Kristo Vaher

Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

API-centric design

Web development has been slow to catch up with desktop programming over the years. Large part of this reason is because web is built around HTTP, which is technically a ‘stateless’ protocol. But modern web applications are often anything but stateless and consist of layers upon layers of session handling and asynchronous requests to overcome the inherent weaknesses of HTTP. One of the better principles for handling all this mess is the API-centric development.

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Wave Framework

Wave Framework is an open source API-centric PHP micro-framework. First release of Wave was in February 2012 and the code has been through refactoring, multiple patches and bugfixes since. Wave puts strong emphasis on API-based web development. The project has gained some recognition on Google+ and today has more than a thousand followers. The name ‘Wave’ comes from the use of ‘www’ prefix across the system which looks like symbolic waves.

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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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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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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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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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