PHP

June 24, 2008 – 8:44 am

I used to hate PHP. I still do actually, even if it’s only just a bit. But, over the past year or so I’ve developed an appreciation for the language. OK, as a programming language it is pretty odd. I mean that syntax, c’mon. Some weird demon child offspring between C and Perl. It’s a pretty hideous creature. Furthermore, PHP cannot be considered a platform like .NET or J2EE. It’s a programming language, nothing more and nothing less. Anything you can code with PHP can be done in as many different ways as there are PHP programmers. In a way it reminds me of the good old C days. C came with a massive library of incoherent functions. E.g. with C there where multiple of different ways of working with files. You use the set of functions that would make to most sense to you. In a sense, the biggest difference between PHP and C is the lack of pointers…

I believe that the power of PHP doesn’t lay in the programming language itself, because any serious programmer can confirm that the language is pretty frustrating to work with on a day to day basis. No, the power of PHP lies in its availability. A programming environment like ColdFusion, Java or even .NET is much more powerful and structured. Not that you can do more with these languages than with PHP, but it provides a common ground for programmers to start off with. The problem with ColdFusion and Java is that you can’t get it hosted, unless you’re willing to shell out the big bucks. Most providers offer Windows hosting so hosting ASP isn’t outside the reach of small time web developers and whipping up some old school ASP isn’t that much different than doing PHP. With .NET that’s a different story. Unfortunately, to effectively develop for .NET you need the Visual Studio development environment which you can buy for lots of money from Microsoft, making the platform unavailable for a large group of developers. I’m sure Micorsoft provides a stripped command-line SDK, but that doesn’t make the environment more approachable for people who don’t have the budget to buy Visual Studio.

The typical web developer likes PHP because every cheap hosting enviroment has at least PHP 4. And even though PHP 4 lacks some OO functionality, you can create pretty good applications with it. Other than that, there is so much information available for PHP available that’s being able to be grasped by not only the hard-core coders but also the the guy who just wants to store some stuff in a database and doesn’t want to get to much involved in the details of the language. Because of this, there are a lot of web developers using PHP. Which in turn means that a lot of companies use it because it has a large resource pool. So, even though PHP isn’t the most elegant programming language, it is popular because of these reasons.

By luke | Posted in PHP, Programming, Web development | Comments Off

(more) ActionScript 3 weirdness

May 7, 2008 – 11:08 am

The other day I was attending the Colin Moock lecture “AS3 from the ground up” here in Sydney. Even though the lecture was very (and I mean very) basic, as it was intended, it was still quite interesting to see the man in action. I sat through the whole thing even though around 4 o’clock I was ready to walk out (of boredom). I’m glad I made it till the end.

Even though the lecture was quite basic there was one thing he pointed out that caught my attention. The implicit calling of the super class constructor. He’s stated that even if you do not specify a call to super in your sub class constructor, the super class constructor is still called. this sounded all to weird for me. I didn’t wanted to shout this out in case I was wrong and I didn’t bring a laptop to test out if this weird behavior was true. And thinking again, AS3 has a number of weird things going on that are not consistent with what you would expect. So, this might be another one of those things.

Never the less, the next day I decided to test this behavior just to make sure this was the case, and behold. It is. Besides the fact that you can’t make constructors private in AS3 (which is a different discussion all together) the super class constructor IS ALWAYS CALLED!!!

As a programmer, for me to override the constructor has actual meaning. It means that I DO NOT WANT THE SUPER CLASS CONSTRUCTOR TO EXECUTE, unless I call the super class constructor explicitly with the super keyword. To me this is another typical one of those; “we complier designers need to protect those poor little programmers from them selfs, the poor souls don’t know what they’re doing” type of thing. Sigh…

For some reason, the more I do with AS3 the the more frustrating it is becoming. Every time I run into small but irritating issues like this the more I tend to step away from the language. Don’t get me wrong, I like the executing speed increase and the improvement from AS2 its just these little annoying things that get to me.

By luke | Posted in Actionscript, Actionscript 3.0, Dribble, Programming | Comments Off

The proprietary (in-house) CMS (revisited)

May 1, 2008 – 10:21 am

I’m sure you’ve seen them. You might even have worked with them. The company with the proprietary CMS. Almost every company that specializes in web development has some sort of self proclaimed spectacular and ground breaking CMS that was developed in-house. My opinion? Try to avoid them!

Why? You ask. Well let me explain. Say you’re a developer and you’re being hired by one of these companies. It will be highly likely that they expect you to further develop this CMS or at least work with it. Most of the time this is almost impossible to do. I’ll bet you, there will be no documentation and the complete system architecture (if there is any) is probably all locked up inside one guy’s head (the guy who built it). Great. Now imagine you’re a client of a company with a proprietary CMS. I’m sure they will tell you that their CMS is the most fantastic and easy to use CMS in the world. It will solve all your problems. Unfortunately, you as the client has no way of actually testing if this statement is true, all you can do is believe them.

Now, in comes the established open source CMS. There are so many open source CMS’s out there that it’s almost not funny if you need to pick one. Just hop over to CMSMatrix and you’ll see what I mean. Currently the popular ones and my personal pet favorites are Drupal, Joomla! & Wordpress (For the moment we put aside the discussion if Wordpress is an CMS or not). Of course, the benefits of using an established open source CMS over a proprietary CMS is obvious:

  1. There will be documentation (for both end-users and developers).
  2. The implementation of features has been questioned during development (i.e. with all likelihood, more than one developer has worked on it and they discussed amongst each other the best way to implement certain features).
  3. The number of implementations will be much higher (i.e. real world examples).
  4. Clients are not locked in with a single development party.
  5. Clients are free to investigate the system before using it for their solution (transparency).
  6. Community (knowledge sharing).
  7. Jobs (for developers).

Well, I don’t know about you. But there’s not a lot that can compete with that and I’m sure that at least you will agree with me on most of these points. As a matter a fact, I can’t think of any benefit of using an proprietary CMS all together.

Of course, like most developers I would love to build a full fledged CMS myself. Heaps fun! But in the end its pointless. The market for CMS’s is completely over saturated and building your own can be considered a complete waste of time and effort. Now, by all means. I’m not claiming in any way that there is no room for proprietary CMS’s. Proprietary CMS’s are very suitable for the Amazon’s and eBay’s out there which are specialized systems, not generic ones.

As a developer, there is another very important aspect of proprietary CMS’s to consider. If you work for a company that utilizes a proprietary CMS, then whenever you would leave your position at that company, all your CMS knowledge will be worthless. On the other hand. If you had worked all that time with Drupal or Joomla! than you could actually utilize that knowledge in your next job. It might even be the case that you will be primarily hired for that knowledge.

By luke | Posted in CMS, Dribble, General | Comments Off

eBooks

April 27, 2008 – 1:19 pm

Ever since I got involved with computers (20 or so years ago) I’ve always been buying books about various subjects to extend my knowledge and learn about new things. Over the years I’ve built up quite a little collection of books and a quick peek at my bookshelf learns me that there’s about 250 or so books there. Some them are really old. I mean really old! I think the oldest is called Using QuickBasic 4 and dates from 1987 (print). I think I’ve got a copy of it in 1989 or so (around the time of my QuickBasic era).

A couple of years ago I moved counties. I moved from the Netherlands to Australia. Guess what I took with me? I had about 11 boxes shipped over. 10 of them filled with books. So effectively I’ve been lugging this stuff half across the world.

I’ve always been intrigued with Safari (no, not the browser, but the service offering from O’Reilly). Getting a subscription to this service is very appealing to me. However, it still seems quite expensive. I do not buy books every month (I usually go through book buying phases). And since Safari is a monthly (or annual) subscription, I haven’t signed up yet. I believe that this sort of subscription/service is ideal for employers who employ programmers (hint hint).

Buying computer related books in Australia is a pretty expensive hobby. The average book goes for about $80 AUD. That’s currently about $75 USD! The average computer book on Amazon goes for about $35 USD ($ 38 AUD)!!! I guess buying in a normal store in the States doesn’t change the price that much and you get an actual physical book for that price. I guess that’s because of the shear volume of books being sold in the States is much higher than in Australia (1% of 300 million is a lot more than 1% of 22 million). Also, computer related books are not printed in Australia but overseas and have to be imported. On top of that the margin must be higher because less books will be sold in Australia and the shop owner still needs to pay the electricity bills of the book store (which doesn’t change whether you sell a 100 books or 10 books).

So, instead of buying physical books, I’ve been looking into cheaper alternatives. eBooks are a great thing. Not only are they cheaper to buy but also a hell of a lot cheaper to ship to the other side of the world. In the recent month I’ve bought eBooks from four different publishers. O’Reilly, Packt Publishing, Manning and Apress. My best experience so far is with Manning.

All the publishers so far had me create an account before I could purchase my eBook. I can see their point of view of this. By creating an account, my purchase is associated with my account. E.g. with O’Reilly I can go back into my account and download my eBook over and over again. This is handy if I ever delete my eBook by mistake, for me, Manning has succeeded the best with mimicking the real live event of buying a book. When you buy an eBook on Manning’s site and you pay with PayPal (yes, PayPal is awesome!) you don’t have to create an account. All you need to do is to click on the pay with PayPal button, which guides you through the familiar PayPal process, and the book is emailed to the email address that’s associated with you PayPal account. So yes. they have your email address but so what? So do the others with a lot more information. Not to mention the time I had to spend setting up the account, which of course next time I want to purchase an eBook I’ve forgotten the password of.

Now being true geeks you probably wonder what eBooks I purchased. This is the list:

So there you go. Lots of stuff about Joomla! and CMS related things plus a bit of Java to top it off (anything Java is still my favorite). I’ll be reading a lot for the next coming weeks. Maybe I can squeeze out another post with my thoughts on proprietary (or in-house) developed CMS systems. Have fun buying eBooks and till next time.

By luke | Posted in Dribble, General, books | Comments (0)

WebDU 2008

April 12, 2008 – 4:19 pm

Somehow I’ve been able to get my big fat head on the WebDU about page! I’m the one looking straight into the camera and my buddy Dave is sitting right next to me. Man, that was a shock when I saw that page for the first time. Funny enough I remember that photo being taken and who took it!

Unfortunately I will not be able to attend WebDU this year. Maybe next year again…

By luke | Posted in Dribble, General, WebDU | Comments Off

Playing with APE

January 19, 2008 – 7:48 pm

The other weekend I was playing with APE. I must say, even though APE isn’t the most advanced physics engine for the Flash Platform out there, it is definitely easy to get up and running with. Maybe this is because of the limiting functionality of APE. The particles that APE offers are quite limited, Rectangle, Circle and Wheel. But still, there are some nice effects achievable with these three particles.

The main limitation I ran into when playing with APE was the fact that I couldn’t easily detect if a particle collided another particle. In the end, I ended up modifying the APE source by letting the AbtractItem (the base class for the AbstractParticle class) inherit from the Flash EventDispatcher class and modified the collision testing code in the CollisionDetector class to dispatch an event when a collision occurred.

By luke | Posted in APE, Actionscript 3.0, flex2ant | Comments Off

CoreTween v1.0.0 beta 2 available

December 17, 2007 – 6:02 pm

For the past week I’ve been working hard on the CoreTween website and the CoreTween library. Small changes where made to the CoreTween library and a new reference section has been added to the website.

One of the problems I was facing with the CoreTween reference documentation was the fact that CoreTween supports four different languages. Because 90% of the documentation is the same for all four languages I need some sort of scheme that wouldn’t involve duplicating any data. My first choice was of course to store the reference documentation in a good ‘ol database. But to do that effectively I also needed some sort of CMS through which I easily could fill this database. No of the shelf solution fitted this so I reverted to another solution.

For a long time I’ve been wanting to do more (and learn more about) XSLT. This fascinating XML technology has been on my mind a lot lately and so I decided that this would be a good time to start using it. The reference documentation for CoreTween is therefore stored in a simple plain XML document which is easy to edit with a normal text editor. The XML Stylesheet then converts this XML document to the appropriate HTML document containing the correct implementation language (ActionScript 1, 2, 3 or haXe). Within the XML document there are tags that look like this: 

<if>
   <as3>
      void
   </as3>
   <otherwise>
      Void
   </otherwise>
</if>

This way its easy to specify only the differences between the supported programming languages and keep all the other stuff the same. The XML Stylesheet takes care of filtering the <if> tags to the correct value. These vales are passed from the URL to the PHP script that executes the XSLT processor. Try a sample of the TweenManager class for a demonstration. To change to implementation language, simply change the ‘language’ parameter on the URL to as1, as2, as3 or haxe. Follow this link to have a look inside the TweenManager XML document that defines the reference documentation.

Of course, on the final website you can easily change between implementation languages. But that’s still in the works.

By luke | Posted in CoreTween, PHP, Programming, XSLT | Comments Off

New flex2ant release (v0.0.5)

November 30, 2007 – 8:30 am

Once in a while I get requests or bug reports for flex2ant. Like the other day, I received a request for a fix of this one bug from two different people. Apparently a blog had popped up that discuses flex2ant (amonst other things). I knew that the problem in question was caused due to operating system differences but I didn’t really have the time to look into the problem.

When I received the second email explaining the issue I decided to have a look at it because the problem was starting annoy me. It didn’t annoy me that people report bugs, but the fact that there was a problem with flex2ant. And since I always try to fix bugs to code ASAP instead of pushing it forward, I loaded up up Eclipse, synchronized the project with the Subversion repository to be sure I had the latest copy and fixed the issue in about 2 min. Updating the website however, took me about 10 min.

So, there you go. If you’re a flex2ant user then get your new copy from the download area of the website. Happy Flexing!

By luke | Posted in Eclipse, Flex, Programming, flex2ant | Comments (0)

Mate, your blog is broken…

November 22, 2007 – 12:43 pm

No, its alright! I chose to go for the minimalistic theme called SandBox. Not only do I actually like this theme, it also gives me a great clean template to work from if I ever want to change the CSS for this blog myself.

By luke | Posted in Dribble, General | Comments (0)

Papervision3D, Quake Models & Color Palettes

November 20, 2007 – 3:23 pm

Last week I was working on a port of a Quake model viewer I did in OpenGL to ActionScript 3.0 and Papervision3D. The actual AS3 code is reading the Quake model information from the original binary Quake .mdl file and contains, besides the polygon data, the bitmap that represents the texture for the model. The problem is that Quake uses a global color palette because the game was programmed for 256 colors (remember, this game is from 1996!). None of the models or textures actually stores a palette because they are assumed to all use the same palette and why store it many times… The actual color palette is stored in a separate binary file of 768 bytes in size (256 * 3 = 768, the 3 is for the three r, g, b color channels and every component ranges from the standard 0 - 255).

When building the AS3 version of the Quake model viewer I could have chosen to read the color palette from the binary file by loading it in at runtime. Instead I chose another approach. I created a class that represented the color palette and I embedded the raw palette information as a resource in the swf itself:

package
{
   import flash.utils.ByteArray;

   public class QuakePalette
   {
      [Embed(source="quake.pal", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
      private static const Palette : Class;

      public var r : Array = null;
      public var g : Array = null;
      public var b : Array = null;

      public function QuakePalette()
      {
         var i : int;
         var a : ByteArray;

         a = new Palette() as ByteArray;

         r = new Array();
         g = new Array();
         b = new Array();

         for( i = 0; i < 256; i++)
         {
            r[i] = a.readUnsignedByte();
            g[i] = a.readUnsignedByte();
            b[i] = a.readUnsignedByte();
         }
      }
   }
}

Above is the code for the actual QuakePalette class that is used by the AS3 Quake model viewer. As you can see, the color palette is embedded inside the class as a resource. By setting the mimeType property to “application/octet-stream” the data is actually embedded as raw binary data. In the constructor the Palette class (the alias by which the raw binary data is known inside the class) is then casted as a ByteArray to be able to access the data. In the end the QuakePalette class has three public properties, r, g & b, that represent the three RGB color channels for easy access.

By luke | Posted in Actionscript, Actionscript 3.0, Papervision3D, Programming | Comments (0)