Programming on Justin Carmony

Happy Birthday PHP

Mon, 08 Jun 2015 18:07:33 +0000

Whew, it has been a busy day.

Today I saw so many of my friends posting their thoughts on PHP and it’s 20th birthday. It is pretty incredible how far it has come, and how much of the web it powers. I wish I had more time to post my history with PHP, my first websites, my first security vulnerabilities, my first successes, and failures, etc.

But alas, it has been a very busy day. I woke up and went to work at a job I absolutely love. I then came home to my family in our wonderful home and made forts with our 2-year-old son. Then to wrap up the evening I worked on some PHP code for a project at work that we’re demoing tomorrow. It went by really quick.

Webpack, React, and Multiple Versions Issues

Thu, 02 Apr 2015 18:10:21 +0000

I’ve been using React successfully for several projects, and tonight I ran into a problem I hadn’t experienced before. I was trying both react-d3and react-d3-components when I would get an error on rendering:

Uncaught TypeError: Can't add property context, object is not extensible

This error had a very, very deep stack trace far into the depths of React, and I was worried I had encountered a nasty React bug. After some poking around & googling, I discovered that multiple versions of React do not play nicely with each other, at all. When I had installed both those react component libraries, each installed their own version of React, version 0.12. I was using React version 0.13.

Thoughts on Learning React & Flux

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 18:15:25 +0000

I started to write a blog post detailing everything I’ve learned over the last few months building applications with React & Flux. After writing down about 10% of it, I realized it was becoming far too long. So, instead, I’ll be doing a series of posts over the next few weeks.

Over the last two months, interest in React has had a surge of interest. If you look at the search term reactjs over the last 12 months:

X-Requested-With, AJAX Requests, and Android WebViews

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 18:20:17 +0000

Today we ran into an interesting problem with certain pages of our website not loading for Android users inside their Facebook Apps. We dug down and ran into several red herrings, but ultimately found the problem.

The Problem

If you Google for “X-Requested-With”, or the $_SERVER variable name in PHP HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH you will likely find many posts stating that it is a method for detecting AJAX requests. Most major JavaScript libraries and/or frameworks like jQuery will set the X-Requested-With HTTP header for any AJAX requests. So if you Google X-Requested-With or HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH you will see blog posts & StackOverflow answers about detecting AJAX requests.

SSH Key Forwarding & Sudo

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 21:43:28 +0000

Lately I’ve been really liking using SSH Key Forwarding to let a server I’m SSH’d into authorize against my key. Most of the time it is so I can pull private git repositories on a server. The problem is when I use sudo I lose my current environment variables. Thanks to ServerFault, I found a great work-around where sudo can forward the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable. You can do this by using visudo to add the following line:

Restarting VirtualBox on Mavericks

Fri, 08 Nov 2013 12:07:05 +0000

Occasionally when rebooting my machine, VirtualBox would fail to start up correctly. They changed the command to restart it once moving to OS X Mavericks, so I’m just recording here the new command:

sudo /Library/Application Support/VirtualBox/LaunchDaemons/VirtualBoxStartup.sh restart

I made a command in my local ~/bin/ directly called ~/bin/virtualbox_restart so I could easily restart if needed.

The Catalyst for Agile Development: Sprint Retrospective

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 23:24:58 +0000

By now, everyone in software has heard of agile software development, and for the most part about scrum. Almost everyone, at some point, has worked on a team who has done agile with varying degrees of success. About half the companies I know have, quite frankly, implemented agile completely wrong and it has made their process even worse. The other half have used it with some varying degrees of success, but rarely to the degree as the “mythical teams” whose productivity elevated to a whole new level.

PHP Live Regex

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 18:41:03 +0000

Here is a useful website for evaluating regular expressions for PHP and testing them out live.

http://www.phpliveregex.com/

Personal Post - Infertility

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 06:32:41 +0000

Thursday morning at 12:36 AM, Joanna’s water broke. Eleven hours later, Marshall, our first son was born. It was an amazing experience. I’ll likely be posting in the future about the wonderful, and truly humbling, experience of becoming a father. However, I want to talk about something very different.

One year ago, Joanna and I were in a very different state. We were struggling with infertility. We were undergoing tests after tests, trying to diagnose why we were unable to get pregnant after trying for two years. While no diagnosis had been found for our infertility, Joanna was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. We struggled month after month of trying with no solution in sight. It was completely humbling as our life plans and hopes were slipping through our fingers and I could do absolutely nothing to “fix it.” We watched as dozens of friends, family, and neighbors got pregnant, gave birth to their babies, and lived a dream we thought we might never have. It was a very serious personal trial for my wife and I, one which can still bring tears when we look back, even though we’re “passed it” now.

Vagrant & PHP: Our Success Story At The Deseret News

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 20:36:11 +0000

The simple world of LAMP is fading fast into the distance. When I first started developing websites, you’d just drop your PHP code in a document root, configure it to connect to a mysql database, and that was it.

Now-a-days, you have frameworks that need to be setup, include paths that need to be changed, modules that need to be installed, web servers that need to be configured for your routing, etc. Then you might not just have MySQL, but Redis, Mongo, Couch, Memcached, Postgres, or any other dozen other servers. Then in Production you might have load balancers, multiple web servers, clusters of databases, and the list goes on.

Refactoring or Rebuilding: Working with Legacy Code

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:08:43 +0000

Everyone has some form of Legacy code, and at my new job we have plenty of it. The Deseret News has been around in paper format since 1850, and has had a web presence since 1996. I can still find parts of our codebase for running with Sybase and Vignette. Fortunately, most of the code we work with is much more modern using the latest PHP with an in-house MVC framework. However, there is still one big piece written in a less than ideal system. Its still PHP, but much more hacked together. It is our backend CMS system for controlling the website. It is painful to use, and we get many complaints all the time about it. When I joined the company three months ago, I was told we were going to completely rewrite it. Three months later, the “rewrite” of the CMS is still ages away and we’re continuing to hack to support requested changes.

PHP Tek 12 Recap

Tue, 29 May 2012 23:34:40 +0000

I started writing this on the plane on my three hour flight back to Salt Lake City. I have to say that php|tek 12 this year was very excellent. It was great to catch up with many people, and meet so many more. This was my first year as a speaker, which was a lot of work, but very worth it. I’m hoping to be able to speak again in the up coming years.

PHP-FPM, Nginx, PHP_VALUE, and Multiple Values

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 05:34:57 +0000

Quick little post on a problem I had while trying to use XHGui with my Nginx/PHP-FPM setup. I needed to be able to pass the auto_prepend_file and auto_append_file settings to PHP-FPM from Nginx. In apache you can declare multiple php_value settings. However, when I did the same in nginx, it would only reflect the second setting. Turns out you need to set all of your php_value’s in Nginx in a single string, and you separate them by new line characters. Here is how it should look:

PHP, Sessions, __sleep, and Exceptions

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:48:43 +0000

Today I ran into a problem where my PHP Application would throw this fatal error:

Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0

Which is so much fun, because it doesn’t have a line number, so I had no direction as to what exactly was causing the problem. Some quick googling came up with this website stating the following error:

Most often, the error will appear if you use an exception handler combined with an error reporting to exception handler by converting it to an ErrorException, then there a suddenly a whole new magnitude of ways to throw errors within the exception handle, especially if E_NOTICE, E_STRICT and/or E_WARNING errors are converted. This form most often occurs when you use variables without first initializing them. This error may be preventable by wrapping the exception handler within a try/catch block.

Making a Distributed Workforce Work

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:30:16 +0000

I’ve been mulling over this blog post in my mind for quite awhile. I’ve been working exclusively for distributed companies since 2008. Also know as telecommuting and virtual workforce, it basically is when you have employees working for you regardless of location. Whether it is home, a co-working space, or another office space they prefer, its when an employee can work for a company other then the office.

I’ve met and talked with several companies that have had a great success with this approach. Toni Schneider, CEO at Automattic, has written about the 5 reasons why your company should be distributed.

SMS Nagios Notifications with PHP & Twilio

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:12:14 +0000

I’ve had a few requests to share my Nagios SMS notifications using Twilio. I’m almost embarrassed to share them, since they are so dead simple. There was another plugin out there to do the same, but it was a lot more advanced and more work to setup, so I wrote my own in PHP.

In the past I would just use my iPhone’s email-to-txt email address. However, when I received the txt message, it wasn’t formated very pretty, and it would have a different “From Number.” So if we had a crazy day, I would have 20-30 message threads in my iPhone all about Nagios. I’ve been lazy in the past, and didn’t clear them out until I had about 200 of them, and it was a lot of “swipe, delete, swipe, delete, swipe, delete” to get rid of them.

PHP Workers with Redis & Solo

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:20:10 +0000

I’ve come across an awesome combination of tools for managing PHP Workers, and thought I’d share.

Why Workers?

Sometimes there are situations when you want to parallel process things. Other times you might have a list of tasks to accomplish, and you don’t want to make the user wait after pressing a button. This is where “Workers” can come in. They are independent scripts that run along side of your application, performing tasks, or “jobs.”

Siege with User Authentication

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:33:02 +0000

If you want to stress test your application, the quickest and best way to do so is with siege. From the siege website:

Siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It lets its user hit a web server with a configurable number of simulated web browsers. Those browsers place the server “under siege.”

Mac OS X Lion, /etc/hosts Bugs, and DNS Resolution

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 22:21:00 +0000

Final Update: I’m working on a follow-up post, but thanks to all the comments, it seems that somehow during the Snow Leopard to Lion upgrade, the /etc/hosts file was encoded incorrectly (likely the type of newlines used), and that Lion would fail to read it properly. Please try to copy the contents of the /etc/hosts file, recreate the file, and paste to fix your problem.

Update: I was still having problems with using .local for my development sites. After some extensive debugging and research I’ve found out some interesting things. It appears that Multicast DNS (mDNS), which is used in Apple’s Bonjuor for network discovery without a tradition DNS Server, has the Top Level Domain .local reserved for special mDNS functionality. Mac OS X will treat domains ending with .local differently! Use another TLD, like .dev, and it will work correctly.

Node.js, Evented I/O, and a Cup of Tea

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:30:42 +0000

All Arthur Dent really wanted was a cup of tea.

I was reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, and I found a humorous example of event driven programming. So I thought I would share.

The Story

Arthur Dent was one of the last surviving humans after Earth had been destroyed to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. He was living on a spaceship known as the “Heart of Gold,” which onboard had an amazing piece of equipment called the “Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer” which “claimed to produce the widest possible range of drinks personally matched to the tastes and metabolism of whoever cared to use it.”

Simple Trick: History Command

Tue, 31 May 2011 21:05:08 +0000

So today I quickly installed Redis on a server, and I wanted to keep a copy of all the commands I had used to do so. I knew there was a better way than hitting the up arrow each time to copy and paste each command in reverse order. So after some Googling, I found out about the history command. So I was able to type the command “history” and it showed me the last two thousand or so commands I had used. I was able to copy and paste that into a wiki, and was good to go. You could also search your history by piping the history command to grep. Cool stuff I don’t want to forget.

Mac OS X & Wireshark - No Interfaces Found Fix

Thu, 12 May 2011 18:58:57 +0000

Alright, quick fix for a problem I always forget. When running Wireshark on OS X, when I go to select an interface to capture on, I get an error telling me there are no available interfaces to capture on. This is because Wireshark is running as a user that doesn’t have ownership on these interfaces.

Solution, open up the terminal and run the command:

sudo chown <username> /dev/bpf*

After a reboot, these permissions get reset, so you need to do it after each reset (and hence why I need this every now and then but can never remember the command).

Node.JS, LAMP, and The Future

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 23:35:37 +0000

I just read an article about “Node.JS and the JavaScript Age.” It was from a very “enthusiastic” point of view. My guess is they had tinkered around with Node.JS and using with client-side JavaScript rebuilding their Dashboard. You can do some pretty cool stuff with it, and it has a lot of potential. It is very easy to install and get going, much like Redis. Here ia an excerpt from the article:

First PHP Project - Tournament Brackets

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:47:01 +0000

I mentioned on my twitter account that my very first project in PHP is used in production today, and I had a few people ask me what it was. So I thought I would show some examples of it in action. While I had done other things in PHP, this was the first time I had sat down and built someone by myself instead of just modifying someone else’s code. I built it for the very first time back in 2005, and since then have had to update it a few times. But it is still used regularly to host CEVO’s tournaments.

PHP Itch to Scratch: Object Notation

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 07:07:16 +0000

Marco Tabini, co-founder of php|architect and Blue Palabora, posed an interesting topic: Is PHP running out of itches to scratch?

I think it’s fair to say that the pace at which PHP core is being developed has slowed down considerably over the past couple of years, while the development of many projects based on it, like programming and application frameworks, has sped up and continues to grow at a fast pace.

He goes on to point out some of the reasons for the slow down of development for the PHP Core. But at the end, he states it ultimately boils down to find a better way to bring features build downstream back upstream.

Analogy for Moving From SVN to Git

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 23:12:44 +0000

Today as I was talking with a friend about Git and when or not we should switch a repository from SVN to Git, I thought up a pretty good analogy. So I thought I would share this to those who are looking to learn Git, and hopefully put them in the right mindset.

The Goal

Ultimately, when people talk about Source Control, they have the same concepts in mind. I want to be able to easily update my source control, collaborate with others, and have a history of changes that I can review and use to make other changes. So for our Analogy, these basic concepts, we’re going to call Getting from point A to point B.

How I Became a Web Developer & CTO

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:57:56 +0000

Note: many of the screenshots of websites I had done in the past are from the Internet Archive and many of the images are missing. But it can give an idea on the projects I had worked on. One day I’ll try and track down the original files and update the screenshots.

Today some memories came from when I first started with web development. So before I forget anymore of the details, I thought I would share my unique way I became a web developer. I never went to school to learn Computer Science or Information Systems. I’ve had a total of 2 programming classes, which were my in sophomore and junior years of High School, one of which we lovingly nicknamed Warcraft 101, because we would spend the entire time getting out butts kicked in Warcraft 2 by my classmate Daren (We all got A’s, we had just finished the entire coursework in 2 and a half weeks).

Using GIT with SVN

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:50:10 +0000

Over the last two and a half years, since the day I presented on Streamlined Web Development with SVN, I’ve been hearing about the Source Control Management tool called “git.” I kept reading about it online, seeing it on the schedules for conferences, and hearing it about it in the different Open Source groups here in Utah. I have been a big time Subversion (SVN) user for several years now, and it has solved my problems

PHP, SoapClient, SoapServer, and Timeouts

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:50:58 +0000

I ran into an extremely frustrating problems while trying to add a test script for some PHP web services. I won’t go into detail on all the different things I went through to debug this problem. But here is what it all boiled down to:

Problem

I have a SOAP Web Service that extends PHP’s internal SoapServer class that serves hundreds of thousands of remote devices. Every now and then, our server will have a hiccup and our Web Service won’t return valid responses. However, nginx will return requests just fine. So, to monitor the Web Service, I wrote a PHP script using SoapClient to read the WSDL, make several SOAP calls, and make sure the responses are valid.

MySQL Stored Procedure, NAME_CONST, and Character Sets

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 07:12:35 +0000

For a Project I had helped work on, they recently needed to move servers and in the process upgraded from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1.41. They ran into some quirks with 5.1 and I thought I would document our work-a-rounds for them.

We were having serious performance problems with a Stored Procedure that would be called by a Windows Client on thousands of machines. Before on 5.0 it would take under 0.02 seconds, and now it was taking 25-35 seconds. In this stored procedure we would call a query something like this:

RESTful Web Services & Nirvana

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 22:21:10 +0000

I’ve been hearing, reading, and talking a lot REST, RESTful Web Services, how to implement them, and even how to explain to your wife about it. Then I see or read presentations about what is and what is not RESTful Web Services. I’ve created and consumed quite a few web services, so while I’m not a leading expert in the field, I have a lot of experience with them. So instead of explaining over and over again to different people my thoughts on the subject, I’m writing about them. For those who have a short attention span, I’ll sum up my feelings of the subject in one sentence for you, and then explain in detail for those interested.

PHP, Nginx, and Output Flushing

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:01:00 +0000

Alright, so one of the few hangups I’ve ran into with moving from Apache to Nginx was output buffering. Now, we have a few administrative tools we use to perform large operations on our library and data. These scripts can take normally 3-5 minutes to run, and they output their progress and what step they are on as they run. The way they do this is after ever step in PHP I issue the same two commands:

Debuging with PHP, Stack Traces, and Redis

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:22:56 +0000

A cool new trick I found with debugging pieces of code and how often they get executed. We were running into a problem where an expensive query was being called more frequently than I thought it should. This query was only found inside of a single member of a class. However, this class, which retrieves a user’s photo album, is used all over the place. So it was really hard to determine exactly where the unneeded queries being executed from.

MySQL Sleeping Connections & PHP

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 20:51:48 +0000

If you want to skip to the explanation, just read below. But before then, here is a little background.

A Little Background

On January 2nd, we started to run into some serious performance problems with Dating DNA, so we began the process of going and deciding what were our problems, and how to optimize them. At the beginning, the Database was the bottleneck. It would get flooded with requests, and unable to handle them all, each query would slow down. We were using a tool called Jet Profiler (which I will post about more in detail later), but here is a graph it would output before we started out optimizations:

Creating Chatroom / Walls with Redis & PHP

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:15:16 +0000

Preface: This is not a step-by-step tutorial, but more of an outline on what I did. Also, I wrote this really quickly before heading off to dinner, so if there are parts that are unclear, or you have questions about, please leave a comment!

This last week has been a roller coaster for us at Dating DNA. We had an excellent holiday season, but with mass volume of new sign ups our servers started to slow down. Severely. Something you never want to have happen. So over this last week I’ve worked about 80 hours (though I’m a salary employee, woohoo… :P) and implemented a lot of new performance boots, and I have about four or five blog posts worth of discoveries I need to write. So before I forget them, I’m going to write them.

Goal for 2011: Learn C

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 02:09:53 +0000

I feel this is one area of my computer science education that is rather weak. The years I spent in schooling learning C, C++, or another derivative, either my teachers / professors really didn’t teach it well, or were only around of half a semester. Truly, computer science teachers when I was in school were the “professor of defense against the dark arts,” as they were always changing, even mid semester.

Large MySQL Conversion & InnoDB

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 03:01:32 +0000

Over the last week at Dating DNA, we’ve re-engineered our internal mail system that users use to send messages to each other. It took a few days longer to convert and re-engineer everything, but we finally made the change. With the exception of two small bugs, it all went off without a hitch. But before all the different things I learned doing it fade, I wanted to document them here.

First off, converting from one large set of InnoDB tables to a new structure. I’ve done something similar in the past, and I think I’ve honed in a little bit more the technique. So here are some thoughts regarding doing this process.

Music in a Digital Age

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 05:54:38 +0000

Ten years ago, I remember my father introducing me to a band named Guster. They were opening for Barenaked Ladies (BNL) and he wanted to check them out. That CD, Lost and Gone Forever, became one of my favorite CDs. I remember driving on the highway to get to Media Play, searching through all of their records and buying it. It was then lost to a friend, and I had to go drive down again to a store and buy it. I owned maybe 20 CDs total my entire teenage years.

SVN Switch - Key to Success In Web Development

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:13:05 +0000

So lately I have been given some thought to how we use Subversion (SVN) in our web development, and features we don’t use nearly as often.

In web development, one big area where I don’t see us using a lot is branching, tagging, and merging. However, with our iPhone Apps, we use tagging and branching a lot. As I started to think why, one of the biggest things was the environment. Client development, especially with the iPhone, is double clicking on a project file for Xcode, and I’m ready to go. There is almost no hassle running trunk versus running a tag or branch. It is all the same.

jQuery UI - Disable Title On Dialog

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 05:56:35 +0000

For some reason, this was turning out to be kind of hard to accomplish, and everyone on the internet wanted to do it with JavaScript hacks. My issue was if the JavaScript hack didn’t execute fast enough, causing the title to flash for just a second, so I’d much rather do it with CSS. Unfortunately, there are no built in ways to hide it in jQuery. However, there is an option you can pass in the .dialog() method: dialogClass. This places a custom class in the main div element, allowing you to do something like this:

Sharing Sessions Across Multiple Servers With Memcache

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:52:15 +0000

These last few days have been full of quickly implementing things I’ve only read about, but hadn’t done for myself.

One situation was looking at splitting web traffic across multiple servers. In our case, we had only 2% of our website that would spike and increase our load by %1000 percent (I’m not joking) for a short period of time. So instead of doing traditional load balancing, we opted for routing specific functions to a custom subdomain that would run on another server. That way if the thousands of crazy video game players (you know who you are), slam the servers trying to get a cool skin for their online avatar, it would only take down that one section.

Ignoring Files In SVN

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 07:01:09 +0000

There is a method for ignoring files in an svn via their svn:ingore tool. For those who use windows w/ TortoiseSVN, it has a really slick interface for handling it all. However, for those of us (like me) who are on a Mac and just use the command line, I always forget the commands. So here is my note to myself on how to do it:

First, navigate to the folder I want to edit it’s ignore settings.

#hackUTOS - April 24, 2010

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:02:30 +0000

I’ve been busy with several blog post floating around in my head, its just a matter of sitting down and writing them out. In the meantime, next Saturday, April 24th, will be #hackUTOS. Here is the news announcement:

If you have ever been interested in creating, improving or just participating in an open source project, here’s your chance! Do you already have an free and open source software project you are working on?

PHP HipHop – What It Means

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:32:04 +0000

There has been a lot of speculation about PHP, Facebook, and a big announcement. Over the last few weeks, several predominate PHP community members were invited to the Facebook offices to check something out. Facebook asked the PHP members, as Ben Ramsey put it, to “make a gentleman’s agreement that I wouldn’t talk until FB is ready.”

Well, Facebook has made their announcement, and it is called HipHop. Here is an excerpt:

Joining a Startup - The Advantages

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:50:36 +0000

While going through my backlog of my RSS feeds. I stumbled on Keith Casey’s post on Joining a Startup. He wrote it as a “reality check” for people who are considering joining a startup as a developer. Here is a snip-it:

First, everyone does everything. Check your ego at the door. In the first startup I was with, I was in charge of adding reporting to the eCommerce application and taking the garbage out. Was it an effective use of my time? Not at all. Did it have to be done? Yes. Did we have the money to hire someone else? Nope. If your startup is renting office space, you probably won’t have to worry about this… but who signs for packages? Who re-orders coffee? On the flip side, you could be the one taking technical questions at the next investor pitch or invited to the big customer Christmas party.

Teaching PHP This Year

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:34:41 +0000

I will be giving short presentations on PHP for beginners at the monthly Utah PHP Usergroup. Here is the annoucement:

Greets all,

Being in my seat, I’ve heard from many people over the course of this past year who have lost / changed employment. I know there is concern by many who are employed as to what will happen long term. The reality of the matter is this, though. Recession or no, change happens and the best way to be ready for it is to have a great skill set. To that end, we are restructuring the way our meetings will be.

My 2009 Technology Recap

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:55:31 +0000

Its been two years now that I’ve been a more or less “serious blogger.” I had using the term blogger, since when people hear about blogs, they think of people either detailing their entire lives, or pumping some angel. For me, blogging has just been a way to share information with people I know locally, and those I don’t even know who find my blog via searching. I’ve had a few spurts where I blogged quite frequently, but for the most part it was just here and there.

My PHP User Group Experience

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:46:09 +0000

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for awhile now, but never got around to it. I woke up and couldn’t sleep only 1 hour before heading out for some Black Friday madness. Might as well make some use of me being awake.

I will have to say that belonging to a local PHP user group has been an awesome experience. A little over a year ago I somehow stumbled upon the Utah PHP Usergroup, ran by a now good friend Victor Villa. I had no idea other people were meeting on a monthly basis to talk about PHP and web development stuff. I joined their IRC channel on freenode, and I instantly found a great little resource for myself. Within two months of regularly using the IRC channel, I decided to drive the hour down to where the meetings are held. I now go almost every month whenever possible. I miss now and then due to family functions and such, but for the most part I make the trek down from Ogden to Murray to enjoy the meetings. There are a few things that I found local user groups (LUGs) can provide others that I’d like to share.

Presentation: Real Life Scaling

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:39:44 +0000

Here are my slides for the presentation that I gave at the Utah Open Source Conference on Friday. It was an awesome conference, and I am glad that I was able to be involved.

Real Life Scaling: A Tale of Two Websites http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=reallifescaling-ataleoftwowebsites-small-091010143045-phpapp02&stripped_title=real-life-scaling-a-tale-of-two-websites

View more presentations from Justin Carmony.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below.

Article: Why Developers Get Fired

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:43:04 +0000

Here is an article that showed up on my RSS feed: Why Developers Get Fired. While I never have been fired from a job, I have been put in a situtaion where I needed to prove my worth to the company. The advice this article gives is pretty good, and in my opinion are the most overlooked issues. A developer could easily overlook these issues, and get side blinded by a pink slip. Here is an exceprt:

"Nerfing" a PHP Object

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:26:35 +0000

I was trying to think of something with PHP I could blog about that would be short and sweet. Then I thought of something that a good friend of my taught me: nerfing objects.

The Problem

Many times while working with PHP and bigger frameworks, you’ll have classes that extend classes that extand classes. We have an ORM system that interfaces our Database with PHP classes. This makes accessing and updating information easy for us. So lets say we have a class called “Post” that stores a blog post. Our ORM class just takes a few lines of code to hook up our “Post” class to the “posts” database tables. We just extend our base DataObject, which contains all sorts of references to other class isntances. Long story short, this PHP code is awesome, but there is one issue.

Speaking: Utah Open Source Conference 2009

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:00:13 +0000

I will be speaking this year at the Utah Open Source Conference this year. My presentation is “Real Life Scaling: A Tale of Two Websites.” Here is the abstract:

Scaling is a real issue for many websites. However, many developers try to implement solutions used by the giants of the internet: Google, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc. However, many of these techniques are designed for very unique and high demand situations. Implementing these techniques prematurely to smaller websites can lead to overly-complex solutions that can be difficult to manage, and even hinder progress.

jQuery Tip: Better Toggle

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:28:05 +0000

For many web developers, jQuery is the most awesome JavaScript library out there. For me, it has turned JavaScript from being a nightmare into a power tool. I love JavaScript now, where as before I truely hated it. Takes all the hassel out of most compatibility issues across browsers. I spend less time debuging it and more time writing it. While I’m on my goal to write more blog posts, I’m going to share a few jQuery tricks.

So You Want To Be A Web Developer?

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:54:35 +0000

This last week I’ve been talking with my brother Brack, who to say the least, absolutely abhors his job. Well, maybe abhor is a little strong, but he is extremely frustrated and unsatisfied. He works at a air force base in the human resource department and he basically helps provide statistical data for departments on who, what, and where to hire new help. Since he is a “wiz” at solving problems, computers, and making this more efficient, he has streamlined his work process with several nifty Excel spreadsheets and Java programs. He can now take a weeks worth of work and do it in one morning.

Project Management & Entrepreneurship

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:51:51 +0000

My dear friend Eric Ping pointed out I only had a few days left before I’d break my year and half record of posting at least every month. I was wondering what to write about, and last night I figured out what to write.

Yesterday after going to dinner with Joanna, my wife, we went to our guilty pleasure store: Barnes & Noble. Since I already have the entire Wheel of Time series to re-read for the upcoming books, I walked over to the technical section of books. I looked over the majority of titles, most of them for beginners learning a new type of language. It got me thinking. Over the last five years I have spent most of my time and energy working on becoming a great web developer. I’ve been working hard on my design skills, searching the web for examples and resources. I’ve been trying to make my PHP code more maintainable, efficient and clean. These last years I’ve been asking myself over and over “how can I do this better?” “How can I be a better developer?”

Steamlined Web Development Presentation Video

Wed, 27 May 2009 14:41:26 +0000

Alright, it looks like the Victor at UPHPU has gotten my presentation up on Steamlining your web development. Since it was the first night Victor had tried to capture video & audio to mesh them together, the video on the presentation is a little bit further ahead than the audio. However, I think the presentation went quite well. You can view all the UPHPU meeting videos here. Here is the presentation I gave:

Memcached: Simple, Effective, and Powerful

Wed, 20 May 2009 16:12:01 +0000

Realizing once again I haven’t written a blog post for quite some time, I thought I would just write a few smaller posts on things I’ve learned these last few months. Hopefully I can get back into the habit of blogging regularly again.

This last month I finally broke down and learned how to use memcached. While I have known about memcached for a very long time, I just never got around to using it. While I heard it was beyond easy to implement, I still assumed it would take a few days to get the hang of it and figure out its quirks. However, when the forces of high load on a webserver and the file-based caching system that I have previously used were found to be too I/O intensive, I had no choice but to take the plunge.

Data Backups - There Are No Excuses

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:04:48 +0000

Today I just had the terrible experience of having a database lose data, need to restore, only to not have a recent backup. If you haven’t had this experience before, please, take this serious. My wife was home for lunch as it happened, and she watched as the blood drained from my face. It only took a few seconds for the loss to happen, and immediately I knew exactly what the repercussions where. The immediate second thought that passes through your brain is “Where are my backups?” That is when I realized I didn’t have my nightly backups set up on this server. I quickly checked the file date on the last known backup I had.

Recursively Add New Files to SVN

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:51:33 +0000

One great thing about running Windows is TortoiseSVN. I makes managing my SVN so easy. One of the problems I’ve ran into on other systems was I had been working for several hours. I would have dozens of new files and with TortoiseSVN it would show me a list of all the new files and I could hit “select all” and commit. However, on Mac I haven’t found an SVN client that I like, so I just use the terminal commands. There are also times, like when managing a WordPress installation, that WordPress and its plug-ins could auto update. I wanted to be able to add all the new files on the linux server back into the svn.

XAMPP for Mac - My Frustrations & Solutions

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:15:34 +0000

These last few days I’ve been trying to get XAMPP to work on my MacBook Pro these last couple of days and it has been frustrating! It seemed I kept running into more and more problems. For those who don’t know, XAMPP is tool for developers to run a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on your machine locally. I’ve been running it on my Windows machines for years, and I have been running my production servers on Linux.

Aptana Studio – PHP IDE Alternative to PDT, Zend Studio

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 05:09:53 +0000

The other day I ran into another option as an IDE for PHP. If you’ve been following my blog, I’ve been a big user of Eclipse PDT (http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/) and Zend Studio (http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/). There is a third one to add to the list, Aptana Studio. It is built on-top of the Eclipse framework, like PDT and Zend Studio. It has several extensions: Python, Rails, PHP, and others. If you’ve read my post on Consumer Linux, I talk a lot about “Power & Polish.” Here is my definition:

Software Development With Clients In Mind

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:05:56 +0000

Why does it seem so hard to deliver quality products to clients? Sometimes it feels like clientseither don’t appreciate quality, or they have their priorities all mixed up. To help us understand, here is a wonderful sketch from Monty Python called “The Architect’s Sketch.”

I’ve been searching for awhile for a good example for this subject, and when I saw this sketch, I knew this would be perfect. It outlines two large problems with developing solutions for clients: quality & suitability.

Great PHP Article: Leadership in Software Development

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:24:48 +0000

I just read a good article on PHP Development by Cal Evans, an active member in the PHP community. Its about managers, developers, and the problems they face in the IT industry. Here is an excerpt:

There are very few professions that combine the creativity involved in good software development and the rigorous deadlines, often imposed from the outside. Hurry up and create! The ideas have to keep flowing, they have to be scheduled, and they have to be completed on time. If you have to go figure something out, go. But make sure you are back after lunch and make sure your schedule doesn’t slip. Developers, especially now as we work in Web years, are under increasing pressure to “Get it out the door fast!”.

List of 50 PHP Tools

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:08:58 +0000

Found a great article listing popular tools that every PHP developer should be away of. Here is an excerpt:

PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side scripting languages that exist today. With over 20 million indexed domains using PHP, including major websites like Facebook, Digg and WordPress, there are good reasons why many Web developers prefer it to other server-side scripting languages, such as Python and Ruby.

PHP is faster (updated), and it is the most used scripting language in practice; it has detailed documentation, a huge community, numerous ready-to-use scripts and well-supported frameworks; and most importantly, it’s much easier to get started with PHP than with other scripting languages (Python, for example). That’s why it makes perfect sense to provide the huge community of PHP developers with an overview of useful tools and resources that can make their development process easier and more effective.

MySQL, 40 Million Rows, MyISAM to InnoDB, 45 Minutes

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:13:08 +0000

Warning: This blog post is NOT a walk-through or tutorial. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could seriously screw up your database. This is just talking theory and ideas on how I solved my problem.

The other night (really, the other morning) I had the wonderful pleasure of trying to convert a table with 40 millions from MyISAM to InnoDB. The reason for the conversion was this table had a high amount of queries, and a high amount of writes. With this table growing and updating daily, the table locks were killing us. Because MyISAM needs to peform a lock on the entire table, we would have dozens of queries backlog as locks and writes were taking place. It was causing the site to screech to a halt, waiting for the locks the be released. It was a total nightmare.

Characteristics of Good PHP Code

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:20:02 +0000

At the time I am sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting for a very delayed layover flight to San Diego. Wonderful weather causing all sorts of headaches. So I’ve decided to make the best of my time by writing the introductory article to a series of PHP articles. I’ve had this idea for a while, and now I’m going to finally sit down and write it.

A Different Type of Article

CSS – I’m 100% Converted

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:01:35 +0000

It has been a hard, long road. But these last few days, I’ve finally have reached a realization of a great step in my life as a web design: I’m 100% converted to CSS layouts, and have forsaken tables. 5 years ago I would have believed that would be impossible, and that I would love and use tables for my layouts until the day I die. I remember hearing the lectures and heated discussions on using CSS instead, but I couldn’t bring myself to using CSS for layouts. Don’t get me wrong, using CSS was amazing for formatting and styling, such a color, size, bolding, etc. I love it every second and my conversion to CSS for those scenarios was very quick. However, the positioning of content, headers, footers, side menus and navigation was a nightmare for me at first. I just didn’t get it.

PHP Singletons, Sub-Classing, and HAS-A Relationships

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:37:53 +0000

I’ve been very busy these last fews weeks and have neglected making any posts. While there are a variety of subjects I’d love to post about, they’ll most likely have to wait until the next year. However, I thought I might be able to throw up a quick example of how to use PHP Singletons and extending public classes.

The Singleton Pattern “is a design pattern that is used to restrict instantiation of a class to one object.” (Wikipedia) In PHP, a singleton is created by making the constructor protected or private. “How do you create an object then?” Its done in two parts. First, you make a static class variable that is private, to hold the instance. Second, create a static function to return the instance. Here is an example:

Streamlined Web Development: In-Depth

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:26:44 +0000

Note: This is a work in progress. I will finish the rest after the presentation. I just wanted to publish the post to link to. If you have any questions, please post them below I will try to answer them as fast as I can. I probably won’t have time to finish this until Sunday, due to several critical projects that are due ASAP.

This in the “In-Depth” part of my presentation on “Streamling Web Development with SVN & Trac.” I can’t possibly cover all the aspects of this topic. I like to post a “in-depth” article right after my presentation with links, tutorials, and all my resources used for the presentation. This allows for me to spend more time on questions & answers. I’d appreciate any feedback on the presentation, and if you have any questions feel free to ask. This article is an extension to the presentation, so I suggest listening to the presentation first if it seems like there are any pieces missing.

Speaking: Utah PHP Usergroup – Streamlined Web Development

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:41:51 +0000

Next Thursday, November 20th, at 7 PM Mountain Time (9PM EST, 6PM PST) I will be speaking at the Utah PHP Usergroup meeting on “Streamlined Web Development.” I will be speaking with Kevin Carter from Code Greene. Here is the annoucement on the UPHPU website:

I’m very pleased to announce the topic for November’s UPHPU Meeting : Streamlined Web Development using a VCS (Version Control System) and Trac.

Starting the meeting off will be Code Greene’s Kevin Carter. Kevin, who has used Git in a production environment for several months now, will be presenting a primer on how to get started with Git. Additionally, he’ll cover the advantages of distributed source code control and possibly some topics on using git in an svn eniroment. His blog can be found at http://dexterthedragon.com.

MySQL - Does Table Exist w/o Throwing Errors

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:34:33 +0000

There are times where you would like to know if a table exists before executing an query. Most solutions require having MySQL throw an error saying “table does not exist,” but I prefer a cleaner way. I found on this forum post a clean way to do it:

/* example with table name: table_name */
SHOW TABLES LIKE 'table_name';

This solution will return 1 row if it exists, and 0 rows if it doesn’t. Here is a PHP example using this:

PHP Design - Biggest Database Oversights

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:56:44 +0000

Over the last three years I’ve had the opportunity to work on several PHP projects, some of them having grown rapidly and required to scale quickly. Three in particular have been a fantastic learning experience for me. Now I don’t consider myself a total expert, but I thought I would share my experiences. Many PHP developers are self-taught, like I was, and are learning PHP to be able to create dynamic websites. Many haven’t had studied or learned best practices for Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). They are web designers first, and programming in PHP is just a way to do things simple HTML can’t do.

Local LAMP Developement & User Content

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:37:26 +0000

I’ve come up with a simple solution for handling user uploaded content when trying to work in a local development environment. I’ve installed XAMPP on my windows machine and at the beginning of every week I take a database snapshot and update my local database. I had a pretty smooth system going with one problem: user uploaded content.

When working with social networking sites, many times they allow for users to upload their own videos, pictures, etc. My current project wasn’t different, but I didn’t want to download 80GB of user content every week to store on my PC. I wanted a way to point my browser to the live server to get recent images, etc.

Zend Studio vs PHP Development Tools

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:41:44 +0000

I’ve been using Zend Studio (ZS) for the last two years. It is developed by Zend, the company behind PHP. The very first time I used it and it was able to auto-complete my custom PHP classes I was sold. With version 6 of Zend Studio, they integrated Zend Studio with Eclipse, a popular IDE framework. I’ve been mostly happy with the new version, where as in some areas I felt that things were took a step back.

PHP 6 Books - Did I Miss Something?

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 02:46:30 +0000

Update 01-21-12: since I was contacted by the Author of one of these books, and a few years have gone by and I’m more familiar with the publishing industry, I was unfair to place blame on the author for the decision to market these books as PHP6. Authors have almost no say in how their books are marketed. Thus, the blame for these types of tactics, rest solely on the publisher.

WordPress & OOP

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 02:55:21 +0000

I’ve been hacking around with WordPress these last few weeks, and I’ve loved using it so far. My only concern has been that WP seems to be coded with the desire to be compatible with PHP 4.3. I just wonder when WordPress will take a OOP approach to it’s design. It would make things more simple for new developers.

I would love for WordPress 3.0 to have an OOP approach. I would love for one of the goals of WP 3.0 would be for it’s OOP core would be taken and used in another other website. A great example would be with a Dating Website I’m working on. It would be great to be able to have members have their own blogs and we could have it 100% integrated with our system. Right now I feel like it would take a lot “hacking” methods to get it to work, and when upgrades to WordPress would come it would be hard to upgrade. I really think WP needs to bite the bullet and make the change to OOP.

Web Design & The Cookie Jar: When Dealing with Clients

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:34:57 +0000

I saw this YouTube video and I couldn’t help but post about it. Here is the video, and I’ll add my thoughts at the end:

I’ve seen this happen so many times it isn’t even funny. You have a company with dozens of individuals giving their input on how something should be designed. As in the video, the end result is usually the same: a product that doesn’t accomplish it’s goal. This is what I call the “Cookie Jar” effect, when you have too many “hands” in the cookie jar.

iPhone SDK 2.1 - Another NDA

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 06:24:20 +0000

Until Apple change’s their attitude and policies, they will never be a Microsoft, Sun, or other monolithic technology company. Why? Their NDA on the new iPhone SDK 2.1 hinders developers seriously. They are so tight lipped about everything and are such control freaks that they will never replace Microsoft. If someone asked me today if I could magically snap my fingers and have Apple replace Microsoft, I would say “hell no.” Using their Laptops and Phones is one thing. Developing blindly with nothing but half-baked documentation and a NDA shoved down my throat is another beast.

Web Development 10-Years Ago & Now

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:43:55 +0000

This week’s blogging challenge was our computer software now and then. Lorelle talked about the different versions of WordPress over time. I thought it was an interesting article.

10 Years Ago

I started web development back in 1997. My tools back then were:

Notepad - That right, the one and only. It was how most people did their websites back in the day. It hasn’t changed much over the years.
Adobe Photoshop v4 - The must have program for image editing:
Dreamweaver 1.0 - Thats right, I’ve been with dreamweaver since the beginning! (Sorry, I couldn’t find a screenshot)
ws_ftp95 - This old school FTP program was the bomb in my eyes since day 1. Boy have things come a long.

Technology wise I was serving up static HTML pages. When I had mastered Dreamweaver’s template system, I was able to run a website with 20+ pages not too bad. It was definitely interesting. Every time I made a change, it would go through and update every single page, and then I would upload every page to the server.

_CGRectZero Error with UITableViewCell

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:06:11 +0000

Preface

If you haven’t agreed to the iPhone SDK License Agreement and NDA, please ignore this post, or Apple might hunt you down with their lawyers… and what a horrible death that would be.

Problem

I keep getting a build error when trying to subclass the UITableViewCell

Solution

Add the CoreGraphics.framework to your project

Resource

Found my answer at the MacRumors forums.

SoapUI - a simple and raw Java SOAP Client

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:47:20 +0000

There are times when you need a “raw” SOAP client to see the exact messages being sent to and from a Soap Sever. This is especially important for developers who are hosting a soap server for an API. In my example, PHP was throwing an error, but I couldn’t see exactly what it was. The Soap for Ecplise uses XSLT to parse a soap message into a readable format, but because the PHP error was breaking the XML formatting, Eclipse just told me that it couldn’t parse, but wouldn’t show me the raw message.

LT PACT 2008 - Day 1

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:31:52 +0000

Whew, today was a good day. I took a lot of notes and over the next few days I’ll be blogging on the different topics. Hopefully you’ll enjoy.

PHP Practices: Buffering your autoload

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:44:56 +0000

I spent 2 hours working on a problem with PHP, Doc-Types, and a website. We started to see symptoms across our website where we would get a 12px space on the top of the page on IE7 (Internet Explorer 7) and FF3 (FireFox 3). We started combing through the HTML markup our website was returning, and parsing it via FireBug I could tell that something was causing our page to parse in correctly.

Redesigning blog....

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:06:33 +0000

Alright, I figure it is about time I design my own WordPress theme. Most likely in the next few months I’m going to need to design some WordPress themes. Hopefully I’ll get able to do a good job…. ;)

iPhone SDK - Learning the Basics by Removing the Touch

Wed, 21 May 2008 03:12:28 +0000

After looking around for tutorials on the iPhone SDK, I’ve come to a revolutionary idea on learning the iPhone SDK: Learn it by programming in something else.

The iPhone SDK, which is basically Cocoa Touch, is based of the Cocoa framework, which is used to make programs for the Mac OSX. While the documentation for the iPhone SDK is limited, and outside resources are non-existent, information for the regular Cocoa framework is very large. There are tons of books, tutorials, videos, etc.

Zend Studio – Basic Intellisense Tutorial

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:51:13 +0000

I thought I would throw together a little video on how make the most out of Zend Studio’s intellisense using PHP Doc Blocks.

[A Flash demo stood here. It is no longer viewable.]

Full Resolution Download: http://www.mediafire.com/?wmzqmyelmox

iPhone Web Development: Controlling the viewport via Javascript

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:58:07 +0000

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of iPhone web applications. A client wanted to create a portion of their site for the iPhone, and they wanted it to look a very specific way. In order to do this we had to set the view port’s maximum-scale and minimum-scale to 1. This gave them the functionality they desired.

However, one aspect of the web application allowed users to view photos. This caused a problem due to the fact that we had disabled the scale so they were not able to zoom in on photos via pinching.

Five common PHP design patterns that aren't used enough

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:09:34 +0000

“This article explains five widely used design patterns in PHP with sample code to demonstrate each pattern. Intermediate level.”

I can’t say how many PHP programmers that could benefit from using these “design patterns.” So many times PHP, and PHP coders, make me feel like we’re just writing hacks all day. A solid understanding of these patterns and when to use the can make large projects better and more sound. It is so easy to write a complex website. It is a total pain trying to maintain it. These patterns are all about maintaining code, not just writing it.

ASP .NET, LINQ, GridViews, and GUID Errors

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:17:22 +0000

I found a simple problem today. Here is the deal, there were several times where I had to base a LinqDataSource off a Guid that I would set in the Page_Load(). I created an<asp:HiddenField /> to hold the value so all my DataSources could pull it from the control. The HiddenField control’s value is stored as a string, so I would have to convert the guid to a string. After doing this, I was getting the following error:

MS SQL 2005 (T-SQL) Row Count for Each Table

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:08:38 +0000

At work I needed a solution to give me a count of how many rows each table contained. I’ve always liked phpMyAdmin’s ability to list all the tables and show their size and row count. I’ve found it immensely helpful. However, I couldn’t find anything similar for SQL Server Manager Studio 2005. I found a blog post that pointed me in the right direction on how to get the row counts, but I couldn’t get their script to run on the SQL Server 2005. Since I figured this would be a useful script to have I would re-write it and comment it for others. Here it is:

Page.FindControl() Returning Null Issues and Solutions Within Another Control

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:41:51 +0000

Alright, I’m going to have a lot of blog posts over the next few days going over my wonderful expereinces learning how to create advanced server controls, and just how hard it is to find good information on the subject. But the problem I ran into today was having Page.FindControl() not work as expected.

Problem

Page.FindControl() can be misleading. A developer without understanding the situation could assume FindControl() will return a control found within that page. This is completely wrong. The reason this does not work is because Page does not have its own FindControl() function. It actually inherits this from Control, because Page inherits control. So FindControl() is really more like a FindChildrenControls(), and it is not recursive.

ASP .NET Ajax - Straight forward and simple, the way it should be.

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:34:41 +0000

I have to say, I’m very impressed with the implementation of ASP .NET AJAX. After creating several projects in .NET, converting several of my pages to implement AJAX was beyond easy. It was incredible. It takes all the “thinking” out of AJAX and just makes it work. Now, I’m not familiar with the security and stability of it, but for simple AJAX to make your interface just “nicer”, its amazing. I’ll be posting a few tricks and tips that I discover as I play around with the AJAX capabilities of .NET.

ASP .NET, GridViews, SqlDataSource, and Guid Parameters

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:40:27 +0000

Another thing I ran into today. I actually ran into it awhile back but since I ran into it again today I’d thought I’d post on it to help anyone who happens to find it.

Problem

You have a GridView and a SqlDataSource that takes 1 or more Guids as a Parameter. You use the built in DataSource configuration and it doesn’t give any errors. However, when you actually run it and pass the Guid, you get this error:

ASP .NET & System.Threading.ThreadAbortException Error

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:02:15 +0000

While doing some work today I started to run into a ThreadAbortException error. While debugging it spit back this error:

Unable to evaluate expression because the code is optimized or a native frame is on top of the call stack.

I was really confused because everything seemed to be working just fine, then I found this forum thread. Turns out there are several causes for this error, but mine was caused by doing a Response.Redirect(); from within a Try-Catch statement. Apparently ASP .NET does not like that.

ASP .NET GridView Access to Data In Code

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:52:38 +0000

There are situations where you want to gain access to the GridView’s DataSet to display extra information outside of the GridView. I found the following code to work the best for me. You can get the information from the DataSource of a GridView by doing the following:

DataView dv = (DataView)sdsDataSource.Select(DataSourceSelectArguments.Empty); if (dv != null) { try { strName = (String)dv.Table.Rows[0][“Name”]; } catch { strName = “N/A”; } }

You should be able to access whatever information you need from the DataView.

ASP .NET Accessing Session, Request, Response, etc from within a Class

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:30:38 +0000

I remember it took me forever to figure this out and the headache before learning this that it caused. Because .NET is strongly typed you are unable to access the Session, Request, or Response (and many other Http/Web object) from within a class library like you can writing in a code-behind file or on the page itself. I battled for weeks (I almost think months) trying to find ways of passing information between my pages and class library, when I finally found the answer:

ASP .NET 2.0, GridViews, HyperLinkField, and JavaScript

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:34:00 +0000

I’ve found some interesting notes on ASP .NET’s GridView, it’s limitations and work arounds. For work I was looking for a way to execute JavaScript from clicking a link on a GridView Cell. An example would be to having a list of transactions and wanting to click a link to update it’s details. I noticed that many functions of GridView used tags to execute JavaScript. An example would be:

<a href="javascript:myFunction('variable');">Link</a>

Since I had experience with the HyperLinkField before, I thought I would add a HyperLinkField to my GridView and set the DataNavigateUrlFields to the needed fields and the DataNavigateUrlFormatString to use the fields properly. I was hoping to accomplish it by using the following code, which in turn I found out this solution does not work:

PHP5.x or PHP6 - Argument for Type-Hinting: Better IDEs

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:59:38 +0000

I’ve read some posting lately about PHP6, the Meeting Notes by the Developers, etc. that deal with type-hinting, especially scalar type hinting. Here is my reasoning why PHP should allow for more type-hinting scenarios: it allows IDEs to be more powerful. An example would be auto completion. Many times an IDE can’t possibly know what is being returned by a function or what is stored a variable because PHP is not strongly typed.

Retrieve Current Module/Controller/Action inside View Script / Layout Script

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 21:19:04 +0000

Before I forget to do this again I’m going to make a post on how to get the current Module, Controller, and Action while inside a View Script or Layout Script.

Here is the most correct way to do it:

$front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$request = $front->getRequest();

$module = $request->getModuleName();
$controller = $request->getControllerName();
$action = $request->getActionName();

Now, here is the incorrect way I attempted to do this the first time:

$front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$request = $front->getRequest();

$module = $request->getParam('module');
$controller = $request->getParam('controller');
$action = $request->getParam('action');

I found some odd behavior because sometimes while in the default module it would return default, but other times it would return a null. I’m not sure if this is a bug or not, but the most sure way to retrieve the desired result is using the appropriate methods of getModuleName(), etc.