Author Topic: RAWK Web Development Circle  (Read 118965 times)

Offline Deano06

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RAWK Web Development Circle
« on: June 24, 2008, 09:24:26 pm »
As suggested in the HTML help thread.


Here is a web development thread.

XHTML
CSS
Javascript
MySQL
PHP
ASP
MySQL
Ruby on Rails
Apache2
etc etc.


I'll get started so who here is into web development as a hobby career etc? What are your preferences. I'm a LAMP guy.

Timiano: ASP.NET, C#, IIS 6.0, SharePoint 2007.

Slick Beef: PHP, ASP, MSSQL, IIS..... Really keen to learn flash and ASP.net & C# tho, as I'm trying to find a new job and want to broaden my skills a bit..

Degs: PHP & Mysql mostly, throw in the obligatory HTML and CSS though.

Wacko: Python, PHP. Get by in Ruby (not a massive fan). Solid HTML, CSS, decent JavaScript (though I dislike it).
Working on improving: Smalltalk. Squeak and Seaside in particular. It's a bit freaky, though.
Next thing, maybe: Cocoa. Usually, I avoid platform-specific stuff like the plague, but MacRuby looks really interesting. I wish they'd done it with Python, instead, though.

Mudface: ASP.NET, C#, T-SQL, HTML, CSS. Would like to get better with Javascript, and AJAX.

CraigS: PHP, mySQL, IIS, Javascript, cold fusion (not much anymore, thankfully), (a bit of) ASP, Flash (& actionscript). And a bit specialised, but if anyone else is doing it: Using Filemaker as a back end DB with the FM PHP API (and also with FX.php). Integrating flash with Filemaker back end using XML requests.

BrettD: I'm a C#.net-er. ASP.NET, C#, SQL 2005/2008, LINQ, JavaScript (more JQuery really). Mainly web stuff but been doing Windows stuff today.


« Last Edit: June 26, 2008, 02:40:20 pm by Armin »

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #1 on: June 24, 2008, 09:25:46 pm »
I'm not very good myself, just a novice but this lad is boss

www.tutvid.com/tutorials.html
Please take a look at my latest blog for theredmentv "Dispelling the Rodgers/Martinez myth" http://www.theredmentv.com/blog/p/263 All other blogs can be read at www.theredmentv.com/blog Let me know your thoughts

Offline timiano

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #2 on: June 24, 2008, 10:09:09 pm »
What are your preferences

ASP.NET, C#, IIS 6.0, SharePoint 2007.

Offline Slick_Beef

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #3 on: June 24, 2008, 10:11:26 pm »
PHP, ASP, MSSQL, IIS..... Really keen to learn flash and ASP.net & C# tho, as I'm trying to find a new job and want to broaden my skills a bit..

Offline Deano06

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #4 on: June 24, 2008, 10:57:39 pm »
ASP.NET, C#, IIS 6.0, SharePoint 2007.

I'm guessing you've never deployed a website then hahaha.

I love C# as a language though.

Offline Degs

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #5 on: June 24, 2008, 10:59:10 pm »
Web development?
PHP & Mysql mostly, throw in the obligatory HTML and CSS though.

Learnt a bit of XML but really couldn't see the point in it.

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #6 on: June 24, 2008, 11:00:54 pm »


Learnt a bit of XML but really couldn't see the point in it.
It's a good intermediary, human-readable way of exchanging data.

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #7 on: June 24, 2008, 11:03:14 pm »
I'm guessing you've never deployed a website then hahaha.

Why would you say that?

Offline Degs

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #8 on: June 24, 2008, 11:04:21 pm »
It's a good intermediary, human-readable way of exchanging data.
I get what you mean, but if you just tag something properly and comment where you should you could get the same effect surely?

And if you need a human-readable way to exchange data then why not make a front end then the not so advanced users won't be overwhelmed by code.

It seemed a bit outdated to me when I learnt it.  But then again my teacher wasn't great and we never really got to see any examples of why it was practically a good thing, or why it was better than other technologies.

Offline Mudface_

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #9 on: June 25, 2008, 08:41:54 am »
Good idea for a thread. Although-

I'm guessing you've never deployed a website then hahaha.

- if it's just going to be FOSS adherents sneering at people who use Microsoft tools and vice versa, then this will be my first and last post in it.

I develop intranet apps for my company using ASP.NET (C#) and SQL Server 2000/2005. One of the areas I'm most interested in is architecture, in particular cleanly separating code from UI. I usually use a provider model, in case the data store changes, with an n-tier set-up using custom business objects, but recently I've started using datasets, which are much quicker to set-up but you do lose some flexibility. I'd be interested in hearing from other ASP.NET developers on the pros and cons of using domain objects versus datasets, and whether LINQ can be successfully used in an n-tier environment, as from the looks of it, you'd be mixing data access code with your business objects.

I'd also be interested in hearing from those using scripting languages on how they've implemented n-tier like set-ups. The one (and thankfully only) time I've been exposed to a classic ASP site, it was an horrendous mish-mash of code intermingled with presentational HTML. To be fair, the person who did it was an absolute duffer and ASP is pretty horrible, but is it possible in say PHP?

Offline wacko

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #10 on: June 25, 2008, 09:14:21 am »
Can do: Python, PHP. Get by in Ruby (not a massive fan). Solid HTML, CSS, decent JavaScript (though I dislike it).
Working on improving: Smalltalk. Squeak and Seaside in particular. It's a bit freaky, though.
Next thing, maybe: Cocoa. Usually, I avoid platform-specific stuff like the plague, but MacRuby looks really interesting. I wish they'd done it with Python, instead, though.

I think something that I get a lot better than most is unicode etc., internationalisation and localisation. Even Google and Amazon just don't understand how multilingual people (want to) use the Internet.

I'm seriously considering going back to university to do a CS degree, but I'm worried they won't have me because I've only got GCSE maths.

Edited to follow Armin's wise words.
« Last Edit: June 25, 2008, 12:55:35 pm by wacko »
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Offline Armin

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #11 on: June 25, 2008, 09:25:12 am »
Excellent idea for a thread. As Mudface says above, if you can keep the tiresome 'x is shite y is miles better' stuff out of it then it might be useful. Could even generate some work.

If everyone does a brief statement of their skillset/areas they'd like to improve like SB and Timiano:

PHP, ASP, MSSQL, IIS..... Really keen to learn flash and ASP.net & C# tho, as I'm trying to find a new job and want to broaden my skills a bit..

ASP.NET, C#, IIS 6.0, SharePoint 2007.

It could be incorporated in the top post along with links like TBHAS posted. That way if someone is looking for those skills they'll be able to find them.

Armin: Dreamweaver, Fireworks and about 6 html tags :P
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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #12 on: June 25, 2008, 09:46:31 am »
Mudface: ASP.NET, C#, T-SQL, HTML, CSS. Would like to get better with Javascript, and AJAX.

Offline Ben S

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #13 on: June 25, 2008, 10:29:03 am »
Anyone used lighttpd instead of apache and had good results?

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #14 on: June 25, 2008, 11:19:29 am »
PHP, mySQL, IIS, Javascript, cold fusion (not much anymore, thankfully), (a bit of) ASP, Flash (& actionscript)

And a bit specialised, but if anyone else is doing it:
Using Filemaker as a back end DB with the FM PHP API (and also with FX.php).
Integrating flash with Filemaker back end using XML requests.

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #15 on: June 25, 2008, 12:44:14 pm »
I'm a C#.net-er.

ASP.NET, C#, SQL 2005/2008, LINQ, JavaScript (more JQuery really). Mainly web stuff but been doing Windows stuff today.

Offline Deano06

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #16 on: June 25, 2008, 03:03:42 pm »
Anyone used lighttpd instead of apache and had good results?

Yeah, it's obviously very fast but not as fully featured as apache but has more features than IIS.

P.M me if you want some more info.

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #17 on: June 25, 2008, 03:10:26 pm »
also here are some sites I developed if anyone wants a gander

http://www.g2i.org/

http://www.teachingoutsidetheclassroom.com/

also done intranet stuff for Shell, IBM, P&O etc.

Currency developing a new website for Brewers (the painting/decorating supplies chain).

Offline Ben S

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #18 on: June 25, 2008, 03:12:05 pm »
Yeah, it's obviously very fast but not as fully featured as apache but has more features than IIS.

P.M me if you want some more info.

Using it here to serve most of the static content. Pretty good & efficient, hasn't grown beyond a 25MB process.

Hostnamestatic.redandwhitekop.com ()
Uptime55 days 23 hours 2 min 33 s
Started at2008-04-30 16:06:02
absolute (since start)
Requests222 Mreq
Traffic697.55 Gbyte
average (since start)
Requests46  req/s
Traffic151.28 kbyte/s
average (5s sliding average)
Requests70  req/s
Traffic241.41 kbyte/s

Tempted to switch the rest over with php running through fcgi, although it's made more difficult by the fact that the server runs cPanel (for no real good reason other than time to plan a proper migration away from it).

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #19 on: June 25, 2008, 03:18:28 pm »
That's encouraging about JavaScript but why do you say I should worry about Perl?

I would like to have been able to use PHP but my hosting provider package only allows Perl for server side....

The 123-reg Starter hosting only support the following coding languages:

    * HTML
    * SSI (shtml)
    * CGI/Perl

123-reg Starter hosting does NOT support:

    * MySQL
    * MsSQL
    * PHP
    * ASP
    * JSP
    * .NET


I'd say get a hosting company that supports more languages:

godaddy is very cheap (£2 a month for a basic package) I've never had any problems.

Freehostia do a free php/mysql package wouldn't recommend it for a production site but for testing/development of your skills it's good enough.

PHP is a language developed for the web, so it works with the web very well, it's by no means perfect at all but it's very easy to deploy, the language is easy to learn and has loads and loads of built in functions. Sometimes I wish it where more like C# in it's syntax but developing apps in PHP is far, far faster than any other language. And it's also a faster language to interpret for servers. PHP/Apache2 is also widely accepted as more secure than ASP/IIS.

Perl is difficult to learn and it's dying out.

I love PHP even for all it's faults and it's faults are more than compensated for in many ways.

Good luck, whatever language you choose!

Offline Deano06

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #20 on: June 25, 2008, 03:24:10 pm »
Using it here to serve most of the static content. Pretty good & efficient, hasn't grown beyond a 25MB process.

Hostnamestatic.redandwhitekop.com ()
Uptime55 days 23 hours 2 min 33 s
Started at2008-04-30 16:06:02
absolute (since start)
Requests222 Mreq
Traffic697.55 Gbyte
average (since start)
Requests46  req/s
Traffic151.28 kbyte/s
average (5s sliding average)
Requests70  req/s
Traffic241.41 kbyte/s

Tempted to switch the rest over with php running through fcgi, although it's made more difficult by the fact that the server runs cPanel (for no real good reason other than time to plan a proper migration away from it).

That's good going.

Are you doing any caching on your dynamic content? Caching is fresh on my mind at the moment. Pages on the site I'm working on at the moment are going from 0.6 seconds to 0.0003. Also eases the strain on the database server too.




Offline Ben S

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #21 on: June 25, 2008, 03:33:44 pm »
SMF can use APC to cache a large number of variables that stay relatively static, e.g. permissions, user profile data etc etc.

Not really a way to cache entire forum pages since they change so often and the content on them varies with the users logged in etc.

Using APC probably reduces queries by about 50% though.

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #22 on: June 25, 2008, 03:36:59 pm »
I guess for something this dynamic it would be hard especially if you want to retain things like view counts etc.

Offline Ben S

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #23 on: June 25, 2008, 04:09:55 pm »
Indeed, just caching the major resource intensive queries is about as far as you can go really.

Oh, just remembered, another fantastic little "ap" is sphinx.

With MySQL being absolutely shite at searching through a large dataset, sphinx is the only real option. MySQL fulltext search is shite.

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #24 on: June 25, 2008, 04:18:37 pm »
mysql 6 will fix alot of the searching stuff.

I'm really tempted to switch to sqlite on bigger projects that are going to be used on dedicated servers. sqlite is the most deployed SQL database ever. I need to research it more. It would also require re-writing the database abstraction layer I use which is just for mysql at the moment. I can't see it taking too long.

Anyone know anything about SQLlite?

Offline wacko

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #25 on: June 25, 2008, 05:15:46 pm »
mysql 6 will fix alot of the searching stuff.

I'm really tempted to switch to sqlite on bigger projects that are going to be used on dedicated servers. sqlite is the most deployed SQL database ever. I need to research it more. It would also require re-writing the database abstraction layer I use which is just for mysql at the moment. I can't see it taking too long.

Anyone know anything about SQLlite?
SQLite is designed for embedded applications. If you try using it in an application with multiple concurrent write operations, it'll start hurting. It's not designed for that kind of thing at all, but rather for single-user applications. I know Apple use it in Mail and on the iPods. Pretty much every mobile phone in existence uses SQLite, too.

There was an interesting interview with the original author on the FLOSS Weekly podcasts a couple of months ago. Grab it here: http://twit.tv/floss26

Doesn't PHP have a proper DB abstraction layer so you can swap out DB backends seamlessly? What about an ORM like Python's Alchemy/SQLObject or Ruby's Active Record?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #26 on: June 25, 2008, 05:23:11 pm »
Interesting you should say about SQLite. I've read that it's fairly robust for webserver usage and still lighter than MySQL even in racing/locking environments.

I've actually written an activerecord implementation for php which we use alot, it's very good but you still need an abstraction layer in between the data access object and the database for portability etc.

If people are interested I'd be willing to share the activerecord implementation if enough people want it.

It makes development 10x faster when it comes to database related stuff. Another great idea stolen from RoR ;)

Offline wacko

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #27 on: June 25, 2008, 05:31:55 pm »
Interesting you should say about SQLite. I've read that it's fairly robust for webserver usage and still lighter than MySQL even in racing/locking environments.
For read operations, it is plenty fast. If there are lots of writes, the performance goes down the toilet. Listen to the podcast: the developer talks about the performance in depth.

I've actually written an activerecord implementation for php which we use alot, it's very good but you still need an abstraction layer in between the data access object and the database for portability etc.

If people are interested I'd be willing to share the activerecord implementation if enough people want it.

It makes development 10x faster when it comes to database related stuff. Another great idea stolen from RoR ;)
Of course. I didn't realise you were rolling your own. I'd love to have a look at that. I don't have an immediate need for it, but next time I need to work with PHP and databases, I'd much prefer to be using an ORM so I don't have to worry about SQL, DB abstraction and SQL injection myself.
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Offline Deano06

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #28 on: June 25, 2008, 05:39:30 pm »
I think it's much nicer to write

<?

$user=new user();

$user->name="Robin Smith";

$user->phonenumber="01273 444 444";

$user->age=22;

$user->create();

?>

than:

<?

mysql_query('insert into user (name,phonenumber,age) values ("Robin Smith","01273 444 444",21)');

?>


and then getting data out of the database:

<?
$user=new user(123);
print $user->name;
?>

far nicer than

<?
$userRs=mysql_query("select * from user where id=123");
$user=mysql_fetch_assoc($userRs);
print $user['name'];
?>


Offline Deano06

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #29 on: June 25, 2008, 05:40:03 pm »
P.S. I'll give that podcast a listen too.

Offline wacko

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #30 on: June 25, 2008, 06:03:26 pm »
I think it's much nicer to write
Agree 100%. Much prefer OO-style programming. It's looks cleaner, is more readable, and is a lot easier to refactor/alter.
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Offline BrettD

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #31 on: June 25, 2008, 07:05:47 pm »
Agree 100%. Much prefer OO-style programming. It's looks cleaner, is more readable, and is a lot easier to refactor/alter.

That's probably why OO stuff is so popular nowadays.

User myUser = new User();
myUser.Name = "Joe Bloggs";
myUser.Email = "joebloggs@whatever.com";
myUser.Tel = 0123456789;

myUser.Add();

If you can't understand that as someone beginning programming then there isn't much hope IMO.

Offline PaulV

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #32 on: June 25, 2008, 07:26:00 pm »
I've actually written an activerecord implementation for php which we use alot, it's very good but you still need an abstraction layer in between the data access object and the database for portability etc.
Personally, I use LAMP and program using the CakePHP MVC framework (manual for the new 1.2 version is at http://book.cakephp.org/complete/3/the-manual). Separates the html from the code nicely and tucks the sql queries away. I had a look at a few other frameworks but decided cakePHP was best for my needs. I will be spending the summer upgrading to the latest version (cakePHP 1.2RC1 just released) and adding a whole load of new features.

My site is http://livemaths.co.uk and uses PHP/MySQL throughout although the tree in the front end is javascript from YahooUI.
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Offline wacko

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #33 on: June 25, 2008, 11:00:18 pm »
That's probably why OO stuff is so popular nowadays.

User myUser = new User();
myUser.Name = "Joe Bloggs";
myUser.Email = "joebloggs@whatever.com";
myUser.Tel = 0123456789;

myUser.Add();

If you can't understand that as someone beginning programming then there isn't much hope IMO.
Funnily enough, I know a few PHP hobbyists who totally disdain OO, presumably because they don't really get it. I didn't really till I got into Python. Mind you, PHP is to OO what RuPaul is to womankind.

Does anyone use any exotic stuff like Lisp?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

Offline wacko

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #34 on: June 25, 2008, 11:09:23 pm »
My site is http://livemaths.co.uk and uses PHP/MySQL throughout although the tree in the front end is javascript from YahooUI.
Love the background! How do you get those lovely, readable URLs? Does it catch 404s or does it need Apache mod_rewrite?
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Offline Degs

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #35 on: June 25, 2008, 11:14:28 pm »
Funnily enough, I know a few PHP hobbyists who totally disdain OO, presumably because they don't really get it. I didn't really till I got into Python. Mind you, PHP is to OO what RuPaul is to womankind.

Does anyone use any exotic stuff like Lisp?
Nah you can get OO and not like it.
I know of people who don't like the disjointedness of it and prefer having it all "in the one bit" if you know what I mean.

Personally swing either way depending on the size and nature of the project.

Offline Deano06

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #36 on: June 26, 2008, 12:09:11 am »
Personally, I use LAMP and program using the CakePHP MVC framework (manual for the new 1.2 version is at http://book.cakephp.org/complete/3/the-manual). Separates the html from the code nicely and tucks the sql queries away. I had a look at a few other frameworks but decided cakePHP was best for my needs. I will be spending the summer upgrading to the latest version (cakePHP 1.2RC1 just released) and adding a whole load of new features.

My site is http://livemaths.co.uk and uses PHP/MySQL throughout although the tree in the front end is javascript from YahooUI.

Model View Controller is definitely the way to go at the moment. I hate seeing SQL queries in my code unless it's totally necessary.

I don't understand how someone can not like OO. It's almost impossible to organise code properly without OO. it's so easy to keep things modular. it's going to be even better when PHP 5.3 is ready for production and we get namespacing.

Lisp is old school but obviously historically very important. I'm learning Objective-C 2, it's pretty straight forward if you've worked with C like languages like PHP before but the notation is different. You know how you have -> in PHP and . in C#. Obj-C uses weird []. Harder to read for me.

The thing about object oriented vs procedural (traditional) programming styles is almost anyone can understand and conceptualise procedural code but object-oriented requires a very special mind. Especially with concepts like scope resolution, overloading, abstract classes, interfaces etc.


Offline wacko

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #37 on: June 26, 2008, 12:25:32 am »
Nah you can get OO and not like it.
I know of people who don't like the disjointedness of it and prefer having it all "in the one bit" if you know what I mean.

Personally swing either way depending on the size and nature of the project.
I feel exactly the same as you, but these guys don't see any advantage in it at all. I haven't really looked at version 5, but last time I looked you couldn't do any of the cool OO stuff like dropping custom objects into existing functions. It's just for organisation and namespacing as far as I can tell.
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Offline DarrenKaye

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #38 on: June 26, 2008, 03:09:19 am »
I am not really into web stuff but I have to do some every now and then.Simple things at most of times so I can't claim I know anything about something specific so I study things related to the problem when it appears. CMonkey.
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Offline PaulV

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Re: RAWK Web Development Circle
« Reply #39 on: June 26, 2008, 02:24:32 pm »
Love the background! How do you get those lovely, readable URLs? Does it catch 404s or does it need Apache mod_rewrite?
Yes, it uses Apache mod_rewite. but your URL then ends up in the form /controllername/functionname/param1/param2 etc None of this ?a=2345&c="asda" malarky - and cakePHP is set up to use mod_rewrite out of the box.

Every host (only a handful) I have used supports mod_rewrite

If you request a non-existent controller/action, you get a customisable page.
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