For many years I used a code editor that is now discontinued by its developers, and the introduction of HTML5 and CSS3 led me to look for an editor that supports the new tags and properties. In this article I’ll share the criteria and process I used to find an editor suitable for making quick fixes and a development environment for large-scale projects. My initial candidate list contained over 30 popular Linux, Java, Windows and XUL software packages which had at least one stable release after January 1, 2010: Arachnophilia, Bluefish, Bluegriffon, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, Dreamweaver, Eclipse PDT, Emacs, Expression Web, Geany, gedit, HTML-Kit, jEdit, Kate, KDevelop, Komodo Edit, KWrite, Netbeans, Notepad++, Notepad2, OpenBEXI, PHPEdit, PHPEd Pro, PHPStorm, Programmer’s Notepad, PSPad, RadPHP, Scite, SeaMonkey, Vim, WebDev, WebMatrix, and Zend Studio. You can google each program for their specific details

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PHPMaster: How I Chose My Programming Editor

It was such a cliche of a title, I just had to use it. I’m sure you have heard of the great BDD tool Cucumber , but what you may not know about is how smelly cukes can be. I have recently been revising and refactoring my cucumber features in absolute disgust. In my defense, I started writing cucumber in earnest 6-7 months ago

See more here:
RubySource: Smelly Cucumbers

If you’re serious about web development, you strive for a fast website.  Nothing beats the feeling of sitting back and viewing a great website that’s fast.  Speed matters.  Your customers expect it.  If you don’t think they do, you’re living in a different world to mine.  With a growing trend of consumers buying online in 2011, developers have to cope with the extra devices customers will use to browse your website.

There are many ways to increase the performance of a website, but the way with the biggest impact by far is to decrease the number of HTTP requests.  Every time you reference an image, CSS file, JavaScript file, video, audio or a flash file, that adds an extra HTTP request.  That is time that could be used elsewhere, such as taking customer orders!

One way of reducing the number of HTTP requests is to combine the files.  If you have three style sheets sitting in your web page, that’s three separate HTTP requests.  Combining them into one file means there’s only one HTTP request.

You can take this one step further and add minification to this process.  Minification is the process of stripping out all of the white-space and comments from your CSS and JavaScript files.

If you’re familiar with ASP.NET, bundling and minification was always a job for your build process.  With the advent of Visual Studio 2011 and ASP.NET 4.5, Microsoft has added bundling and minification out of the box, which in my opinion has been long overdue.  This process happens at run-time and is available to ASP.NET WinForms, MVC and Web Pages.

Installation

Before starting any development, you’ll need to install ASP.NET 4.5.  The simplest way to do this is via the Web Platform Installer.  All of the ASP.NET 4.5 articles I’m authoring are developed in Visual Studio 2011 Developer Preview. Below are the links to get started.

• ASP.NET MVC 4 for Visual Studio 2010
• ASP.NET MVC 4 for Visual Studio 2011 Developer Preview

Why Do This?

The answer is simple; to reduce the number of HTTP requests that go between the client and server.  The result is a faster website.  By default when you create a new MVC 4 website, the following JavaScript files are loaded into the page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="../../Scripts/jquery-1.6.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../../Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.11.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../../Scripts/modernizr-2.0.6-development-only.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../../Scripts/AjaxLogin.js"></script>

Looking at this through Chrome you can see the 4 separate HTTP requests.

We can do better that that! After you bundle it, you’ll see one request.

Where’s the Magic?

The magic happens at runtime in ASP.NET 4.5.  Instead of referencing each JavaScript file separately, you can replace them all with this:

<script src="scripts/js"></script>

And you can also bundle and minify your CSS files too by adding this line of code:

<link href="content/css" rel="stylesheet" />

This is assuming you have your JavaScript files in a folder called scripts, and your style sheets are in a folder called content.  This is configurable, of course – as you’ll soon see.

Before this will work, you need to add one line of code to the global.asax file in the Application Start event.

Bundle.Bundles.EnableDefaultBundles();

The need for this line of code will be removed when ASP.NET 4.5 is released.  When the website is running, if ASP.NET encounters either of these tags, it will automatically bundle and minify each file in the given folder and send back a single HTTP response for the JavaScript file and a single response for the CSS.  Out of the box you don’t need to do anything else.  This is a welcome feature.

By default, when the files are bundled by ASP.NET they are in alphabetical order.  If there are known libraries such as jQuery, jQuery UI and Dojo, they are loaded first.  For the CSS files, they are also bundled in alphabetical order.  The results can be seen in the image below.

Custom Rules

If the default bundling rules don’t give you the control that you need, you can always create your own bundling rules.  A common reason for doing this is to group common libraries.  There aren’t too many occasions when you need to bundle your entire JavaScript or CSS files into the one file.  To create a custom rule you create a new Bundle object.  Then you add files individually or an entire directory.

var jSBundle = new Bundle("~/CustomJs", typeof(JsMinify));
jSBundle.AddFile("~/Scripts/CustomFunction.js");
jSBundle.AddFile("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.1-vsdoc.js");
jSBundle.AddFile("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.js");
jSBundle.AddFile("~/Scripts/JSONCreate.js");

Notice the type JsMinify above?  That’s the default object that bundles and minifies the JavaScript files.  For CSS, you use CssMinify like the example below.

var cssBundle = new Bundle("~/CustomCss", typeof(CssMinify));
cssBundle.AddFile("~/Content/Collection.css");
cssBundle.AddFile("~/Content/GlobalSupport.css");
cssBundle.AddFile("~/Content/MasterStyle.css");
cssBundle.AddFile("~/Styles/MenuStyle.css");

To reference these custom rules, you put the name of each bundle in your HTML.

<script src="CustomJs"></script> or <link href="CustomCss" rel="stylesheet" />

Custom Processing

If you want total control, you can override the default CSS and JavaScript bundling support and replace it with a custom process.  An easy way to do this is to create a class that implements the IBundleTransform interface.  The following example is trivial but it demonstrates how to do this.  The example inserts a company copyright into each JavaScript files and sets the default cache for the file.

public class AddCopyrightToFiles : IBundleTransform
{
    public void Process(BundleResponse bundle)
    {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        sb.AppendLine("// Copyright your company");
        sb.AppendLine(bundle.Content);
        bundle.Content = sb.ToString();
        bundle.Cacheability = HttpCacheability.ServerAndNoCache;
    }
}

And to use this custom process, create a new Bundle and reference the custom class.

BundleTable.Bundles.EnableDefaultBundles();
Bundle customBundle = new Bundle("~/CustomBundle", typeof(AddCopyrightToFiles));
customBundle.AddFile("~/Scripts/CustomTypes.js");
BundleTable.Bundles.Add(customBundle);

And in the HTML, just reference the bundle by its name.

<script src="CustomBundle"></script>

Unbundle JavaScript Files

It’s worth noting that there are services that will unbundle your files, or beautify them.  The one I love to use is jsbeautifier.  This flattens the file.  One of the biggest drawbacks of bundling and minification is readability.

Web applications usually follow a synchronous communication model. However, non-interactive and long-running tasks (such as report generation) are better suited for asynchronous execution. One way to off-load tasks to run at a later time, or even on a different server, is use the Job Queue module available as a part of Zend Server 5 (though not as part of the Community Edition). Job Queue allows job scheduling based on time, priority, and even dependencies.

See the article here:
PHPMaster: Zend Job Queue

If you’ve ever tried to read code written by someone other than yourself (who hasn’t?), you know it can be a daunting task. A jumble of “spaghetti code” mixed with numerous oddly named variables makes your head spin. Does this function expect a string or an array? Does this variable store an integer or an object?

Taken from:
PHPMaster: Introduction to PhpDoc

Ok, so you’re pretty comfortable with using the Zend Framework, specifically the use of Forms. Along with that, you have a good working knowledge of how to combine a host of standard validators such as CreditCard , EmailAddress , Db_RecordExists , and Hex , and standard filters such as Compress/Decompress , BaseName , Encrypt , and RealPath . But what do you do when a situation arises that’s outside the scope of the pre-packaged validators and filters? Let’s say you want to guard against users uploading files that contain viruses, for example.

More here:
PHPMaster: ClamAV as a Validation Filter in Zend Framework

CloudSpring: Apparently 90% of the data in the world was produced in the last two years – which should give you some idea of just exactly how much data is being accumulated the world around, especially by large companies like Google. The data field is so enormous that traditional methods of linking, searching and retrieving data don’t work any more. This is Big Data. Big Data The term “Big Data” was popularized by Roger Magoulas from O’Reilly in 2005, although avid net trawlers have found evidence of the term being used occasionally as far back as 2001

Continued here:
Hadoop 1.0 Release – Big Data for everyone

Chef is billed as “A systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure”. It doesn’t matter how many times I read that, I still hear a ‘whoosh’ over my head. Put simply, we can manage server configurations through good old familiar Ruby. The gist of Chef is we create cookbooks, these cookbooks use the Chef DSL to install and configure packages we require for our servers

Read the article:
RubySource: Cooking with Chef Solo

Imagine a friend of yours approaches you one day and would like you to build her a website so she can showcase her photography. She wants to be able to easily upload her photographs and have them watermarked so that people can’t easily steal them. “Don’t worry!” you tell her, because you know there are functions provided by the Imagick extension that makes watermarking images a breeze in PHP. This article shares a few pointers on what makes an effective watermark, and then shows you how to use the Imagick functions to add a watermark to your image.

See the article here:
PHPMaster: Watermarking Images

Sometimes the idea for an article strikes me out-of-the-blue, like a lightning bolt or an airborne toxin. The quality of these sudden onset ideas varies greatly, and it usually directly proportional with the number of beers I’ve had pre-idea strike. My most recent attack hit me in bed as I was drifting off. It said: “Write a post about Ruby resolutions for the new year.

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RubySource: Rubylutions for 2012

Session are a tool which helps the web programmer overcome the stateless nature of the internet. You can use them to build shopping carts, monitor visits to a website, and even track how a user navigates through your application. PHP’s default session handling behavior can provide all you need in most cases, but there may be times when you want to expand the functionality and store session data differently.

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PHPMaster: Writing Custom Session Handlers

PHP’s default session handling behavior provides all you need in most cases, but there may be times when you want to expand the functionality and store session data differently.

Follow this link:
PHPMaster: Writing Custom Session Handlers

Integrating with Facebook from PHP is easy with the help of Facebook’s PHP SDK and some HTTP libraries like Zend_Http_Client or PEAR HTTP_Request2. In this article I’ll show you how to get started using the Facebook PHP SDK. You’ll learn about the Facebook Graph API and create a Facebook application capable of updating your status message and uploading photos. If you don’t have it already, you can clone or download the PHP SDK from Github

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PHPMaster: Integrating with Facebook

Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage solution is useful for many things, and serves as the CDN for many major websites. But despite the portfolio of high-profile use cases for the service, it’s still just as handy for personal conveniences, like backing up your data. In this post, we look at five useful Amazon S3 backup tools. S3 Backup “S3 Backup is the most reliable, fast and simple to use solution around for keeping your data backed up online but still safe and encrypted.

See the original article here:
5 Useful Amazon S3 Backup Tools