirrel)

frameworks:

- solarPHP.com:

Solar is a PHP 5 framework for web application development. It is fully name-spaced and uses enterprise application design patterns, with built-in support for localization and configuration at all levels.

- how to create a module web app with ZendFramework, one might ask, well here it is ...

- a company who came back from Rails to PHP (to Yii Framework to be exact) nvzion.com

- and to stay with Yii Framework, the new design had been accepted for logo and site. good stuff.

others:

- if you think I only write about Firefox, you're wrong. Here is a pretty cool article about Opera Unite, a new way to use your (opera) browser.

- 40+ Invaluable PHP Tutorials and Resources.

Dev Corner 2.5

Long time no see (or read). Sorry about that, but my wife and I just had our first baby, last Tuesday, so I gave myself a week(end) to relax. If you are at all interested, you can check out some pictures of her (Violet Alison Mehesz) here. Some of the news probably not the "most recent", but I'm gonna put them here anyway, just for history's sake.

what's new:
- Android 1.5 (Cupcake) is available for download. Honestly, I have no problem with my iPhone, I think it's a great tool, but I can't wait till next year, when I can switch to an Android powered phone. It'd just fit me better ;)

- New Zealand's government will not renew their agreement with Microsoft this seems to be the new thing to do lately.

- Here is an article about an Open Source car, yes a Car. Never heard of such a thing :) awesome

frameworks:
- symfony (PHP framework) conference was going on, the new version is out too (1.3) check out their blog for more details.

- Yii Framework 1.0.6 is out, (this is our newly chosen framework, looking forward to learn it and use it) read the CHANGELOG.

- ZendFramework 1.8.2 (maintenance release) focus on Zend_Db and autoloading improvements and bug fixes.

- Limonade (a light weight PHP framework) tumblog opened and a pretty good example is now available too (no, not another blog ;) ) it's a WIKI built with limonade.

others:
- I really like that cool feature in Chrome (the Google browser) that you can save an actual web-page to your desktop and use it as a "real application". well, wait no more, because FireFox came out with an extension called prism, and I tried it on Windows AND Linux (ubuntu with a little hack). It works independently from FF so if it crashes (never does, but IF SO ;) ) your other running apps, like GMAIL or GCalendar would be fine. Give it a try.

- here is an interesting way to generate menu systems with recursive function.

- I really wanted to play with GIT (yet, another source control thing) and I found two sites that helped me a lot. First, how to install git from source and second for windows loverZ -> msysgit :)

tip of the weak:
- never call your JavaScript variable location - weird things will happen to you and to your site :D

Dev Corner 2.4

This week's post is gonna be a little bit different. I attended the Day Of Ruby event in Orlando on Saturday (May 30th 09) so I'd like to dedicate Dev Corner 2.4 entirely to Ruby (and Ruby On Rails)

What was/is this event about?

It’s a chance to get your hands dirty with one of the coolest languages out there - Ruby! Day of Ruby is a free, one day event featuring sessions on Ruby, Rails, Deploying Rails, Building GUIs with Ruby, using IronRuby and JRuby and more.

And this is exactly what you'll do. Get your hands (and machines) dirty with RoR (Ruby On Rails) :) First off let me thank the presenters and the helping crew:

Cory Foy from cornetdesign.com:
Agile consultant and coach living in Bayonet Point, FL.

Corey Haines from ... coreyhaines.com:
~ "travels around the country pair programming with whoever will feed him a scrumptious vegetarian meal and give him a spot to put his air mattress." - by =>

Hashrocket guys from hasrocket.com =>
Hashrocket is an expert web design and development group. We practice Agile and leverage technology such as Ruby on Rails to help your company deliver quality software quickly.

Orug the Orlando Ruby Users Group:
The Orlando Ruby Users Group was formed in January 2006, to provide a club for many purposes

Wrap up:
- in the first two hours Corey Haines. guided us through the awesomeness of the Ruby language itself. (on a personal note, if you just want to "play" with the language, but don't want the hustle installing, setting up etc. just simply try their 15-20 minutes tutorial on their site, it's worth it! - http://www.ruby-lang.org ) His slides are available on his blog.

- after the tasty launch from Panera, we _really_ got our hands dirty with test/behaviour driven RoR development and created a Todo list application. Here are some of the tools we used:

rspec: RSpec is the original Behaviour Driven Development framework for Ruby.

cucumber: ~ is a tool that can execute plain-text documents as automated functional tests.

webrat: Ruby Acceptance Testing for Web applications

restful authentication: This is a basic restful authentication generator for rails, taken from acts as authenticated.

It is definitely a very interesting development technique (I only experienced it once before, thanks to Sandro Turriate) and you really need to wrap your head around it. The funny thing was, at the end, somehow it all made sense :)

And the best for last, I've literally never won anything in my life (since I don't gamble) and I was not counting on it at all, but I won a cool Rails book called Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails. I kinda looked into it, and I think it's written in Greek :)

Dev Corner 2.3

what's new:

- this week was one of the biggest (if not the biggest) event for the PHP community, php|tek. So far I only found a presentation about MySQL Performance Tuning by lig. I was lucky enough to saw her presentation couple of months ago with the local PHP meetup group, it's awesome.

- apparently Google has updated Chrome, added more security and speed. I just can't wait the release of the Linux version. I h8 waiting :(

- there is no way to tell which browser is the best. Is it FireFox (yes of course ;) ) Chrome, Safari or IE? One thing is definitely certain. Firefox has a growing number of developers who can create more add-on features than any other browser, and it will be really hard to beat. (I'm pulling for FF but that's just my opinion). And Mozilla seems to be a good supporter, especially with the release of JetPack.

Jetpack is a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play. - https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com

- Why don't we have more Linux powered laptops and store shelves? It's simple, really. Supply and demand. If we would have more people who want it, obviously more manufacturer would go for it. This is not the case. yet.


some cool stuff:
- here are 20+ ways to design your HTML lists better. I'm a developer, I only use one kind ;)

- if you hate bots and want to you some kind of captcha solution, this one might be for you:

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Check out our paper in Science about it (or read more below).

- if you like robots and nintendoDS here is an awesome way how you can combine the two ideas. just let me know if/how it worked out. hehe

- and the best for last. I'd call myself an old fashioned developer. I love VIM. I try and try different IDEs and editors but somehow I always end up using this text based awesomeness. And if you think that Vim doesn't have those cool features that your IDE does, you are wrong. Here is my proof ;)

what am I up to:
- finally I finished this little app with this PHP micro-framework called limonade and added an iPhone feel to it. So if you have an iPhone (or maybe an iPodTouch) please check this out: http://mehesz.net/isearch

Dev Corner 2.2

what's new:
- Intel fined $1.45 billion by European antitrust regulators - I think this was a good decision and hopefully will bring good sense to some people.

- the government is moving forward with interesting tech stuff like supporting more and more open source solutions, showing presence in multiple social networks etc.

- Mozilla launched a new add-on for FireFox (btw. it is also available as a stand alone app) called prism which lets you create your favorite web page as a kind of desktop app. (I found it useful with Gmail, RememberTheMilk etc) I think Chrome was already doing this, but FF is better anyway ;)

- Google started WolframAlpha which is a different type of search engine. My english is not strong enough to explain what it is exactly soooo ...

Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing...

framework stuff:
- ZendFramework 1.8.1 is out (ZF 1.8.1) which is the first maintenance release in the 1.8 series. Download it and use it.

- If CakePHP or ZF (or Rails for that matter) is just way to big for your needs, there are other pretty cool solutions out there. For Ruby and Rails dudes there is the Sinatra project and for PHP enthusiasts there is a up of Limonade. These micro-frameworks help you organize your code mostly in an MVC pattern structure but you can tweak them any way you want. Check them out.

- what are the TOP programming languages right now. I think the answer is always relative in most cases, but here is a list how TIOBE sees it may (without categories)

Position May 2009	Position May 2008	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings May 2009	Delta May 2008	Status
1	1		Java	19.537%	-1.35%	A
2	2		C	16.128%	+0.62%	A
3	3		C++	11.068%	+0.26%	A
4	4		PHP	9.921%	-0.28%	A
5	5		(Visual) Basic	8.631%	-1.16%	A
6	7		Python	5.548%	+0.65%	A
7	8		C#	4.266%	+0.21%	A
8	9		JavaScript	3.548%	+0.62%	A
9	6		Perl	3.525%	-2.02%	A
10	10		Ruby	2.692%	+0.05%	A

gadgets:
- NorhTech announced a laptop running on AA batteries :)

- and now you can install the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) OS on a Thumb drive.

what am I up to:
- checking out the micro PHP framework called Limonade.

Dev Corner 2.1

what's new:
- Rails Conf. 09 - is now over, but as far as I could tell from the Twitter and Facebook responses it was a great success. I started to listen to DHH's keynote (didn't have time to finish it yet :( ). I'm a long time PHP guy but always open to learn new stuff, so I'm following both, the PHP and the Rails communities and everybody say their time is here ... NOW :) well, I guess time will tell anyway.

- Who is buying twitter? The entire Tech World reminds me of a bunch of old women sitting on a porch and talking about imaginary/half-true stuff. Who is going to buy Twitter? Microsoft, Google or Apple or maybe Oprah? It might be a short discussion because apparently Twitter is not for sale. At least, not right now :)

- back to Rails for a little bit: they wanted to release a beta version of the up-coming Rails3 this week for the conf, but DHH said that the source is not in that stage just yet. I think you can still download and play with if you want. Here is a short wrap-up (ie. Merging with Merb etc :) ).

open source stuff:
- I see more and more articles like "in this economy how OpenSource will change the World" and such, which is very good and promising, but the big question is, are we, as humans/people in general, ready? new line of cellphones with OpenSource, new, small cheap laptops etc. It's amazing to see the rise of something you like ... like machnes ;) oh, yeah. and the health care system!

- how to avoid Linux migration pitfalls ...

- I remember couple of years ago everybody was talking about the "new big thing" which will change the internet. It kinda did, but didn't change it as much as I expected. I'm talking about Flash here. You can do cool stuff with it, flying saucers, shining whatever, but that's about it. For me at least. Well, now, here is another new thing, Silverlight by Microsoft. What the hack is this? Why would anybody wanna use it, and finally how Open Source comes into the picture?

what am I up to:
- the Drupal guys approved my module so all I have to do now, is to create an CSV older and upload it to their repository. I should be done with it this weekend :)