As a freelance web developer, I’ve seen and used my fair share of open source web applications (and desktop software), and I’d like to point out something that I see all too often in open source projects: the user interface almost always lets the project down. Let me explain…The ProblemI’ve used a considerable amount of open source software (web-based and desktop), and I feel that a large portion of them are let down by their UI. The functionality is brilliant, the code is great, and the product is useful, but the user interface often just lacks the smoothness and le...

I do a lot of Java coding and I enjoy it. I admit that there is a lotof typing, often a lot of boilerplate and getting even simple tasksdone can involve too much work. Most of the tools that try to fixthese problems trade one moment saved for another lost. Maven's XMLbased configuration file is a good example: Thank you for making myproject easier to manage and I won't forget that you made me edit XMLto do so.These are the things that you live with, these are the things youtrade for using a language that thinks it's finishing what C++started; a language that is loved equally by mammoth corpora...

I was recently having one of those “life, the universe and everything” conversations with a close industry (web) friend.Mid-conversation I dropped that I’d identified three kinds of stress that we face as creators – it felt somewhat poetic at the time, so I thought I’d take some time to describe it.Physical, the kind of stress you’re under when you’ve been eating poorly, drinking too much, exercising too little, or working too long. We’ve all been there but for the most part, it’s manageable.Mental, you’ve got things floating ...

A new study examining 365 million lines of code in 745 applications identifies bad coding practices that affect security, performance and uptime, with Java Enterprise Edition applications having the greatest number of problems. Cast Software, which makes tools that automate the analysis of business applications, examined programs written in Java-EE, .NET, ABAP, C, C++, Cobol, Oracle Forms, and Visual Basic, used across a wide range of industries from energy and financial services to IT consulting, insurance, government, retail, telecom, and more. Java-EE applications were the most prevalent in...

Summary: Could and should Bill Gates return to day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft? Fortune is reporting there’s a rumor to that effect. Fortune reported on December 8 that there’s talk Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates might be mulling a comeback, largely to help boost Microsoft’s stagnant stock price and employee morale.I have to say I am very, very, very skeptical on this one.First, it seems this is a single-sourced report. Fortune says: “One prominent chief executive told Fortune he’d heard from someone close to Gat...

A few days ago I wrote a post trying to correct a lot of the inaccurate statements I have seen repeatedly mentioned about how graphics on Android works. This resulted in a lot of nice discussion, but unfortunately has also lead some people to come up with new, novel, and often technically inaccurate complaints about how Android works.These new topics have been more about some fundamental design decisions in Android, and why they are wrong. I’d like to help people better understand (and judge) these discussions by giving some real background on why Android’s UI was designed the wa...

While profiling our application I came across a a rather strange memory usage by the ob_start() function. We do use ob_start() quite a bit to defer output of data, which is a common thing in many applications. What was unusual is that 16 calls to ob_start() up chewing through almost 700kb of memory, given that the data being buffered rarely exceeds 1-2kb, this was quite unusual.I started looking at the C code of the ob_start() function and found this interesting bit of code inside php_start_ob_buffer()initial_size = 40*1024;block_size = 10*1024;Which directs PHP to pre-allocate 40kb of data fo...

It seems like web app security has entered the public conscious recently, probably as a result of the press covering the activities of groups like Anonymous and incidents like security breaches at several CAs. Here are a couple of quick security tips to improve the security of your web apps. Think of these as low-hanging fruit, not as a substitute for thorough analysis of your app’s security. If there’s interest in this topic we can do more posts, too - let us know in the comments!Prologue: SSLYour app already forces all traffic over SSL, right? If it doesn’t, it should. T...