php[architect]

by Jack Herrington

Writing a robust chat client in Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) is an exercise in pain management. Hazard pay should be involved. To start with, you need to account for all the various browser versions, the vagaries of each of their object models. And then there are the browser bugs, like memory leaks, that show up when you're making thousands of Ajax requests over hours. There is a better way: Adobe Flash.

by James Q. Stansfield

There are blogs in every corner of the Internet, written about every topic under the sun. And for as many variations as there are in blog content, there are differences in blogs themselves, both in style and function. The only obstacles in the way of getting your blog to do what you want are the constraints created by the blogging code itself. This is where WordPress shines. When you want your blog to do something its original creator didn't intend, you can extend the functionality with a plugin.

by Richard Lynch

If you knew you were about to be stranded on a deserted island for the rest of your life, which ten albums would be in your jukebox?

by James Cauwelier

Making a webshop is supposed to be easy. Making a webshop that will continue to work with 800,000 products and rising, is something entirely different. Our team was recently faced with this task; this case study explains how we went about meeting the challenge of bringing one of Belgium's largest e-commerce sites up to date.

by Steph Fox

It's always fascinating to me to hear about the ways developers put PHP to work in an enterprise context, and even more so when minor trends appear to be emerging out of that anecdotal evidence. But this month, one of our authors went a stage further.

by Paul Reinheimer

Somewhere between a coding contest and a game, you'll find Web Bot Battle. Read all about it here—and then come along and give it a try yourself!

by Jeff Moore

Take one inexperienced programmer with an itch to scratch. Throw in a handful of low-level control statements and a heavy sprinkling of copy-and-paste. Delete nothing along the way. The application might well work, but beware—it could also become the basis for a cautionary tale.

by Marco Tabini

Good developers are the laziest bunch of slobs!