These days, it's becoming increasingly harder to find web applications that are homogenous in terms of the tools they use to Get Things Done. The ability to build the web front-end of your site using PHP but a critical part that requires asynchronous processing using Node.js is something that is both exciting and, well, practical. [...]

In discussions with my friend Kevin, I have come to realize that we have arrived at the same conclusions about the use of web application frameworks. Much of these conclusions have driven from 12+ years in building applications using them, with various rates of success. Suffice it to say, only the most l33t programmers out [...]

The other day I had a nice meeting in my basement lair with my co-workers. We laughed. We cried. We had some BBQ'd burgers, and nobody got food poisoning. As we discussed the implementation of our new fantasy gaming platform, I managed to figure out that one requirement was for an admin to upload a [...]

The folks at Packt Publishing asked if I was interested in reviewing their upcoming title "CodeIgniter 1.7: Professional Development" due to my experience with CodeIgniter. While it is not my favourite framework (for reasons that I have explained on this blog), I still have to work with it going forward. I was interested to see [...]

(Note, this example was using Zend Framework 1.10, so things might change going forwards). As a lapsed tester, I've made the commitment to build out our Zend Framework powered application using tests going forward. The first two modules for the app *should* have been done with tests, and for that I hang my head with [...]