@rustlang has piqued my interest. Gonna have to explore it some time soon.
I received an email from a developer the other day, who had forked the repository for my āIIS Express Hereā shell extension on GitHub [editors note ā no longer available]. He had noticed there was no license information available in the project, so asked if I could either add a license, or give him written permission to adapt my code and share it to others (as is the spirit of GitHub and OSS).
To be honest, this wasnāt something Iād thought about before, and was a bit of an oversight on my part. Iād not really considered the need to add explicit licenses to my repositories. After all, the code is out there anyway ā itās open to use on GitHub, and Iāve often shared it on this blogā¦ if someone wanted to copy the code, they could, right?
Unfortunately, this creates a grey-area, which some are naturally uncomfortable with. Can I use this code in something else? Can I modify it at all? Do I have to pay royalties if I do?
But licensing is hard, isnāt it? All the different types, with different caveats, liabilities, and legal mumbo-jumboā¦ well, yes, it can be hard. The good folks at GitHub have a solution: ChooseALicense.com is attempting to demystify open source licenses so you can pick the right one for your project. More than this, when you create a new repository on GitHub, the site will ask if you want to add a template license during the initialisation process:
Coming back to the developer who emailed me ā I mailed him back to let him know that IIS Express Here is now licensed under the MIT license. This fits best with how I see the code and projects I share on this blog (unless noted otherwise) ā free for anyone else to use, but with no warranty, so if something goes wrong then Iām not liable and itās not my responsibility to fix it. I havenāt got around to updating all of my repos with licenses, as Iām evaluating each one in turn, based on my goals and even whether the project is going to archived.
This is just a bunch of stuff Iāve wanted to link to over the last few days, but didnāt get around to doing individual link posts for:
- how to blog about code and give zero fucks
- Visual Studio 2013 RC for Web Developers ā One ASP.NET, Browser Link, and our Direction
- iPhone 5 Camera Specs: better optics, slow motion, and āTrue Toneā flash
- Call Filter Alarm Lets Emergency Calls Through, Silences Everyone Else
- BBC News ā Doctor Who 50th anniversary schedule revealed by BBC
- āTitstareā app at Techcrunch: women in tech deserve better
- Why Iām Never Going Back to Penny Arcade Expo | Underwire | Wired.com
Did you know you can use custom PHP extensions on Heroku? Neither did I, cos I canāt find it in the documentation. But you can:
https://gist.github.com/1288447
I came across this while searching for a way or workaround to use the MongoDB PECL extension on Heroku (donāt get me started on thatā¦).
If you canāt be bothered checking the link, the summary is this:
- Create a folder in your app called āextā or similar.
- Copy your extension into this folder.
- Create a php.ini file with the following contents:
extension_dir = "/app/www/ext/" extension=mongo.so
- Deploy
Most of my small personal projects tend to get built with CodeIgniter (CI), which is a simple to use, fast, lightweight PHP5 MVC framework.
For a while now Iāve had an itch to build something fun against the Facebook API so I can start learning how Open Graph works, and as a primer to building a āproperā Facebook integrated application. I also realised I hadnāt actually tried using CodeIgniter 2.x since it was released (quite some time ago). With an abundance of free time this weekend it seemed like the perfect time to get hacking!
Before I could build anything I would need to know one thing: just how do you connect a CodeIgniter app to Facebook?
The beauty of web development is that, ultimately, the code behind it is simple. Yes, web apps have taken leaps and bounds over the last few years, and are capable of so much more than ever before, but lets face it ā weāre not exactly writing DNA sequencers. Yet.
It frustrates me when I find someone has made life difficult for themselves or the person who will inherit their code, by using the wrong tool for the job. Iām not claiming to be a saint here either ā I often look back at some of my own code and shudder (it helps keep me right in the future!).
Consider the following snippet, from the View (presentation) file of an MVC app I inherited:
<?php echo "<h1>$category</h1>"; echo "<h3>$company ($name)</h3>"; echo "<p>"; echo "$address<br />"; echo "$town<br />"; echo "$city<br />"; echo "$post_code<br />"; echo "$phone<br />"; echo "$email<br />"; echo "</p>"; echo "<br />"; echo "<br />"; ?>
PHP needs to be used to output the data passed from the Controller, yes, but thereās no need for it to be outputting the HTML too. Let HTML itself worry about that!
<h1><?= $category ?></h1> <div> <h3><?= $company ?> (<span><?= $name ?></span>)</h3> <address> <span><?= $address ?></span> <span><?= $town ?></span> <span><?= $city ?></span> <span><?= $post_code ?></span> <span><?= $phone ?> </span> <span><?= $email ?></span> </address> </div>
I donāt know about you, but the HTML-based version above is easier to follow and spot coding errors. No doubt someone will point out thereās more HTML tags/bytes in this example than the first, but that is because I coded it with semantics and microformats in mind; add in the right classes and you suddenly have a hCard.
Possibly more importantly in my mind, the HTML example is easier to follow for someone who isnāt PHP literate, like many front-end designers I know.
Iām picking on this example as itās the most recent Iāve come across, and the first to come hand. Itās not the first example Iāve come across, it wonāt be the last, and itās certainly not the worst!
Pure, simple HTML can be a wondrous thing. Lets try not to spoil it by abusing it with our fancy server-side languages. K.I.S.S!
I loves me some jQuery ā without it I probably wouldnāt write any JavaScript at all (seriously, I hate the stuff). Anyway, today I needed to add some āopen in new windowā links to an internal application using jQuery. Being the Standardista I am, I wanted to make it a)Accessible, and b) Unobtrusive . If the user has JavaScript disabled (it happens, even on ācontrolledā, intranet environments), the link should just go to the new page anyway ā new window be damned.
My first attempt (below) didnāt work as expected. The following code takes all <a> tags with a class of ānewwindowā and applies an onclick event to open a new window.
$(function(){
$('a.newwindow').click(function(){
var w = window.open($(this).href(), 'newWindow', '');
return false;
});
});
Nothing would happen with the above, because of the return false;. Removing return false; would open a new window, but also send the opening window to the new page. In the end, the following worked the way I wanted:
$(function(){
$('a.newwindow').click(function(){
var w = newWindow($(this).href(), 'newWindow', '');
return false;
});
});
function newWindow(url, wName, opts){
w = window.open(url, wName, opts);
return true;
}
Basically the āheavy liftingā was moved to a seperate function. Itās slightly longer to type, but not exactly finger-breaking stuff. No doubt some bright-spark could tell me an even betterway (feel free!), but thisāll do for now.
So Iām writing my first serious bit of PHP in aaaages. This last few months, Iāve either been adapting existing systems to fit the bill, or Iāve been writing ASP (all while learnng Ruby on Rails).
I feel like Iāve been out of the game. Before I fell out of writing my own PHP every day, I was using the CakePHP framework. CakePHP is a wonderful framework. It greatly speeds up development and makes things so much easier.
Unfortunately, frameworks are only of use to the developer or your customer has someone who knows what theyāre doing to set up everything for them. When youāre building a product for those who arenāt so technically minded, giving them something like CakePHP/Rails/Django, etc, to install ā before they can use the product ā is a big no-no1.
So anyway, Iām writing this new product. Itās not terribly exciting, nor should it be particularly difficultā¦ but what looked a piece of cake on paper is going slower than I would like. I need to get my head around the fact I donāt have a framework or existing application doing 90% of the grunt-work for me. All those framework-specific shortcuts and existing functions Iāve grown used to donāt work any more so I need to do things manually2. Joyful.
On the plus side, this is probably the coding equivalent of getting back into shape for a World Championship fight, after getting slower and fatter from being too comfortable ā a la Rocky in Rocky III.
Frameworks are a wonderful thing for speeding up development in large projects where you have control over your environment. Just remember not to rely on them too much.
- This isnāt to knock the work of the developers of frameworks like CakePHP and Rails, et al ā not at all. I think theyāre doing great, great work, which makes the lives of countless developers worldwide just that little bit easier. āµ
- Another thing keeping me from top-speed is an insistence Iāve put on myself to follow best coding-practices all the way, and most importantly, document everything as I go. I usually write something then document it later once everything else is finished. āµ
Today I fired up TextMate to do my first bit of serious PHP coding since my stroke. Iāve been almost entirely XHTML/CSS since getting out of hospital last August, with a little light coding (ASP mostly) since then.
Probably the closest Iāve got to writing any real PHP in 8 months has been learning the basics of WordPress themes from Blog Design Solutionsā¦ To be honest, Iāve not had the same drive or determination to āJust Code Itā as I once did.
Iāve been reading 37 Signalsā excellent book, Getting Real today. Iām about three quarters of the way through. I doubt Iāve ever said this about a ātechā book before, but itās a real āpage-turnerā; Getting Real pulls you in and is real hard to put down once you get started. All the praise you may have heard about this book is justly deservedāitās essential reading for developersā¦ hell, it should probably be essential reading for anyone who has to work on just about any type of product or in a team.
While Iāve been reading Getting Real, Iāve been feeling like I want to write code again; I want to write something simple, elegant and real. I want to stop thinking about some of the ideas Iāve had over the last few month ā no years ā and actually do something. So I set-up a development site and database for one such idea, opened TextMate and created a new project.
It hit me like a slap in the face; Iāve forgotten how to do this. Itās like Iām back on square oneā¦ like someone sucked most of my programming ability out of my head. I can remember lots of stuff about various PHP functions, syntax and a million myriad details, but actually doing anything with any of it is another matter. I started thinking about the initial, basic class/data structure I would need and it was like the lights were on but nobody was home.
Looking on the bright-side: if I do have to relearn myslef this stuff, it means Iāll be able to do it with a clean slate and Be Real from the very outsetā¦