Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for February, 2004
Powerful Webmail Solution
Openwebmail is a free, open source webmail solution that offers a comprehensive feature set comparable to Microsoft Outlook. Developed in Perl and built to handle environments large and small, Openwebmail may be an excellent add-on for web designers and developers to recommend to their clients or offer as a service on the servers they manage.
Openwebmail includes powerful features beyond a user-friendly webmail interface. Some of these include:
-Address book
-Calendaring
-Disk quotas
-Web Disks
-Spam filters and Mail filtering
-Confirm reading options
-Message searching and spell check features
-Remote SMTP relaying
In addition, in group environments, a global address book and calendar can be created and shared by users.
Openwebmail was inspired by Ernie Miller and his NeoMail project, and has taken on a life of its own. You can review the Openwebmail site at http://www.openwebmail.org.
Timeline Effects and Flash Extensibility
Flash MX 2004 brought with it several new features and one which although noted as one of the animation and rich media additions has not received as good a press as it could have done initially but is now gathering momentum within the Flash community.
The new addition to the fold are known collectively as Timeline Effects and are primarily aimed at the Flash Beginner to increase their productivity for common procedures such as simple effects and tweening.
What happens if you consider yourself to be an intermediate or advanced advocate of Flash? Do they still have a place in your arsenal? Well… yes and no. There are two main Timeline Effects that are quite handy and these are Copy to Grid and Distribute Duplicate, both of which are timesavers for rapid duplication of instances into a grid like structure and gradated duplication with control of many factors.
But what about the Explode, Expand and Blur Timeline Effects? Sure they are kind of handy for the beginner, but in my opinion won’t get much use after a while, especially after you start to get familiar with ActionScript as there as there are only so many iterations and types of effect that you …
Generating XUL with PHP
Couple of interesting PHP / XUL projects I ran into recently, experimenting with XUL generation from PHP.
First there’s a PEAR package going through the process of approval (here): PEAR::XML_XUL. This provides a DOM-like PHP API for generating XUL. Not sure how much mileage there is in that approach through; will it add much value over simply generating the XUL using strings (or templating), as is common with HTML.
Fascinating is HV WDDX Metadata, over on phpclasses (you’ll need your own account to view the code). This seems like a more promising approach. If I’ve understood it correctly, uses WDDX (a widely XML format for serializing data) to define the “widgets” which appear in an XUL form, as well as the JavaScript used to validate them on the client side. Generation is being done with XSLT in the provided example. In other words you’d just need to modify the original WDDX document to add further fields / validation to an XUL form.
Nice to see XUL being explored by PHP developers. Any more projects out there?
Other XUL news is XULPlanet now has a PHP-manual-like comment system for some of the online references and tutorials.
Welcome to Go Flash Go!
Welcome to Go Flash Go!, SitePoint’s Flash blog.
We’re pleased to introduce Steve Grosvenor, who’ll regularly be bringing you news, views, and updates on all things Flash.
Check back to stay informed and expose yourself to the world of Flash.
What Do You Want?
…posted by davidjmedlock:
Many people have commented on how nice it is to see ColdFusion get some spotlight here on Sitepoint. Now my goal is to edge out all the PHP, Java, ASP, and .Net coders and eventually turn Sitepoint into one big ColdFusion site.
Okay, I’m just kidding. The PHP guys need a place to hang out, too, ya know. At any rate, I want to hear from all our ColdFusion readers exactly what information you want from Sitepoint when it comes to ColdFusion. Do you want more entry level tutorials? Do you want book reviews? Interviews with successful ColdFusion developers? In-depth articles on specific topics?
I’m interested in hearing what our readers want. So, for everyone out there reading this, feel free to comment on types of articles you’d like to see as well as specific topics you’d like covered. Be as specific or vague as you like. Of course, the more specific you are, the more likely you are to get what you want. :)
So, it’s in your court now. Have at. As Dr. Crane would say: “I’m listening”.
Spoof Your Email Addresses
A really cool and simple to use server control EmailSpoofer.NET protects the email addresses you have on your pages from spam bots who parse pages looking for potential email addresses to clutter up with their junk.
EmailSpoofer works by encoding references to your email address in either the hexadecimal URL format or JavaScript-based encoding. The latter is particularly powerful as most spam bots cannot process JavaScript, so is ignored. Another great feature of EmailSpoofer.NET is that it can render your email address as an image, which provides the best protection of all…an OCR spam bot? Not likely :)
These spoofings are nothing new, but having the functionality available in an easy to use control is certainly an powerful and simple way of protecting your mail box from unwanted junk.
EmailSpoofer.NET is available for free download from http://www.emailspoofer.net/default.aspx.
HTTP Digest Implementation in PHP
While following leads from Zend’s weekly summary, ran in Thomas Pike’s HTTP Digest Class: http://www.xiven.com/sourcecode/digestauthentication - a pure PHP implementation which relies on getallheaders() (i.e. requires Apache as well). Thomas introduces it here on his blog.
PHP comes with built in support for HTTP basic authentication but the problem there is, unless you’re using SSL (https), visitors will be sending passwords in clear text, which could be easily “sniffed” between their browser and your server.
HTTP Digest Authentication is a somewhat more secure mechanism, where, essentially, the server begins by sending a “seed” value to the browser, which the browser then uses to (one way) encrypt the password before sending.
Good to see this finally well-done in PHP.
Open Source Content Management
One of the primary difficulties a web site faces is managing content. This can include enabling multiple user levels access for content development and editing, establishing staging and production areas of a site, all while maintaining integrity of the design and application levels.
There is substantial open source development in content management systems (CMS) and there is of course a portal and organization devoted to aggregating access to the best open source systems available.
OSCOM - The international association for Open Source Content Management, brings together developers and users to improve and promote open source CMS. Be sure to see their extensive matrix of systems available.
Official: Windows Source Is Leaked
It was simply rumour yesterday, but today Microsoft have confirmed that portions of the source for Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4 have been leaked onto the Internet.
This is serious. Not only for Microsoft but for the millions of consumers of their products, including us .NET coders. Depending on where your priorities lie on the Microsoft divide, a possible benefit to this is that 3rd parties could now potentially view the inner workings of the operating system and therefore hopefully produce applications that can rival Microsoft’s own for integration (this is good for us, bad for Microsoft). But for most of us, this means bad news. The hackers job is made easy for finding new holes and releasing new viruses because now some of the source that underpins Windows 2000, NT 4, portions of XP and Server 2003 is available. This is serious for everyone, especially those running Windows 2000 servers. As one person said on Slashdot “anything after Windows ME is in for a world of hurt”.
But lets not go overboard, the full source hasn’t been leaked (the full source is supposedly around 40Gb in size…this leak is around 600Mb in size) but key source code being …
Testing in Safari without a Mac
iCapture by Daniel Vine is a service I would have sold my granny for if it had been available before I switched to using a Mac. It allows anyone to enter the URL of a site and download a screenshot of that site as viewed in Safari, with other Mac specific browsers on the way. And unlike BrowserCam, it’s a free service!
For a less accurate but more flexible alternative PC users might want to check out KDE 3.2. Released last week, this new version of the popular Linux desktop environment includes an updated version of Konqueror which incorporates many of the improvements to the KHTML engine made by the Safari development team. Konqueror certainly won’t provide a perfect environment for Safari compatibility testing but it’s better than nothing. Best of all, as soon as Knoppix is updated to include KDE 3.2 PC users will be able to test with the latest version of Konqueror without having to install Linux first.
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