Linux and PHP web application support and development (Bromsgrove, UK)
This year, we’re sponsoring the second annual PHPNE conference – which is being held in Tyneside on 18th March 2014. Tickets are still available, costing £75 – which sounds like a very good deal to us!
While desktop users are generally getting faster and faster internet connections, it’s still the case that optimising a page’s generation and delivery can lead to a significantly better user experience. This is especially the case for mobile users – who are often on a relatively low speed and/or high latency connection. With this in mind, here […]
A useful way of ‘warming up’ in the morning is to spend 10-15 minutes doing a short task/exercise – partly to hone your skills as a programmer through practice and repetition – and partly just to get into the right frame of mind. See this article on wikipedia for more information and links, and one example String […]
Dear other web developers …. if you’re going to add a cron job to a (web) server, please make sure any output is sent to a valid email address (or log file) which is monitored….
Our new, responsive theme for Anorak.co.uk has gone live (caution: the site is probably not “safe for work”). Benefits – Much better layout on mobile devices (e.g. smart phones) which account for 40% of traffic Better navigation support for mobile users (who can’t use normal hover-over menus due to the touch screen UI) Better advert […]
When developing applications, an initial implementation often involves multiple tasks occurring in real time, and in sequence. While this may function well initially, often over time as the system grows, performance issues crop up.
TL;DR version Use Solr as a ‘search engine’ for applications. It is fast. A lot faster than MySQL (at least in one slightly-scientific study we’ve undertaken). Further details below….
When writing unit tests, it’s often desirable to ‘mimick’ a backend call to web service or database (without using the real thing backend). Ideally you need this to be quick and easy to do. One way of doing this is to use mock or double objects. This article discusses their use with PHPUnit (a unit […]
Web applications often have a requirement to log information about a request to a database. In a contrived example this could just be a global counter which attempts to amaze visitors to your site about how many requests you’ve handled in the last hour/day/week/month. One approach to doing this is to update a database each […]