Now the day has come to celebrate the immediate availability of the long awaited 1.1 stable release of the symfony framework!

• The new architecture of symfony is more configureable and decoupled, allowing you to use or replace part of the framework very easily,
• The new object-oriented form framework makes form creation and reuse a breeze,
• The brand new task system allows to quicly make extensible batch scripts and command line utilities,
• Symfony has now a decent YAML parser, with verbose error reporting,
• The new plugin manager is now compatible with the PEAR standard API, handles plugins dependencies, and provides options for a better control on what you install,
• The formats handling system can make your app behave and respond differently whether an iPhone, a bot, or a browser is requesting it,
• The Propel 1.2 ORM is now bundled as a plugin, which means you can very easily switch to Doctrine or even to Propel 1.3 if you prefer,
• The bundled sfCompat10Plugin will ensure that your 1.0 based projects will still work after having upgraded to 1.1!
• The routing is now cached, so you can expect a significant performance boost when you got plenty of routes in your app. Also, the routing class is no more a singleton so you can now extend and reference it easily to fit your needs,
• Even if that’s not really a feature, more than 8,500 unit and functional tests guarantee the overall stability of the framework codebase. We doubled the number of tests between 1.0 and 1.1!

All these can add great improvements in your development efforts.

Closures are the current hot feature for programming languages. The inclusion of closures in Java appears to be around the corner, and the C++ committee has recently voted on closures in the upcoming C++ 0x standard.

The introduction of closures into many mainstream languages indicate to me that the logicial next big features is going to be primitive aggregate operations. Those are operations that operate on collections such as lists or arrays.

Closures, are anonymous functions created at run-time which can refer to variables that are visible where the function is declared.

Closures are especially useful when performing operations over elements in a collection. The most common collection operations (aggregate operations) in functional programming are map, filter, fold, and unfold operations.

A map operation transforms a list into a new same-sized list by applying a transformation function (such as a closure) to each element in the original list. A common example of a map operation [...] Continue Reading…

Javascript applications are still one of the most complex issues when it comes to web-development. Many tools and applications could make your developing life pretty fast and simple. Today we wanted to share with you a wide range of tools and applications that could really help you build, test and debug Javascript and Ajax applications. Let us know your experience with the tools listed here or others that are not.
1-Roar - Notifications (v1.0) Roar is a notification widget that streamlines incoming messages, such as updates or errors, without distracting the user from their browser experience or breaking their work-flow by displaying obtrusive alerts.

2-Damn It DamnIT is a free service that emails you when a user encounters a JavaScript error in your webpages.

3-Growl 2.0 with Mootools Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X, it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications.

APIs
4-Google AJAX Language API With [...] Continue Reading…

Well, I guess I’m going to work backwords. There are three layers to the frontend; behaviour, presentation and markup. We’ve done behavior so we’re onto presentational now. CSS Frameworks have been all the buzz lately, we’ve had ones that use python ways of code then regenerate it as css, ones that are specifically for forms and an awesome one which is just for styling print!

Personally I find frameworks to much hassle, I have my own little framework but that is only really 20 or so lines. I might share it with all of you in the coming weeks if you would like it. Now here they are!

1. 960 Grid System - The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or [...] Continue Reading…

Nice URLs, readable URLs, search-engine-friendly URLs. Different names same deal.

It can’t really be disagreed on that something like example.com/index.php?page=article&id=409 is not nearly as nice as example.com/article/409.

Turns out this isn’t all that hard with PHP - infact it can turn into something that’s very useful from more than just a readability viewpoint.

The Plan

What we’re going to do is capture everything past a particular point in our URL and pipe it to PHP, we’re going to let PHP do most of the the legwork.

* Using mod_rewrite we get everything past a particular point.
* We will then pass that into a PHP get variable. We’ll use “p”, you can use anything.
* In our PHP we will define “rules” for our URLs with very simple regular expressions.
* When something matches, we’ll get the appropriate page - otherwise we’ll give back a 404.

mod_rewrite

Yep, this article is purely from an Apache perspective, so I assume [...] Continue Reading…