Kristo Vaher

Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

WWW Framework

WWW is a PHP micro-framework that is built loosely on model-view-control architecture and factory method design pattern. It is made for web services, websites and info-systems and is built around a native API architecture, caching and smart resource management. WWW is a compact framework that does not include libraries and bloated features and is developed keeping lightweight speed and optimizations in mind.

Note that WWW Framework is currently in BETA and it is not recommended for production use yet.

Latest version of WWW Framework can be grabbed here.

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Website weight loss?

A skilled young developer posted this recently on Twitter:

Well, yes, base64-encoding and embedding the image into HTML is one way to reduce HTTP requests, but honestly, why would anyone do this?

This article will describe briefly how base64 encoding is done and what benefits it might have.

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WWW Framework

I am proud to present the first complete release of WWW Framework. Goal of the project has been to create an API (Application Programming Interface) focused framework which can be used to build user-interface independent software which can be controlled from any type of interface required (be it a simple website or a mobile app). The result is this, an API-focused web and infosystems PHP micro-framework.

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Waher-style Theme

If you are using Windows and use Notepad++ as one of your main source-code editors and happen to be a web developer then you might just love this.  I originally developed this for personal use for I was unhappy with other themes or found them a little inconsistent across different web development languages. By now I have used this theme in Notepad++ for more than a year now.

Thanks to this being shared in reddit, Twitter and Facebook, it has been downloaded more than ten thousand times in one day.

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WebViewApp

I have only recently become curious about developing for Android phones. As a web developer the most important thing for me was to provide a way to bridge the gap between web applications and native applications.

Free and open source WebViewApp application is a simple base setup for developing Android applications that communicate with web services. WebViewApp is released as open source and developers can use this base application to build their own fully functional web applications in Android.

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Electronic Payments

E-payment systems and bank services are everyday and common in Estonia, but both developers and companies, who implement e-payments to websites, tend to ask large sums of money for solutions that should be relatively simple. Having developed e-payment systems for years, I had not put together a single solution for this very common problem until now, when Estonia has adopted Euro as its main currency. This solution is released open source, under LGPL license.

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The Social Network

Please note that this is not review of the movie, but an opinion piece about its topics. For a review, I recommend a review from one of my most trusted reviewers, Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times.

David Fincher’s ‘The Social Network’ really is more of a movie about making enemies, than making those 500 million friends. But what the trailer depicts is not what the movie is really about. After seeing the trailer, I expected something entirely different. I expected what I guess Mark Zuckerberg  – one of the creators of The Facebook – expected, a movie that paints him as a monster. Instead it was a movie about our dreams, hopes and aspirations and how, at times, we exploit, manipulate and so completely cause self-conflict because of those things we like and want to achieve. The older generation will never understand and we can only hope that our experiences will be able to serve our children better. No one was holding our hand when the internet took over the world.

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For phpclasses.org purposes I also converted the Smart AJAX Controller into a class, it is available here. While there aren’t big differences between the two, class structure makes the backend script more seamless and easy to use. Another improvement is the ability to return the result from the server compressed with GZip, thus making the whole communication very lightweight.

I have seen a number of complicated solutions for front-end AJAX development and it has become quite clear such solutions are difficult thing to grasp for someone not that experienced with AJAX. Today I am offering a very simple and easy to extend solution that not only is less than two hundred lines of code in total – together with detailed comments – but also gives the ropes to jQuery AJAX development and using JSON as the preferred type of returned data from the server. Fear not, this is actually easier than it sounds.

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I recently shared a simple PHP and jQuery animated pathfinding tech-demo through my Twitter account and promised to share the simple pathfinding class used for pathfinding calculations. The example shared in Twitter is still available here.

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