On January 22, 2008 Zend Technologies, Inc. released Zend Studio for Eclipse 6, a new IDE for the PHP programming language. It is the successor to Zend Studio 5, and as the name implies, is built on top of the Eclipse IDE framework. Unless you have been programming in a cave somewhere, you already know that in the last few years Eclipse has grown to become the most popular and powerful programming environment on the planet. Eclipse has an open plug-in architecture, and Zend has created a set of PHP plug-ins that draw upon the power the Eclipse framework offers. [More…]

Originally published in 1995 by authors Eric Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, Design Patterns is probably the most world-changing and important text on Object-Oriented Programming written to date. The book was inspired by the idea of reusable design patterns that originated with Christopher Alexander’s book on architectural design, called A Pattern Language. The Gang-of-Four (GoF) book established a new lexicon for OOP based on their broad and extensive software design experience. [More…]

The LAMP/WAMP (Linux/Windows Apache MySQL & PHP) web server stack has evolved into a viable lightweight network server platform. One of the problems of using WAMP servers is the way CGI processes are evoked. When PHP is used as a CGI process, it is reloaded each time a PHP script is called. A new instance of PHP runs each time a script executes. To get around this limitation, web servers running a FastCGI module can keep a service loaded so it doesn’t need to load anew each time it is evoked. [More…]

JavaScript has a unique style for Object-Oriented Programming. The style is closer to the syntax of a functional language than a procedural language. The syntax is not difficult to learn, but it behaves completely unlike what you expect from a compiled language like Java or C++. Central to JavaScript OOP is the way that new functions may be attached to existing objects. Here are a few simple example of how a JavaScript object can be instantiated and manipulated. [More…]

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) uses a combination of JavaScript, XHTML/XML, and DHTML techniques to create dynamic web pages that can update without reloading. The technique is based on the use of the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest() function to perform GET and POST operations with a server script, with additional client side DHTML code to modify the requested page elements. [More…]

If you have been creating HTML 4.1 and CSS web pages for some time you’ve probably noticed that an increasing number of web pages now use XHTML formatting. There are several reasons why XHTML is a better choice for web pages. If you have put off learning to use XHTML, here is a straightforward introduction that may help change your mind. [More…]

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) in Perl is a like riding on the back of a strange imaginary beast. You eventually arrive at the destination, but explaining to someone how you got there takes some creative doing. In Part 1 of this article we look at how Perl can be used to create code that mimics Object-Oriented Programming. If we squint hard, we might even fool ourselves into thinking we’re really doing OOP, as long as we don’t look closely. So grab onto your saddle…here we go! [More…]

The Sun NetBeans 6 IDE is a free development environment for Java, but is available for cross platform C/C++ development as well. The NetBeans 6 download is about 12MB and unpacks to about 55MB. Sun recommends using Cygwin C/C++, GMake, and GDB debugger. With some additional effort MinGW can be used as an alternative compiler on Windows machines. Users that choose MinGW will need MSYS support. This document gives a brief overview of the installation process. For a detailed explanation visit the NetBeans and Cygwin web sites. [More…]

Learning to program C++ is not what I would call a simple task. Finding books that present the information at your level of comprehension is important. Beginners need a simple step-by-step presentation that an experienced programmer is likely to find boring. The collection of book listed below is oriented towards individuals with some existing experience and programming knowledge. The texts are considered to be among the best available, and will move you through the intermediate stages and into the advanced. [More…]