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Java Web Start

Gertjan — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:17:16 +0000

In the growing market of the software industry today, users are clamoring for client applications that can be run not only from a desktop environment but also from the Internet. Users want the same functionality and support from Web-based applications as they get from those on their desktop, preferably packed with a thin-client interface. The most common solution, currently, is to develop two separate Java applications: one that executes as a desktop application and one that simulates much of the functionality of a desktop application, but is accessed from the Web. This is a burden to developers, who are required to write two separate applications that perform the same on different execution environments, but it is also a financial burden to software companies, which are forced to provide support for two separate applications. To alleviate this problem, Sun Microsystems has introduced Java Web Start, a client-side technology that enables Java applications to launch either from a desktop or from a Web page. This eliminates the need to develop Java support for Web applications, and also provides an efficient means to upgrade, maintain, and manage client-side Java applications with the support of any common Web server.

What is Java Web Start?

Java Web Start is a software technology that encompasses the portability of applets, the maintainability of Servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology, and the simplicity of markup languages such as XML and HTML. It is a Java-based application that allows full-featured Java 2 client applications to be launched, deployed, and updated from a standard Web server. Upon launching Java Web Start for the first time, the user may download new client applications from the Web; thereafter these applications may be initiated either through a link on a Web page or (in Windows) from desktop icons or the Start menu. Applications initialize quickly under Java Web Start, are cached on the client machine, and can be launched remotely offline. Additionally, because Java Web Start is built from Java 2 technology, it inherits the Java platform’s complete security architecture.

Since Java Web Start is, in itself, a Java application, the software is platform independent and can be supported on any client system that supports the Java 2 platform. Java Web Start performs an update automatically when a client application is launched, downloading the latest code from the Web while simultaneously loading the application from a previous cache (provided that a cache exists). Java Web Start also provides a Java Application Manager utility, allowing end-users to organize their Java applications as well as providing a variety of options, such as clearing the cache of downloaded applications, specifying the use of multiple JREs, and setting HTTP proxies.

Link: Java Web Start

Pimp Your PHP App with Flex!

Gertjan — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:00:57 +0000

If you’re looking to add some pizzazz to your PHP application, look no further—Adobe’s Flex is here to give your interface some polish. In this article Lennart Steinke shows us how to make a Flex widget with a PHP back end. Read carefully, because there’s a quiz at the end: for a limited time, every entrant scores a free Flex reference just for doing the quiz, plus three lucky winners will each receive a free copy of Adobe’s Flex Builder 3!

Flex is Adobe’s open source web application framework designed for speedy development of web or desktop applications. It allows you to build software that’s then compiled into a Flash (SWF) file, and can be run in any browser with the Flash plugin installed. Best of all, it’s fun to use. You can create great looking applications easily: eye candy and pleasing effects are built in, and can be added to your app with just a few lines of additional code. This allows you to create a cool application in a short amount of time.

Link: Pimp Your PHP App with Flex!

Build a Facebook application with Zend Framework

Gertjan — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:55:27 +0000

You can integrate your application with facebook in two way: with an IFRAME (using XFBML) or with FBML.

You can embed your content in a Facebook page through FBML or use an IFRAME

Facebook will be a proxy between your server and the user’s browser: it will load a page form your own server like a normal browser, parse it, “enhance” it with his components and then embed it in a Facebook page. You will use standard HTML tags plus FBML tags.

Pros:

You can use almost standard HTML, but with some other tags like: ,
Feature rich: with a simple tag integrate wall, comments, tabs, dashboard and many others components (Complete list of facebook tags)
The url in the browser follow the navigation
Faster when you need data from facebook database (groups, friends, etc.)

Cons:

Slower page load times: restart the facebook chat at every request
Can’t use standard JavaScript, only FBJS that’s almost equals but your existing scripts and libraries won’t work
Its losing ground: Facebook is trying to take IFRAME/XFBML on par

Link: Build a Facebook application with Zend Framework

Practical PHP Performance

Gertjan — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:41:54 +0000

When it comes to building web applications in PHP, performance isn’t typically a major concern. Features, usability and any business concerns are considered a greater priority, as they can be better demonstrated and visualised. Performance graphs don’t make the boss’s day.

So, why should you as a PHP developer, worry about performance? Quite a few reasons, in fact:

Efficient code gives you more flexibility with what you do with your application – for example, you can’t exactly throw in a thumbnailing routine if you’ve already maxxed your server.
Performance techniques generally line up with best practices, and while best practices are their own justification, they will save you time (and money!) in the long run.
On a high-scale application, performance graphs won’t make much of a difference. Still, informing the boss that, thanks to your performance efforts, you can cut server costs significantly, will definitely earn you some credit, and maybe even a raise.
Well written (and therefore efficient) are easier to debug.
The potential performance of PHP applications is certainly something to be proud of – at one stage, Digg was handling 200 million page views per month with just three web servers and eight database servers. PHP by its nature is one of the fastest web scripting languages available, having been more or less written for mod_php, the Apache module used for most PHP installations. Unlike Java, PHP is sufficiently dynamic to run literally as lightweight as you require – for example, you could write a web service in just ten lines of code that could easily handle millions of hits a day, as opposed to the overhead of pulling in a significant chunk of enterprise-sized libraries that you probably don’t need.

Link: Practical PHP Performance

Desktop Application Development with PHP-GTK

Gertjan — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:37:57 +0000

PHP-GTK 2 is out, and with it, a fantastic means for PHP developers to build useful, reliable cross-platform desktop applications. This tutorial will show you how to get up and running with PHP-GTK in no time and build your first desktop application.

Before you continue, have a brief read through my previous article on building desktop applications in PHP, for a bit of background to this tutorial. PHP-GTK is a PHP extension that provides bindings for the GTK window system. GTK, or Gimp ToolKit, provides a collection of visual elements called “controls” which you can use in your PHP application – essentially, these provide the visuals. The PHP bindings from PHP-GTK allow us as developers to manipulate these controls programatically, and from within PHP.

This is all very well, but what does it mean for you? In short, you can take all your existing PHP skills, and reuse your existing PHP code, but build complete desktop applications. In my previous article, I elaborate on the benefits of desktop applications and why you might want to build them; but consider being able to achieve everything Flash objects and Java applets can without having to learn a new language.

Link: Desktop Application Development with PHP-GTK

9 PHP Debugging Techniques You Should Be Using

Gertjan — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:33:58 +0000

Isn’t writing new code great? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if all were ever had to do is write software from scratch, not having to worry about methods of classes past? Unfortunately, we all know that this is not the case. In fact, estimates say that we spend around 80% of our programming time maintaining old code.

The tutorial talks about following techniques:

Enable Notices (on your development environment!)
Use a Logging System
Log Errors
Check Function Parameters
Use an Integrated Development Environment and Debugger
Unit Testing
No Magic! (Or, Avoid Side Effects)
Use Manual Redirects When Debugging
Keep Things Simple

Link: 9 PHP Debugging Techniques You Should Be Using

Installing MySQL on Windows

Gertjan — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:23:43 +0000

As Web sites and Web-based applications become more important to commercial firms and other organizations, so too does the methods used for storing data online, such as customer contact information, system login details, product data, and much more. Rewritable flat files may be sufficient for extremely limited data for which security is not an issue. But for most Web sites and applications, a robust database is called for.

There are several relational database management systems (RDBMSs) from which you the developer can choose, ranging from expensive systems that can prove quite difficult to administer, to free and open source alternatives that may not have as many features as the proprietary RDBMSs, but can be much faster to set up and work with. Of these, MySQL is the hands-down favorite.

In this tutorial, we will take a detailed look at how to obtain, install, and configure the MySQL database server on your Windows PC.

Link: Installing MySQL on Windows

Generating Search Engine Friendly Titles for your URL

Gertjan — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:21:20 +0000

For most dynamic websites you will want to create “Search Engine Friendly” or “User Friendly” URLs, rather than using ugly and meaningless strings or IDs to reference your content. The way you interpret the URLs and use them to get your content is for another article and I won’t go into that right now, what I want to talk about is how to turn your page titles into versions that can be used in your URL.

For example you have a page called “Search Engine Friendly URLs”. In the URL you will ideally want to have this string, only lowercase and with dashes in place of the spaces: “search-engine-friendly-urls”. Therefore the URL to the page becomes “http://www.yourdomain.com/search-engine-friendly-urls/” or similar.

Link: Generating Search Engine Friendly Titles for your URL

Getting Started with Memcache

Gertjan — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:15:30 +0000

Memcache is a tool which can cache objects in memory – and is often used for speeding up dynamic web applications. PHP has a built-in module for working with memcache, and its a simple and convenient way of introducing caching to your application.

PHP has a PECL module for talking to memcached – look up how to install for your system, but be aware that it isn’t bundled. It’s a good module to include on your system however, quite a few apps will take advantage of it where available.

Memcache is object storage, objects are stored in a serialised manner in RAM, with a unique key to identify them. This means that you need a unique string to identify any object you may store in the cache. Primary keys work fine but look out for when you are storing multiple types of object in there – _ probably works better in that scenario.

The storage persists as long as the machine is on – a reboot empties the RAM and therefore clears the cache. You can also set how long a cached object is valid for. After that time, memcache will return false when you request your object and your code will fall through to its usual retrieval process.

Link: Getting Started with Memcache

MVC, XSLT and other animals

Gertjan — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:09:48 +0000

The MVC architectural pattern is a smart and bright way of developing web-based applications. The acronym MVC stands for Model, View and Control: these are the three components that, according to the pattern, every application can (and should) be divided into. I would actually state that MVC is “the ultimate” way of developing apps but since IT is such a fast-growing/evolving discipline, I won’t dare being so bold and just say that it is certainly a topic every good developer should spend some time on.

This article will try to briefly expose the basics of the MVC pattern and put forward an alternative template management system based on the duo XML/XSLT. Many MVC implementations in php are actually quite fuzzy in the way they manage the Views layer. Most of them partially fail in separating the markup from the programming language and there are often some residual bits of php code here and there.

As he’ll show you in a while, it is absolutely possible (and wise) to keep the two things clearly distinct and obtain a complete separation of presentation from logic.

The goal of MVC pattern is, as stated above, to identify (divide and develop separately) the 3 layers we have briefly outlined.

Link: MVC, XSLT and other animals