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Blogs » Archive for September, 2006
WD06: Jeremy Keith, “Explaining Ajax”
Kevin Yank is reporting from the Web Directions South conference in Sydney, Australia.
As expected, Jeremy Keith gave a clear and entertaining introduction to AJAX at Web Directions South, today. I won’t rehash that material here, as we have plenty of good introductory material on SitePoint already.
Keith adopted a somewhat contrarian view when it comes to “desktop-like” AJAX applications like the web-based instant messaging application, Meebo, suggesting that there are better uses for AJAX than simply replicating desktop applications within the confines of a browser (and subject to the limitations of that environment). I tend to agree.
Keith also spent some time discussing the design challenges that arise from adding AJAX to your web site. High on his list were issues like providing status information and feedback about the otherwise silent server communication at the heart of every AJAX application.
Keith’s closing point was on the lack of accessibility of current AJAX applications, and how this is the single biggest challenge standing in the way of AJAX becoming an universal aspect of real-world web development.
This session will be podcast over the next few weeks on the Web Directions South blog.
WD06: Kelly Goto, “Designing for Lifestyle”
Kevin Yank is reporting from the Web Directions South conference in Sydney, Australia.
Kelly Goto opened the Web Directions South conference today by speaking about current goals, trends, and methods in the design of devices, products, and software that aim to fit into the lives of their users.
Beyond mere usability, successful design today requires that an interface engender an emotional response in its users. We are emotional beings, after all, and our choices about the products and services we use are–for better or worse–emotionally motivated as often as not.
Related design approaches that Goto has observed include interfaces that emulate human-to-human interaction through natural language, devices that provide services that have previously been dominated by early adopters (such as mobile Internet) through prepackaged solutions and convenient default preferences.
Goto noted that one of the staples of “2.0 design”, as she called it, is to make everything look “cute, cute, cute, so that we can’t help but want to interact with it.”
The key new element in the design process that Goto is tracking is the practice of ethnography, the study of the unique behaviours and needs of a group of people, which enables you to build solutions that will fit naturally into …
The Joy of Regular Expressions [3]
Following on from the last part, this one is more of an intermission – a round up of regex syntax seen so far and a couple of links following feedback.
Reads
First you have to check out Andrei’s Regex Clinic (slides / pdf) – even if you don’t get it all, it’s worth it for the pictures at the start ;) That’s Andrei as in Zmievski, as in works at Yahoo, can be blamed for Smarty and PHP-GTK, is one of those who needs thanking when PHP6 (with Unicode) hits the streets and, long ago, even did an interview with Sitepoint.
Andrei’s talk also prompts me to confession: I’m not qualified to tell you about the theory behind regular expressions (if you’re interested, start here and Google for more – or annoy these guys) – I’m coming from a practical perspective so while these blogs will (hopefully) help you discover regexes as a useful tool, don’t expect to find out how to to write your own regex engine.
Another read, specific to escaping regular expressions and the types of security holes you might fall into with preg_replace(), is …
SitePoint at Web Directions South
Hotel and flights: check. Sound equipment: check. Giant posters: check. PowerPoint slides: check. Drink cards: check. XBox 360 winner selection tool: check.
The SitePoint contingent for Web Directions South wings its way to Sydney today. Just like last year, you can expect a pile of blog posts covering the event to hit SitePoint over the next few days.
If you’re at the conference, be sure to say “hi!”, not only because our pockets will be lined with drink cards for the closing party on Friday night, but because SitePoint is looking to hire. We’re after fans of web technology to supplement our editorial team, and a conference like Web Directions is a perfect opportunity for a recruiting push.
So for those of you in the neighbourhood, see you in Sydney. For everyone else, well, maybe we’ll see you in Vancouver instead!
The Joy of Regular Expressions [2]
So continuing the fun started here…
Contents
Part 2
First a quick summary of what we covered in part one;
- Expression delimiters e.g. /yes/ or %yes%
- Pattern modifier syntax e.g. /yes/i
- Meta characters…
- Start and end assertions: ^ and $ e.g. /^yes$/
- Length Quantifiers which apply to the preceding character in the pattern:
-
…
The Joy of Regular Expressions [1]
Was asked recently if I knew of any good regular expressions tutorials (preferably in PHP). The question came from someone certainly smart enough to “get” regular expressions but they’d been unable to find accessible help.
Most regular expression tutorials I’ve seen are organised around teaching the syntax incrementally, which can quickly lead to mental overload. Examples commonly revolve around strings like ‘aaabbababa’…” – great if you’re writing a web crawler for Swedish pop, but confusing for anyone else. And while there are copy and paste regular expressions on-line, if you don’t know what you’re doing, using them can be worse than not at all. Do they meet your needs? Whoops! Mind the security hole…
So going to take a crack at Yet Another Regular Expressions tutorial, with a focus on doing (in PHP) while slowly introducing you to regexp (shorthand for regular expression) syntax. This is going to span a few blog posts (will keep the contents below updated) and get progressively “more interesting” – not all for beginners but if you keep up, hopefully you’ll be able to grasp it. And although it’s “Regexes and PHP”, the regex syntax I’ll be using is largely portable to other programming languages.
Contents
Part …
Photoshop CS2 Tips, Trick and Hacks for the Web
As you may have already noticed either on the site (or at your local respectable book merchants) our first full-color book has just hit the shelves — Corrie Haffly’s The Photoshop Anthology.
We put our first grubby finger marks over a hard copy late last week and it’s pretty impressive — big (8′x10′) (8″x10″), glossy and colorful (6 color process on the cover!). If the majority of your Photoshop sweat ends up online, this may well be the best value CS2 book you’ll ever own.
Personally I currently own 3 Photoshop books (a WOW book, a CS2 Bible and an ancient Visual Quickstart Guide) and they’ve all been pretty useful during their time. However it would be fair to say they are all pretty broad in their coverage, meaning there are whole sections of each book that I ignored. In short, in most books ‘Photoshop for the Web’ is the title of a chapter– not the book.
Interestingly, before this book was released it was been easier to find one that focussed entirely on using LAB color in Photoshop, than it has been to find one that focussed on web development. Weird.
Anyway Corrie …
Sep 20, 2006 News Wire
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DTrace Meets JavaScript
DTrace is a slick and powerful profiling tool currently limited to the Solaris platform, but rumored to be coming to an operating system near you. This alpha provider hooks into Firefox’s JavaScript engine. Push past the intro and check out the examples.
(tags: javascript firefox) -
Top 100 Network Security Tools
An up-to-date list of the top 100 network security tools, as voted by the nmap-hackers security list.
(tags: security software network) -
Python 2.5 Release
A major new release of the Python language, 2.5 contains plenty of bug fixes, speed boosts, and even new language features.
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10 things you (probably) didn’t know about PHP
A few obvious items in this list, but a number of gems too. Even PHP experts should take a quick look—there might just be a valuable feature or two you didn’t know about!
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Threading in C#
A free e-book that covers exactly what it says. A great introduction to a topic too-often ignored by ASP.NET developers.
(tags: asp.net .net programming) -
Tip/Trick: Using IIS7 on Vista with VS 2005
If you’re playing with Windows Vista RC1 as I am and …
Sep 18, 2006 News Wire
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It’s Time To Kill Off Transitional DOCTYPES
Web accessibility experts accessites.org calls for web developers to give up their dependance on Transitional DOCTYPEs. There really is no reason to still be using them.
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Dramatically improved IE7 JavaScript performance
Sebastian Werner, developer of the qooxdoo JavaScript GUI framework, has noted a huge increase in JavaScript performance in IE7 compared to IE6. Microsoft has apparently fixed a performance issue that occurred with a large number of objects in scope.
(tags: ie javascript) -
slGrid, Ajax-Based PHP Grid Component
An AJAX component written in PHP for displaying database records (or other tabular data) in a paged, sortable, editable view. slGrid is open source under GPL and is also available under a commercial license.
(tags: ajax php opensource) -
Back Button Support for Atlas UpdatePanels
This component is for use with Microsoft’s Atlas toolkit for AJAX, and enables the back/forward button to track AJAX application state, including (for example) partial page updates produced using the Atlas UpdatePanel component.
(tags: asp.net ajax) -
Subversion 1.4
This update to the popular version control system introduces new support for mirroring repositories, and a great many performance improvements and …
Roll your own dispatch reaper script
If you haven’t used it before, the reaper script is useful for restarting your Rails application’s FastCGI dispatchers.
It’s seems the reaper script in Edge rails now relies on the existance of PID files in the tmp/pids directory. If you want to replicate the old functionality, create your own ruby script and override the capistrano restart task to call your own script instead of the standard script/reaper.
The reaper script for one of my apps is simply:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
for process in `ps axwwl`.grep(/dispatch\.fcgi/).collect { |s| s.split[1] }
puts “Sending USR2 to dispatch.fcgi process #{process}”
Process.kill(”USR2″, process.to_i)
end
The above code is in script/my_reaper and is called from the Capistrano deployment recipe as below:
task :restart, :roles => :app do
run “ruby #{deploy_to}/current/script/process/my_reaper”
end
