I think of all the things I love about being a web developer – its the constant development and evolution of the technologies available to me as a developer. Just this week we have the following (proposal only at the moment) from Adobe – CSS Shaders.
Just a quick post from me today, to recommend jsFiddle. It’s an online service that allows you to quickly try out Javascript ideas and share them with other developers. The mileage you will get out of this for development I (would imagine) is small – but as a learning and sharing resource its fantastic!
The more I use jQuery the more I realise that I really should have checked out the source code a while back – rather than just viewing the framework as some kind of magical black box of Javascript wonder (not that jQuery isn’t full of wonder of course!). Thinking about how jQuery (and Javascript) works has helped me greatly in deciding good ways to do things.
Recently I have been building a system that required some interaction with Google Maps in terms of creating multiple custom markers to a map. There are many different approaches to solving this problem but I thought I would share my particular twist on this in this post.
Recently we have been working on a system that requires a large amount of data to be synchronized to MySQL (for driving a web interface) from FileMaker. After a few initial tests of methods for achieving this we found that the speed of the transfer was un-acceptable due to the large amount of data being transferred. The transfer was set to take place at several points throughout the day and would often still be running when it needed to run again – not good.
The first thing you will want to do is download the FPDF class files from http://www.fpdf.org/ – this site is also an excellent resource for the FPDF class, if you get stuck then a look through the manual or frequently asked questions will help out no end.
When writing a PHP based site – developers often also have to integrate with a database (otherwise the site tends not to be very exciting!) and a popular technology for this is a flavour of SQL. Rather than go through the basics of database queries using SQL (which if enough people ask me for – I certainly will do in the future) I have decided to write specifically about the mechanics of the JOIN command. The SQL Join command allows us to pull and combine data from two or more tables, where the result can be modified by specifying different data relationships between the tables.
Rob Basden Joins Linear Chat
Over the course of time we will all be posting about our particular areas of expertise – with mine being anything that falls under the category of “web technologies” (although there may be a few diversions in there at some points). So keep an eye out for some posts about anything from CSS and HTML through to Adobe Flash and Photoshop (I know, I know its not strictly a “web technology” but its a fantastic piece of software for any web developer to get their head around – even if your focus is primarily on development).
