TheWayOfCoding.com

From the previous posts it’s easy to notice that I’ve been searching for an efficient way to code large web projects. While I am still open to frameworks and such, I had something happen that kind of “brought me back to my roots.” I have the job of making a website for a not-for-profit organization in my area. I decided that they should have something easy to update, so that means a data driven site with a back-end. I don’t want to use premade systems because they have too many things I don’t want included. I therefore decided to go with what I’ve worked with in the past which is straight PHP. More specifically PHP5+ and the SQLite database engine. PHP5 perfects a good deal of useful features over the older versions such as the class/object model. It also adds support built-in for the file based SQLite engine. For what I am creating, SQLite takes out a lot of the unnecessary complexity of using MySQL. I’ve got the database and gene...

Nothing is ever easy… Anyways, to get a computer ready to start developing with the Symfony PHP framework you have a few options. You can take the long, long route and install apache, php, and a database server. With that you have to do a good deal of configuration to get everything working together. You could also download WAMP or XAMPP, which are just prepackaged versions. I haven’t used XAMPP, so I can’t say how you would get that working. The best reason for using WAMP is that it is self contained in c:\wamp folder by default. You can also start and stop all of the server processes (Apache & MySQL) anytime by just closing the tray icon. It’s great so you don’t have unnecessary processes running all of the time. The main problem is that WAMP and Symfony don’t work “out of the box.” No surprise there. This is the process I used to get WAMP working with Symfony: Download WAMP (1.6.6) and install: http://www.wampserver.com/en/ Open a browser to http://localhost/ WAMP should...

Over the past week or two I’ve been researching ways to develop server-side web based applications as fast as possible (time is money, haha). I am in the initial stages of starting a little side business with a friend and one of our possible clients is looking for a large system to handle online ordering of their products. If you know anything about developing and programming a complex system, it takes a lot of planning as well as a good deal of time to actually create it. My “developer ideals” won’t allow my to create something of poor quality, so I’ve been reluctant to take on large things in the past. I’ve been pushing myself more lately to produce results the results I strive for with more speed. Well more like I’ve been trying to learn new methods and techniques where I can keep my quality level high, but just get things done faster. While I’ve programmed in PHP before, I know that I would need to create a large amount of generic functionality to handle an ordering system. T...

I started playing around with Visual Web Developer Express 2005 (VWD). I had originally planned on using VWD with MySQL. The problem is that to use the new stuff in ASP.NET 2.0 like the pre-made authentication you have to use Microsoft’s own SQL server, or try to get some convoluted method of making MySQL work as the provider. I’m sure that I could eventually get it working, but in the end it would not provide me the free easy to use fast development solution I was looking for in asp.net and MySQL. I had a plan to develop a dynamic small business website with user authentication, but I see now that it probably won’t be with VWD Express and MySQL. If I have to reinvent the wheel for everything I’d rather just use PHP and MySQL. That being said, I still plan on messing around with VWD and Microsoft’s SQL Express. I might be doing some research about Ruby On Rails to see if that would better meet my needs.

Microsoft has a great site with video tutorials here . They cover various aspects of visual web developer in VB and C#. They can’t cover topics in too much detail, but more then enough to be worth while. Plus they are free…