Web Development Magazine

Symfony Reloaded Preview

Recently SensioLabs released Symfony Reloaded (or Symfony 2.0). The first change that every symfony developer will notice is that it’s no longer “symfony”, but “Symfony” (hint capital “S”). Creators claim that “Symfony 2.0 leads a new generation of PHP frameworks”, unfortuantely we will be able to verify it in late 2010 – when the stable version will be ready.

jQuery Preload images – tutorial and example

Not so long ago i created jQuery Image Resize Plugin, today i want to show you another plugin: jQuery Image Preloader. Basically it is a script that loads images in the background and track number of loaded images. It’s very simple, only 25 lines of code, but maybe useful if you are creating jQuery image gallery or some other script that requires image preloading.

WordPress Forum Plugin

It’s almost a year now since i released WPJobBoard (WordPress Job Board plugin), i got a positive feedback from the community, at the same time i learned few things to make WPJobBoard better. Now i am planning to release WPJobBoard 3.0, and within few months i am planning to launch completely new product WordPress Forum Plugin.

jQuery Image Resize Plugin

Few days ago i wrote jQuery Plugin Tutorial, today i want to give away my first open source jQuery plugin: image resizer. I made sure that it’s compatible with all major browsers: IE6+, FF3, Opera10, Chrome (didn’t check with Safari, hope someone can do it for me).

The whole idea was to make it as simple as possible to resize image to given size. The common problem developers face is to resize image to (for example) no more then 150px width or no more then 75px height and because getting real image size is not as simple as it seems i think you will find this plugin useful.

jQuery Plugin Tutorial

jQuery is getting really popular lately. Employers looking for JavaScript developers often requires them to know this library inside out, so today i want to show you my practical guide to jQuery plugins development. With the emphasis on best practices in plugin development. Creating plugin is plain simple, but developing a high quality plugin is a different story. Further more it shocks me that there are tons of tutorials online that do not even make distinction between jQuery extension and jQuery Plugin.

Create FireFox extension in jQuery

Few days ago Mozilla launched special site where you can find special FireFox addons. Special because they were written in JetPack. It’s a new technology that allows to write FireFox extensions not only in XUL, but in HTML, CSS and AJAX.

What is more important is that JetPack allows to use third party JavaScript libraries in your project, so developers can get full advantage of jQuery, Dojo, Google Maps and many other great JavaScript libraries.

Is Twitter having troubles?

Recently TechCrunch published article about Twitter and it’s decreasing traffic. According to comScore (company that offers solutions for online audience measurement), in October Twitter USA traffic declined by 8%. It dopped from 20.9 millions to 19.2 milions unique visitors.

Fortunately Twitter CEO Evan Williams is aware of this trend and hopes that new cool features that are going (or already were) implemented will reverse this trend.

Google creates programming language

That is a second news about Google in the row, however i think this is something that will interest every developer.

Google created programming language. While it is still in a beta stage and even Google is not using it on production servers, it is already released to the public as an open source product and can be downloaded anytime.

Google buys Admob for $750 milions

Analytics says that mobile advertising market will be worth over three bilions of dollars in 2013, yet Google went ahead and already bought Admob mobile advertising and monetization solution for a shocking amount of $750 000 000.

Admob is typical marketplace where advertisers contact publishers and buy adverts directly from them. Admob platform has some nice features like mobile analytics and mobile metrics (which is pretty much the same functionality as in other advertising platforms but with “mobile” prefix).

Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 book review

Recently Swati from Packt Publishing sent me free copy of Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 book. I was very interested in reading it once because i never took the time to find more about advanced features of the software that i am using almost on day to day basis and second because i was interested to find out how Marc Delisle (author of the book) will go about explaining all the functionality. In my opinion while explaining how to such software it is very easy to fall into trap of teaching people MySQL, rather then teaching how to use the actual software.

Well i have to say, that after reading the book i was nicely surprised. Marc focuses 100% on phpMyAdmin, no unnecessary MySQL or web development lessons is a big plus. One of the things i liked most was chapter about Authentication & Security. Some realy advanced stuff there. Author explains phpMyAdmin configuration options that probably most people (including myself) never heard about, shows how to setup for multi servers and makes some interesting notes about security.

Next, there are chapters explaining phpMyAdmin core functionality: creating databases, selecting data, manipulating data, modifying tables and so on. Probably everyone who ever worked with phpMyAdmin did not need to know that stuff as it’s very intuitive, but what i liked about it was that here and there Marc drops tips and hints that depending on what you are doing might improve your work.

Like with everything there are more advanced features that come into core functionality and this are: Relational system and multi table operations, everything with big enough screen shoots. Actually screen shoots in each chapter are big plus for whole book they contain only important information and are big enough to see all the details.

One thing i did not like was chapter about export, where Marc explains how to export data to many different formats (csv, pdf, excel, word, latex, xml, ods, odt, yaml codegen and few more). In my opinion just a few formats would be good enough.

All in all it’s a good book, pretty well written with nice screen shoots (like i already mentioned), really informative and straight to the point, just as i like it. I rate it 9/10.

If you are still not sure about this book you can grab free chapter here