Web Advent 2010

Introduction

Christmas is upon us once again, and it’s time to have a look at what’s under the Web Advent tree. Join us each day as our wonderful authors provide presents of tips, tricks, & tidbits to usher in the new year. Mele Kalikimaka!

Seasons: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

24^th Dec: Mistrust and Verify by Kitt Hodsden

When working on a web app with coworkers or fellow volunteers, few things are more important within the group than trust. Trust among…
23^rd Dec: Aspect-Oriented Design by Garrett Woodworth

I try to write simple apps. I try to code for today as Lorna articulated so well. Almost invariably, I end up with…
22^nd Dec: Don’t Panic by Derick Rethans

It’s finally happening. The end is near. The server is about to be destroyed by a fleet of Vogon cruisers…
21^st Dec: Color for the Holidays by Jon Bond-Caron

If part of your job involves debugging or monitoring PHP apps, you’ll most likely have used tail to check for…
20^th Dec: Big Data by Laura Thomson

Big data, data science, analytics. These are some of the hottest buzzwords in tech right now. Five years ago…
19^th Dec: The Ghost of Christmas Past by Luke Welling

PHP has been around nearly as long as there has been a Web to develop for, but it evolves constantly and is a modern programming language…
18^th Dec: Text and Media Files by Anna Filina

With a team of developers, I recently built a mission-critical web app that relied heavily upon the manipulation of files. I’d like to give you…
17^th Dec: Thumbnails by Owen Winkler

Many of us have had the pleasure of building a web app that requires the automated building of thumbnails from images uploaded at…
16^th Dec: Legacy Jungle by Mark Story

At some point in every developer’s career, they get the opportunity to work on a gnarly, horrible briar patch of a project. Surviving that experience…
15^th Dec: Debugging by Nate Abele

When it comes to debugging, the Swiss Army knife in the PHP developer’s toolbox is Xdebug…
14^th Dec: Usage Statistics by Ilia Alshanetsky

A few years ago, Damien Seguy started collecting information about what version of PHP people were using and how PHP’s usage compared…
13^th Dec: Streams by Lisa Denlinger

If you want to start building your own apps, one of the most important things you need to know is how to access APIs…
12^th Dec: Share and Enjoy by Gopal Vijayaraghavan

Data is precious. It is expensive to produce, time consuming to fetch, and eventually discarded. It makes sense to share it and save all the hassle…
11^th Dec: Managing LAMP by Marcel Esser

There are all sorts of software packages to help you deal with configuration management and software deployment, ranging from simple…
10^th Dec: Everyone Loves PHP by Scott MacVicar

A year ago today, I started at Facebook. I’ve been using PHP for the last twelve years, and before I got there, I thought I had seen most…
9^th Dec: Building Mobile Apps with PHP by Jonathan Stark

Way back when I first dove into web programming, PHP was the obvious choice for my needs. It was available on virtually all web servers, had excellent…
8^th Dec: Output Buffering by Nicholas Sloan

Output buffering has simple, practical applications, and it can also play a roll in more complicated systems. It is one of those tools that…
7^th Dec: Bits and PHPieces by Joël Perras

I like to think of PHP as a mixed bag of tricks. The language itself was born out of some simple, real-world use cases, and that ideology still drives…
6^th Dec: JavaScript for PHP Developers by Stoyan Stefanov

Hopefully, you’ve been a good geek in 2010. You’ve followed last year’s advice and learned some JavaScript…
5^th Dec: Code for Today by Lorna Mitchell

Most programmers are lazy, for some value of lazy. Why, then, do we sometimes over-engineer solutions to the point that…
4^th Dec: The Thing with the Two Heads by Ed Finkler

As web developers, we usually think of the apps or sites we create as single, contained units. That’s understandable, especially with PHP…
3^rd Dec: Profiling with XHGui by Paul Reinheimer

Everyone wants a fast web site. Making one is a bit more difficult. Profiling code during development is easy, thanks to Xdebug, but this…
2^nd Dec: First-Class APIs by Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson

APIs are commonly an afterthought, like a hot tub awkwardly attached to a house — a shoehorned approach that produces a suboptimal app…
1^st Dec: Localization by Anthony Gentile

When creating a web site, it is important to consider the audience. Localization allows the user interface to accommodate a user’s expectations…