Tag: programming

About

Computer programming (often shortened to programming or coding) is the process of writing, testing, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. The source code is written in a programming language. This code may be a modification of existing source or something completely new, the purpose being to create a program that exhibits the desired behavior. The process of writing source code requires expertise in many different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms, and formal logic.

Within software engineering, programming (the implementation) is regarded as one phase in a software development process.

In some specialist applications or extreme situations a program may be written or modified (known as patching) by directly storing the numeric values of the machine code instructions to be executed into memory.

There is an ongoing debate on the extent to which the writing of programs is an art, a craft or an engineering discipline. Good programming is generally considered to be the measured application of all three: expert knowledge informing an elegant, efficient, and maintainable software solution (the criteria for "efficient" and "maintainable" vary considerably). The discipline differs from many other technical professions in that programmers generally do not need to be licensed or pass any standardized (or governmentally regulated) certification tests in order to call themselves "programmers" or even "software engineers".

Another ongoing debate is the extent to which the programming language used in writing programs affects the form that the final program takes. This debate is analogous to that surrounding the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics.

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming

 

Notes on Dutch PHP Conference 2010

Here the notes I took during the Dutch PHP conference 2010 (#dpc10). They're not a representative summary of the event's highlights cause I could only attend 1 of 4 talks at any given time. I also filtered out things that didn't interest me personally.

CakePHP REST Plugin presentation

At our company we have a lot of uses for a solid API. We can use it to distribute config files, have servers report in, let customers edit DNS records using their own interface, etc. Now that I'm converting all of our legacy code to a big CakePHP application, the API needed a revisit as well. I chose to use REST as a standard, read about everything related to Cake & REST, and started hacking on a reusable plugin. The idea is that you can drop it in any application and unlock existing functionality to REST with minimal changes to your code.

Generate HTML with PHP

Hi. Have you met KvzHTML? It's a standalone PHP Class for generating HTML. It's been hiding deep inside the caverns of my secret GitHub repo: kvzlib - a collection of code snippets too small or unfinished to deserve their own repository. But I find working with this class so pleasant, I thought I'd share the fun.

Svn to Git

Today I've moved all of my SVN repositories over to GitHub. 5 private reps and 4 public ones. Two of which you may know: PHP.JS and System_Daemon.

Prepare for PHP 5.3

PHP 5.3 is a big leap forward for PHP and brings of a lot of neat features. However, big leaps can also mean big changes and potentially big breakage when it comes to backwards compatibiltiy. I did some experimenting with running a big legacy application and a CakePHP application on PHP 5.3 and would like to share my findings with you. Here are a couple of tips to prepare your code for PHP 5.3

Notes on CakeFest 3

Looking back at a great CakeFest in Berlin, I learned a lot about CakePHP and met many nice and inspiring people. Here are some conference notes I took that where particularly useful or new to me.

Create short IDs with PHP - Like Youtube or TinyURL

IDs are often numbers. Unfortunately there are only 10 digits to work with, so if you have a lot of records, IDs tend to get very lengthy. For computers that's OK. But human beings like their IDs as short as possible. So how can we make IDs shorter? Well, we could borrow characters from the alphabet as have them pose as additional numbers.... Alphabet to the rescue!

Install the Best Coding Font

If you are in IT professionally (coding or sysadmin) you will be staring at monospaced fonts for many many hours a day. So it's probably justified to spend 2 minutes picking a very good one. It can make your work (typing ; ) just a little bit more pleasing.

7 Steps to better PEAR documentation

If you've written a PEAR package, it's probably a good idea to submit some end user documentation. Here's how to do it.

A DRY piece of Cake

So I've been learning CakePHP the last few days. Bit by bit I've been trying to port a lecagy admininistration app to Cake. 'Secretly' linking menuitems to finished Cake parts as we go. And I must say: I'm pretty excited. I did run into a disturbing conclusion though. I estimated the legacy app will have over 300 Models & Controllers once finished. That could easily add up to (300 x 4 =) 1200 views. And here I am, creating a maintenance hell while trying to solve one!

Create daemons in PHP

Everyone knows PHP can be used to create websites. But it can also be used to create desktop applications and commandline tools. And now with a class called System_Daemon, you can even create daemons using nothing but PHP. And did I mention it was easy?

My new IDE: NetBeans

Writing code requires two important things: creativity & discipline. The creativity to create the unknown, unexplored, exciting parts of software. And the discipline to create the dull & all-too-well-known parts of software / documentation.
You may come up with new ways (or use frameworks) to reduce repetitive work. Effectively beating discipline with creativity. But boring stuff will still always be there in some form. And on days when creativity is low, you may need to tap into that jar of discipline so you can still be productive, by doing things you never feel like.
But every now & then, there is a day when bot...


org.eclipse.emf.ecore.util.EcoreEMap

One error that has bugged my Eclipse PDT for a long time, was org.eclipse.emf.ecore.util.EcoreEMap $DelegateEObjectContainmentEList. A vague error, not much to go on, not many hits on google either. Turned out it had to do with the version of my Java Runtime Environment I was using.

Rescuing my messed up Eclipse

Hi folks. As you may or may not know, I have a love/hate relationship with my IDE: Eclipse PDT. For times and times we get along well. But once every while it gets messed up, and it's a pain to straighten it out again. Or at least, it was.

How virtualization will improve your code

Good testing will result in better code. If you have to wait endlessly for on SVN commits, uploads or compile steps, you will simply produce less inventive code. This has to do with: patience, creativity flow, will, and of course time. Constantly being interrupted breaks concentration. If there's one thing I've really learned, it's invest in a good testing environment. Rapid review of code results will pay off (I promise).
So it's OK to spend some time on learning a good IDE, and another trick to improve the speed & quality of development, is to virtualize your production pl...


Virtualization compared

Recently I've been experimenting with Virtual machines for my development environment. The goal was to create a Virtual Machine that resembles our main production server, and have that Virtual Machine mount my workspace project directory as it's DocumenRoot. This way, my code could be served & tested after every save in my IDE. So no more building / committing delays. And all I could mess up was a Virtual Machine. I didn't know what software to start with and just tried the bunch. Here's my ever so subjective comparison 'chart' on Virtual Machine software.

PHP Recursive str_replace: replaceTree

Working with trees When working with tree data structures you often need to craft them in different ways. PHP offers a lot of functions to change the shape of arrays, but often they only go 1 level deep. Trees can count an almost infinite number of levels. Hence we need recursive replacements for our beloved array & string functions.

PHP Recursive ksort: ksortTree

Working with trees When working with tree data structures you often need to craft them in different ways. PHP offers a lot of functions to change the shape of arrays, but often they only go 1 level deep. Trees can count an almost infinite number of levels. Hence we need recursive replacements for our beloved array functions.

PHP.JS SVN

Hello good people. Our little project is going strong and thanks to Felix Geisendörfer there are a couple of new developments that I want to share with you. I'll limit this article to SVN though.

My new IDE: Eclipse PDT

I've been programming a lot with Quanta which is a leightweight kdevelop based IDE. It did the trick for quite some time, but recent developments in my coding life like SVN brought me on a Quest for my new ultimate PHP IDE.

Better performance with mod_deflate

I used to use Dean Edwards Javascript Packer a lot to compress my Javascript sources. Libraries of 100kB could easily shrink to 30kB and that saves load times & bandwidth. A good writeup by Julien Lecompte made me realize that there were better ways.

PHP.JS Namespaced

Thanks to a lot of extra effort by Michael White (http://crestidg.com) there now is a namespaced version of PHP.JS available for your coding pleasure.

PHP.JS Licensing

Licensing Since the project is really kicking off and we're almost at 100 ported functions, I thought it was probably time to think about licensing. So I did a little bit of research, and I think the MIT license might be what we're looking for.

PHP: tiff2pdf

Or: How to convert multipage TIFF to PDF in PHP. Let's say you have a fax with multiple pages that has been stored as a TIFF and you want to convert it to PDF using PHP for digital document flow. In this article I will show you a tiff2pdf function for PHP, because it cannot be done directly with ImageMagick.

Convert anything to Tree Structures in PHP

I recently faced a programming challenge that almost broke my brain. I needed to create a function that could explode any single-dimensional array into a full blown tree structure, based on the delimiters found in it's keys. Tricky part was size of the tree could be infinite. I called the function: explodeTree. And maybe it's best to first look at an example.

Get an article's Digg count in PHP

If you're like me and you're interested in the stats of your website or blog, you might also want to know how many Diggs all of your articles have received. But that can become quite a pain when you have more and more articles, pages or blog posts. So why not let PHP retrieve the Digg count of your articles so you can use it in graphs or other statistic tools?