1. Use PHP only when it is necessary – Rasmus LerdorfThere is no better source than the creator of PHP, to learn what he can do. Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP in 1995. Since then, the language has spread like a wildfire rate in the developer community, incidentally changing the face of the Internet. However, Rasmus did not create PHP with these intentions. PHP was created for the needs of web development. As is the case with many other projects with open source, have become popular, philosophy or even narcissism has never been the driving force. It wa...

We've seen some neat interactive HTML5 infographics before -- but the periodic table, for example, doesn't really care that much about time.Visual representation of time introduces numerous complications. Traditional ways of representing time visually were, roughly speaking, translations of dimension-type, from temporal to spatial; the mapping selected would depend on what kind of temporal relation was meaningful for the particular application. For example, circles represent cyclical behavior; lines represent development; trees represent evolutionary history; and so forth. New media change the...

It’s no surprise they call them trends, become they come and go. Maybe you don’t want to take them with the constant changes in web design you sure don’t want to be left behind, do you?Nobody can predict the future of web design, but we’re already seeing small changes to the newer designs and I bet we all want to be part of the movement. Most of the changes in web design are subtle so we need to focus mainly on the concept behind each trend.We will exemplify every design trend so you can determine for yourself if your designs would benefit from these changes.Typogra...

In C++/CLR (for Microsoft), sometimes we need to convert int to System::String type or vice versa. The simple way is :From System::String^ to int int num= int::Parse(str); // System::String^ to intFrom int to System::String^System::String^ str = num.ToString(); // int to System::String^For all the other data types, similar ways can be adopted....

The terms lvalue and rvalue are not something one runs into often in C/C++ programming, but when one does, it’s usually not immediately clear what they mean. The most common place to run into these terms are in compiler error & warning messages. For example, compiling the following with gcc:int foo() {return 2;}int main(){ foo() = 2; return 0;}You get:test.c: In function 'main':test.c:8:5: error: lvalue required as left operand of assignmentTrue, this code is somewhat perverse and not something you’d write, but the error message mentions lvalue, which is not a term one ...

This has been a rough year for Mozilla and its Firefox team. Once the darling of the Web and the champion of the oppressed against Microsoft and Internet Explorer, Firefox is facing stiff competition from its primary benefactor and backlash from users. Chrome also seems to be the preferred browser of Web developers. Naturally, this means speculation about the future of Firefox. Has Firefox had better years? Absolutely. Does this mean that Firefox is "doomed"? Not so fast. Google Will Probably RenewLet's start with Firefox's potential revenue problem. If Google doesn't renew, Mozilla could be f...

A few days ago, this video hosted by metacafe popped up on digg, explaining how to increase site download times by tweaking your browser settings to increase connection parallelism. To explain why this works, let’s step back a bit to discuss how browsers manage server connections.In building any application, developers are often required to make ‘utilitarian’ choices. Pretentiously paraphrasing Jeremy Bentham, ‘utilitarian’ describes an approach that ‘does the greatest good for the greatest number.’ Many times, sacrifices in performance are made...

It’s everywhere. XML Abuse. From Domain Specific Languages to Data Serialization, XML is the most commonly abused data format I’ve ever encountered.XML is perfectly fine for (because it was designed for this):First of all: XML was designed to be written by humans and read by humans. Nearly all generated XML I’ve seen sucks badly. I think this is because XML cannot efficiently represent common data structures found in programming languages.XML is good for representing trees. If you imagine the outline of a document, you see that this is definitly a tree....