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Blogs » Archive for October, 2007
Are You Ready to Scale?
The growth of a typical web site might look a little like something this:
You build the first version of your site and deploy it into a shared hosting environment (Dreamhost, etc). All is well.
You need to build more features for your growing customer base. Performance and uptime are also concerns, so you move your site to a dedicated server. Freedom in a box!
More customers. They want more features and they want them right now! How do you cope with the load? You put your database onto it’s own dedicated server. We can breath again.
So here we are with the traditional 2 server 2 tier backend. One server is responsible for generating and serving web pages, the other server is responsible for storing data. Here are some of the problems you may be fortunate enough to encounter when running on a setup like this:
- Availability: You now have 2 points of failure. If either your web server or database server dies you are …
World Usability Day 2007
World Usability Day is an international, annual event that will be held on November 8th this year with the theme of Health.
The main goal of the event is to promote and encourage usability in the wider community and will be held at various locations world wide .
Last year 40,000 people in 35 countries in 175 cities around the world participated in World Usability Day. This year marks the events 3rd anniversary.
– Sydney UPA
If you’re interested in hearing about what’s going on in your city, have a look on line and think about attending an event if you can. Some events have sessions running all day, which makes it much easier to attend even some of the presentations.
While my focus is always on web usability, the World Usability Day event will look at a usability in a wide array of settings. For example, Melbourne’s event will be touring the learning facility of St Vincents hospital.
If you’re in London, 15 free places are available in a 1 day course offering an Introduction to User Centred Design.
Of course, there are dozens of events going on world wide, so have a look …
Why Accessibility? Because It’s Our Job!
I go through phases of complacency and disbelief when thinking about web accessibility.
Working at SitePoint HQ, I’m fairly lucky in that everybody here is on the same page when it comes to accessibility; we spend time making sure our sites are accessible, that our applications degrade gracefully, that our JavaScript doesn’t create barriers for screenreader users. We do this ad-hoc, without even a firm sense of whether our target demographic ultimately requires it. And for no reason other than it’s our job. In the books, articles and other content we publish, best practice is right at the top of the priorities list.
But not everyone in our community agrees, as the original forum thread over the Target case and the recent catfight on TechCrunch illustrated. And I think that’s pretty sad — not because these folks are disagreeing per se (I’d rather see healthy debate than tacit compliance), but because so many of the anti-accessibility arguments are ignorant rhetoric, which cloud the issue and make useful discussion harder for everyone. They generally follow a familiar pattern, taking a peculiarly American line in favour of market forces determining everything, and criticizing any idealistic intentions as political-correctness gone mad.
Whatever. I’m not …
Ruby on Rails: The art of simplicity
Hi there, my name is Myles Eftos and I’m your new Ruby on Rails blogger! I’ve been hacking rails for almost two years now, building a number of online apps, such as my time tracking system: 88 Miles. I am constantly pushing for that Rails-zen state, that harmonious balance between simply beautiful code and powerful functionality.
For those of you yet to be bitten by the Rails bug, it is as close to web development heaven you are going to get (Yes, I’m a bit of a Rails-fan boy – you have been warned). I have worked professionally on just about every web platform out there, and Rails is by far my favourite – things that take hours in PHP take minutes in Rails. The completely self-contained development environment, built in database migrations and deployment system means that you can get a Rails application out the door before some of the other guys have finished setting up their XML configuration files.
The soon-to-be released version 2.0 of Ruby on Rails will once again re-enforce the simplicity and power of the framework with a number of improvements that will make the lives of the humble web developer just that …
ColdFusion myth-busting
I’d like to introduce myself: my name is Kay Smoljak and I’m a ColdFusion developer. I’m going to be posting here from time to time on topics related to my development language of choice.
I’ve been coding in CF for a while now. I started way back in 1999 – the version 4 days – when Netscape Navigator 4 ruled the web, PHP was at version 3 and the dot com bubble was just starting to get interesting.
Things certainly have changed since that time. Over the course of four versions and a complete rewrite in Java, Allaire ColdFusion became Macromedia ColdFusion and then found a new home at Adobe. What hasn’t changed is that CF is still not well-known in the general web development community, and a lot of misinformation regularly makes the rounds of both individuals’ blogs and large tech publications.
So, I’m going to be doing what I can to dispel those nasty myths (number one: no, ColdFusion is not dead!) and highlight some of the cool things that are happening in the ColdFusion community. There’s certainly a lot to cover: from frameworks to open source projects, from built-in features like reporting, image manipulation and Ajax controls to third …
Over One Terabyte of FREE PDFs!
Our hugely popular Ruby On Rails free PDF giveaway has resulted in us serving up over 1 terabyte of free PDF files!
Since the initial announcement that our beginner’s Rails book, Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications, by Patrick Lenz, would be made available in its entirety in PDF form for FREE, close to 50,000 people have downloaded the book.
Normally retailing for USD $29.95, the book has been completely updated with all reported errata, and includes an entire new section on debugging Rails apps using the ruby-debug tool.
Due to the large number of simultaneous requests, several people experienced problems downloading the book in the first couple of days. We immediately moved the file to Amazon’s S3, which handled the enormous load much more gracefully.
If you were one of these people, please try again now — this amazing offer is only good until mid-November!
CSS Positioning: Three Specs Better than One?
One of the areas in which CSS 3 will introduce a lot of new features is page layout. This is widely considered to be a good thing. But with the W3C having just announced that there will be two separate modules for page layout in CSS 3, the standards may be asking too much of browser developers.
Rewarding as it may be to bend CSS’s positioning features to your will, I think we can all agree that CSS 2 was not designed with three-column layouts in mind. Floats and negative margins can get the job done, but they certainly put up a fight.
Introduced by the W3C as a working draft in December 2005, there’s no denying the CSS Advanced Layout module is way better than what we have now, but the apparent lack of interest from browser vendors in implementing this module suggests it might be on the wrong track. Following the release of the latest working draft in August, SitePen’s Alex Russell had some harsh criticism:
I’m not even sure if the “Advanced” Layouts [module] should be mentioned for the fear that more people might actually …
Microsoft is finally adapting
Let me start of by saying that I’m a proponent of a lot of the development tools that Microsoft makes. Some might go so far as calling me a Microsoft fanboy in some cases. However, my feelings toward Microsoft technology is far from blind about it’s shortcomings. I’ve spent hours getting my CSS layouts to look right in IE, banged my head against the wall debugging cryptic .NET error messages and have accepted the fact that my Treo needs to be reset at least once a month.
Fortunately, Microsoft has been making some changes lately; not just in their technology, but also in their approach to technology. The longevity of IE6 was a testament to how slow Microsoft moves, but over the last year they’ve started talking about being more agile and getting rid of the 2 year delays and slow release schedules. Some of these new approaches have actually started to show between the MIX conference earlier this year and the reMIX Boston conference held earlier this week. Some of the changes were subtle, some were more significant, but each showed that Microsoft is responding more quickly to developer input.
The first big area that Microsoft changed between the 2 conferences …
IE 7 Update for Pirated Windows Users
The Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog has announced that the latest update to Internet Explorer 7 will drop the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation step from the installer. Although the announcement stops just shy of saying it, the real effect of this move is to allow people running pirated versions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to get the IE7 upgrade.
When Microsoft first released IE 7 one year ago next week, they made it a “forced” update for Windows XP, in the hopes that this would help get more people onto the new browser. For Microsoft, this would help get more people onto the more secure IE 7 platform in a hurry. For web developers, this would get more users onto the more standards-compliant IE 7 rendering engine.
How successful has this been? Well, let’s look at the browser stats for sitepoint.com. As you’d expect, there is a high percentage of Firefox users (48%) in the site’s audience, reflecting the number of web developers that use it as their primary browser. Nevertheless, Internet Explorer is still responsible for 43% of the visits to sitepoint.com in the past month.
Do less
So I got persuaded into blogging for Sitepoint and this is my first post. I’ll be writing mostly about PHP, since that’s my main area of competence, but will probably touch on related topics.
Anyway, in an attempt to not turn this into yet another “Hello World”, I figured I would reflect a bit on what’s special about PHP.
PHP doesn’t do stuff
It basically boils down to one thing; PHP doesn’t do stuff for you.
Taking a look at the hordes of extensions, which comes with PHP by default — or the overwhelming array of core functions — it may appear that PHP does an awful lot of things, but it doesn’t. Not really. This functionality is mostly passive; When you look at the language core, it makes very few assumptions about the application, you’re going to build. Instead, it supplies the tools to do so.
This is the tradition of open source. Linux is renowned for having a multitude of desktop environments, shell interpreters and whatnot. PHP follows the same organisation. It does have a one pivot point though; The language itself has only one official implementation. Well, two actually, but that’s hopefully going to be …
