Sam’s random musings

Prototype JavaScript framework: Prototype hosted on Google’s servers

The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader’s google.load() method, your application has high speed, globaly available access to a growing list of the most popular JavaScript open source libraries including:

• jQuery
• prototype
• script.aculo.us
• MooTools
• dojo

Bindable Behavior Now In CakePHP Core

It’s not news that Bindable Behavior has saved countless lives in terms of functionality.

As of Changeset 6918 this has now been integrated into the CakePHP core. So, we’ll have something to look forward to in the official release of CakePHP 1.2. Mind you, there may be a lot of other hidden gems in there, I just haven’t been paying attention lately :).

For a complete list of the differences and changes you can check out the
Containable Test Cases for excellent examples of how to use this to it’s full potential.

One of those things that is great to see in the core and to have good test coverage as well. One of the biggest bangs for the buck in terms of site performance after/before/durring adding caching…

Coding Horror: Is HTML a Humane Markup Language?

One of the things we’re thinking about while building stackoverflow.com is how to let users style the questions and answers they’re entering on the site. Nothing’s decided at this point, but we definitely won’t be giving users one of those friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI browser layout controls.

I am also bothered by the gui widgets that people tend to like in pages, for one I want more control given to my designers over my ‘users’ pages. Generally people really abuse those controls and make the ugliest darn things. The worst looking emails tend to come from yahoo and other web mail products that have those darn things.

I also like the markup that markdown makes, easy to style into something that flows with the rest of the site. Not by me you know, but by my designers…

Displaying errors

<?php
    $isDev  = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == ‘dev.phpguru.org’;
    $isLive = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == ‘www.phpguru.org’;

    if ($isDev) {
        error_reporting(E_ALL);
        ini_set(‘display_errors’, 1);

    } elseif ($isLive) {
        error_reporting(0);
        ini_set(‘display_errors’, 0);
    }
?>


sometimes the simple ways are the best ways. I do some very similar things build on this same approach…

(Via phpguru.org - Richard Heyes’ ramblings and code.)

Behind The Scenes of Google Scalability

The recent Data-Intensive Computing Symposium brought together experts in system design, programming, parallel algorithms, data management, scientific applications, and information-based applications to better understand existing capabilities in the development and application of large-scale computing systems, and to explore future opportunities.

Always interesting to read and see presentations on how the really big boys do it

(Via High Scalability - Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites..)

A Guide to Web Typography | i love typography, the typography blog

Typography for the Web has come a long way since Tim Berners-Lee flipped the switch in 1991. Back in the days of IE 1.0, good web typography was something of an oxymoron. Today things are different. Not only do we have browsers that support images (gasp!), but we have the opportunity to make our web pages come to life through great typography.

A good quick treatise on typography as it applies (in my mind) to reading on the screen, specifically on the screen.

Good reading for this design wrecker as I embark on a new design road…

Authorize.net AIM Integration Component

A simple component meant to abstract payment processing for Authorize.net’s AIM card processing method.

gonna need this is a couple of weeks

(Via The Bakery: Components.)

Easier Static Pages for CakePHP 1.2

>Traditionally in a CakePHP application, to do static pages you have two options:

1. Use the built-in Pages controller and either have all static pages reside in /pages/pagename or set up custom routes.
2. Set up an empty action in a controller.

I didn’t like either of those options.

So what with Nate’s help J. Snook makes a custom ErrorHandler to handle the missing controller actions and gets it to look for views in the /views/controllers folder that match and renders them otherwise it does the normal error thing that cake does. I’m working on an extension to this to replace the default route method that I used to serve items from my ContentsController. I’ll keep you informed of the progress but check out. So my plan will to do a quick check in here for things in Contents that might match the path first (or in the cache ) some small corrections, thanks to JS

(Via snook.ca - a collection of tips, tricks and bookmarks in web development.)