Zaemis

Experience has shown me frameworks can be useful for maintaining structure in large code base developed by multiple teams. Every developer has different abilities and a framework enforces structure and consistency throughout the code. But I've not experienced saving any substantial amount of time on a PHP project because of a framework. The other day someone posted in the PHP subreddit asking for advice. He was about to begin work on a small project and wanted to know whether he should use a framework, and if so then which framework would be appropriate. I should have known better than to offer my two cents but I did anyway. Slim + NotORM + Twig is nice. If it's a simple project, you probably don't need much more than that. I'm not a fan of frameworks in the slightest but I do enjoy the aforementioned combination. They're lightweight and stay out of my way, allowing me to write my functionality. Another redditor picked up on my distaste for frameworks and ask...

Writing can be a fun and rewarding way to share your knowledge, experience, and opinions with others. Unfortunately, it can also be intimidating or frustrating for some people. When I was managing editor for SitePoint's PHPMaster property, I prepared a guide to help alleviate some of the frustration and self-doubt that new writers (and even experienced writers) might experience. The guide wasn't something commissioned by SitePoint; I wrote it on my own for my authors. And though it's been about eight months since PHPMaster was absorbed into the main SitePoint site and I stepped down as managing editor, people continue to ask me about it. So, I've decided to make the guide publicly available. The New Writers Guide offers advice for finding inspiration, structuring an article's content, growing one's self-confidence, and overcoming other challenges that programming writers may face. Hopefully it'll continue to help people write awesome articles and realiz...

Developers have been using Ajax techniques for years to create dynamic web forms, but handling file uploads using Ajax was always problematic. The crux of the problem was security – it's not a good idea to allow arbitrary code access to any file it wants on a user's system so JavaScript was intentionally restricted in how it could interact with things like file input elements. Uploading a file with JavaScript was essentially a standard form submission that targeted a hidden iframe. It felt dirty but it got the job done. The W3C began work on standardizing a File API for JavaScript sometime between 2006 and 2009 and we're now at the point with browser support where developers can take advantage of it. Developers supporting web apps on IE8 and 9 still need to use iframes, but those of us targeting newer browsers can finally take a pure JavaScript approach to file uploads. And as more users migrate from IE8/9, the iframe approach will eventually be left in th...

I ran across an old question on Stack Overflow the other day in which a user was having issues maintaining his connection to MySQL from C. I left a brief answer there for anyone else who might stumble across the same problem in the future, but I felt it was worth expanding on a bit more. The error "MySQL server has gone away" means the client's connection to the MySQL server was lost. This could be because of many reasons; perhaps MySQL isn't running, perhaps there's network problems, or perhaps there was no activity after a certain amount of time and the server closed the connection. Detailed information on the error is available in the MySQL documentation. It's possible for the client to attempt to re-connect to the server when it's "gone away" although it won't try to by default. To enable the reconnecting behavior, you need to set the MYSQL_OPT_RECONNECT option to 1 using the mysql_options() function. It should be set after mysql...

Lately I've been exploring some syslog configurations and needed to generate some log messages to verify they were routed correctly. Of course doing so programmatically would provide an easy and repeatable method to generate a batch of fresh log messages whenever I needed, but because of the number of facilities and priorities defined by the syslog protocol , it made sense to write a code generator to iterate the different permutations. The following Lua script generates boilerplate C code for each of the 64 messages needed to test LOG_LOCAL 0-7 with all priorities. I chose generating the code in this manner over writing a nested facilities/priorities loop directly in C so I could easily include a textual representation of the facility and priority constants in the log message (this seemed like a cleaner solution to me than having to maintain a mapping of constants to char* strings as well). And why Lua? Well, it seemed a better idea than M4. :) #! /usr/bin/env lua local fa...