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Saturday, April 25th, 2009Yahoo! Maps Part 2
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009I was lucky enough to attend the Yahoo!7 Open Session this evening. While talking to some staff I discovered that they have the tiles with street maps for Australia, which are available on maps.yahoo.com.au, but they aren’t yet available via the maps API. Hopefully they’ll be available soon.
Yahoo! maps versus Google maps
Monday, April 20th, 2009Over the last two days I’ve found a couple of hours to play with both Yahoo maps and Google maps. It’s my first attempt at building an application that plots data on a map. After starting with Yahoo I quickly moved to Google. The main reason for switching was because the Yahoo (API) maps don’t include street maps for Australia. This seemed kind of strange as maps.yahoo.com.au does include them. A quick check of some US cities and London showed that they did have street maps so I think I set it up correctly.
Currently it displays a marker on the map for every data point. The next challange is:
- Only include markers that will be rendered on the current map,
- Combining markers as the user zooms out.
April PHP Group Cancelled
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009We’ve just cancelled the April SydPHP Group meeting. For more information check out http://www.sydphp.org/
March SydPHP is tonight
Thursday, March 5th, 2009The March Sydney PHP Group meeting is on tonight. Once again it will be hosted by Mobile Messenger. If you’re planning to attend then meeting in the foyer downstairs (17 York St) from 6.20
Faster web applications using message queues
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009The first meeting of the Sydney PHP Group for 2009 will be at 6pm on Thursday, February 5. We have a new venue above Wynyard station and you need to RSVP using Upcoming. This month I’ll be speaking about faster web applications using message queues.
Sending an email to one or two people from a contact form is pretty simple but what happens when sending an email means 5,000 of your closest friends? Richard will cover how some of the largest websites provide fast response times by off-loading intensive, non-critical jobs to back end processes.
Web 2.0 in 14 days – Days 7
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008The first week is over and I really feel I should be further along but life keeps getting in the way. Perhaps it was a bit ambitious to think I could complete the project in 14 days using only my spare time.
Today was spent creating a new template for the site. The current template was only ever meant to be temporary so that anyone visiting BabysittingGroup.com after I provided the URL could see something and register for a beta invite.
While the new template is a huge improvement on the old one I’ve decided to continue using the old template until the site is launched. Less that a week to go (hopefully).
Defending PHP
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008A couple of days ago there were a few emails on the SLUG mailing list started by someone experiencing problems with a PHP script. Towards the end of the discussion I suggested:
While you’re redeveloping you should also read about Cross-site Scripting and why you should escape user input before sending it back to the browser.
Which received the response:
Isn’t PHP fun?
Once again we have seem to have someone pushing the misconception that PHP is unsafe compared to other languages. The problem isn’t PHP. Like most programming languages it does exactly what you tell it to. The problem is that most PHP programmers are self taught hobbyists who have never heard of:
- Cross Site Scripting
- Cross Site Request Forgeries
- SQL Injection
- Session fixation
- etc…
I know I can write Java, Perl and Python code that is just as unsafe by following the practices that these amatures follow. While I haven’t done much .NET or Ruby I suspect I the same applies to them too.
My point here is pretty simple. Imagine if you hired a handyman to hang a picture. If he turned up, pulled out his electric drill and a screw then proceeded to hammer the screw into the wall with the back of the drill you would blame the handyman, not the drill manufacturer. It’s the same with PHP. If you want to hire inexperienced programmers to develop your website then expect stuff to go wrong.
jQuery, my new best friend
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007About 6 months ago I started using Prototype and Scriptaculous for AJAX development. I chose that combination over the Dojo Tookit because they were much better documented. While Prototype is a great AJAX library I’ve always felt that it has been let down by Scriptaculous. Effects are fine but as a web developer I’m really interested controls/components.
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of Drupal development which is how I discovered jQuery. While it’s still early days I feel safe in declaring that jQuery is my new best friend.
So why did I switch to jQuery?
- It’s documentation is pretty good
- It’s very similar to Prototype so migration was almost trivial
- It seems easier to use
- With jQuery UI I get controls rather than effects
Subversion and Trac presentation
Monday, July 30th, 2007On Thursday I’ll be doing a presentation on Subversion and Trac at the Sydney PHP Group. It will be “how to” focused so people can leave with enough knowledge to start using these tools. If you plan to attend then email rsvp@sydphp.org
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