Dmitry Sheiko's Web Development Blog

Building a site on Drupal using MVC

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:34:17 +0200

If you ought to build a new site and don’t have time to develop a CMS, you’ll likely take an open source solution. And likely it will be Joomla or Drupal. They seem as most popular. Actually they are similar in many ways. Both provide basic content management frameworks, extensible through plug-ins and customizable via themes. Both focused on block-designed sites which can be often built without any programming at all, just using downloaded theme and configurable set of extensions. So it’s personal what to choose. I prefer Drupal. Its component model seems clearer to me. The documentation is much more explicit then Joomla’s and gallery of ready-to-use modules is really impressive.

MVC on command line

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:24:19 +0200

If you work with Zend Framework, you likely tried ZF Console (Zend_Tool on command line). But have you tried to extend it? Why? To have common interface for all your Cli-scripts related to ZF-base project. How do you find the idea to program Cli-scripts in MVC? Zend Framework provides us with the tool to do it.

HTML5 and Server-Sent Events

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:36:15 +0200

Besides, already noted bidirectional communication channel, known as WebSocket, HTML5 propositions include also comet communication pattern by defining Server-Sent Events (SSE). WebSocket widely discussed by now, tons of server implementations are available and you can play already with fluent browser implementation under Chrome. However the second server-push technology of HTML5 yet stays in shadow.

YUI3 vs jQuery

Fri, 28 May 2010 21:13:07 +0200

Everybody time to time comes to the dilemma which JS library to choose for further development. I used to work with prototype coupled with script.aculo.us and now use YUI3 in the office and jQuery at home. I like both of them, though finding each as the best one 'sui generis'. YUI3 is a classical framework that provides design patterns and development philosophy as well as tool. jQuery is meant as a rapid, lightweight, flexible and pretty easy to start library. It's like Ruby on Rails and Python. Ruby and Python as languages are comparable (conceptual elegance against explicit consistency) and you will find APIs of both YUI3 and jQuery are quite similar.

i18n for Dynamic UI

Fri, 28 May 2010 20:33:42 +0200

Since YUI 3.1 version, the framework includes internationalizing utility. That’s pretty huge from the prospective of application maintenance and deserves a little review.

Error Handling for Your PHP Application

Wed, 26 May 2010 13:37:03 +0200

However fondly you treat your application, errors happen and they happen often when it is being developed. That’s obvious you want to get all the tracing information during the development stage and something like ‘Application Error’ page if the error occurs on the production.

Everybody knows error handler can be set in PHP through set_error_handler. The same about exceptions for which set_exception_handler is used. But it really works only for user-defined errors and uncaught exceptions. It doesn’t affect any of fatal error for instance. Well, PHP has such stuff as register_shutdown_function to deal with them. We can create ErrorHandler class and subscribe the handlers in the beginning of the script

Anonymous Functions and Closures in PHP

Fri, 21 May 2010 10:57:14 +0200

If you are used to switch between JS and PHP programming, it obviously happened to you to miss some of JS flexibility in PHP. I felt it every time when declaring a callback function , being eager to apply something from JS like that...