Archive for July, 2008

When developing a UI for your web application, it’s easy to lose a lot of time waiting for reloads, dealing with browser quirks, even just trying to identify a particular element in the DOM. Here are five handy bookmarklets that will help you finish your client-side web development faster and more effectively. (more…)

Wordpress is a CMS that was built for blogging but many people have repurposed it for magazines, newspapers, blog networks and all sorts of other goodies! But did you know you can hack your Wordpress blog to be a no-cost solution for a social network? Well you can, and here’s fifteen plug-ins that will let you do it.

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We recently looked at front-end testing of web applications with Selenium. Today, we’ll take another approach to testing your PHP applications: backend unit testing for your actual PHP code. As part of our posts on test driven development, here’s a quick intro to using SimpleTest to test your PHP applications. (more…)

site:yourblogname.com searchterm

This is an example how to search your blog as a query in Google. But have you ever wanted to learn how to make your own ‘Search Tools’ for Firefox so that you can look-up information on your own blog quickly, from anywhere on the internet? Or do you want to hack Google Custom search to improve your earnings and it’s functionality?

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Ever setup a demo for a client, only to find you had a syntax error in one of the key files? Or maybe you’ve forgotten to setup the database on the staging server and your boss is staring at a screen of MySQL errors. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to put together a simple frontend-based test suite using Selenium, to help identify these issues sooner than later. (more…)

As Ivo Jansch pointed out on the Ibuildings blog, there’s barely a month left till security fixes are discontinued for PHP 4. While support for PHP 4 officially ended last December, security updates were offered until 08-08-08. Most major web hosts have been phasing out PHP 4 support, but many legacy applications built with PHP 4 in mind are currently in use, and the more intricate will take quite some time to move to PHP 5. Here are some tips and resources for managing the migration process. (more…)

jGrowl is a plugin for the jQuery that generates unobtrusive notification boxes on a page. It has a similar design to the OS X Growl Framework, after which it is named. With jGrowl, web developers can easily display brief information messages and alerts to their users during busy sessions with complex web applications. (more…)

Fiddler is a request inspector, form tamperer and general debugging proxy for HTTP. Fiddler enables web developers to monitor HTTP requests to their web application, watch request and response headers, tamper with query strings and form values, collect statistics and even rebuild and send new requests. It has inbuilt HTTPS support using a middle-man approach, and can even decode encoded request bodies, as well as render images, and view HEX values and XML. (more…)

Often you need solid metrics on the performance of your web application. Benchmarking your website can provide insight into which sections of your application might need major optimizations, and helps in dealing with scalability issues. Apache Bench, or ‘ab’, is a command line load testing utility which ships with Apache, and allows you to simulate load on a web server. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to get started with ab. (more…)

There aren’t too many free options for charting on the web, either client-side or server-side, that provide you with the actual charting code. We recently reviewed Google Charts, a web-based API for charting from Google. However, either for internal controls, or just simplicity of implementation, sometimes you need to do your own charting with a free software solution. Here are some of the better options, both purely JavaScript/Flash, as well as those with server-side bindings. (more…)