By Michael J. RossRegular e-commerce shopping carts work fine if the functionality of the store site is limited to listing products, allowing customers to purchase them, accepting credit card payments, and all of the other e-commerce features offered by these shopping cart solutions. But what if you also want to support collaborative editing of content, community forums, and other capabilities that could help increase traffic to your site, but are usually only found in content management systems (CMSs)? Is it possible to combine the best of both worlds — shopping carts and CMSs?
Wednesday, 20th August 2008
Zend Framework Tutorial
By Lyndon Baptiste
I find myself constantly bombarded with questions from students and co-workers I've introduced to the Zend Framework regarding how the different components can come together to form a basic application. I've searched, I have found, I have emailed great tutorials, but still the most common questions are posed "What's should I include in index.php?", "Should I use Zend_Db_Table?", "And what about Zend_Form?"
Wednesday, 13th August 2008
Creating an Online Newsletter with Drupal
By Michael J. Ross
As part of the Information Revolution that is changing the way that the world works and plays, people are increasingly turning to the Internet for the information they use to make decisions — financial, professional, health, etc. Consequently, news publications that are printed and mailed through the post are being supplanted by portal news sites, blogs, and online newsletters (oftentimes referred to as "e-zines" — electronic magazines).
Friday, 11th July 2008
Setting Up Subversion for Development on Windows
By Akash Mehta
When developing web applications on your own, a common challenge is keeping track of your changes. Mature version control systems make it easier to manage development as projects increase in size and complexity. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to set up Subversion on a Windows machine and get started with a simple project.
Wednesday, 2nd July 2008
Port Scanning and Service Status Checking in PHP
By Akash Mehta
While building web applications, it's often important to keep an eye on the other services running on your server. Having access to the current status of public servers can empower your applications to make decisions and respond to problems automatically. Acknowledging a service is offline can also save endless support emails. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to keep track of your server status by scanning ports on your server with PHP.
Friday, 6th June 2008
Getting Started with AJAX in jQuery
By Akash Mehta
AJAX is probably the biggest thing you can add to your site; with AJAX, you can dramatically increase functionality, and give your end users more usable web applications. But AJAX is tricky to get started with - it usually requires very complex JavaScript knowledge. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to get started with AJAX using the jQuery JavaScript framework.
Sunday, 11th May 2008
Web Database Access from Desktop Applications
By Michael J. Ross
There may be growing interest in moving computer applications from the desktop to the Web. But desktop applications are still a huge market, whose demise has been prematurely reported by the media in the past, and will most likely be reported in the future. In addition, for many domain areas, a Web browser — even for an AJAX-powered site — will be insufficient for many application needs.
Tuesday, 6th May 2008
JavaScript Debugging Techniques with Firebug
By Akash Mehta
Server side scripters have always had it easy; debugging a web application is simple, and IDEs make problems easy to identify. Client-side scripting with JavaScript, however, is a whole new ball game. In this tutorial, I'll identify the best basic and advanced JavaScript debugging techniques to help you take control of your JavaScript code.
Sunday, 20th April 2008