A friend of mine recently released a new product - http://www.formmapper.com.  What’s neat about this is that it allows non-programmers the ability to take PDF forms, draw field boundaries on the form, then associate data fields from XML files with those field boundaries.  Once that’s done, the XML data can be merged to create new [...]

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Is it possible to give accurate estimates of hardware requirements before software is written?  I’d like to think reducing the question to such a basic level makes the answer a self-evident ‘no’.  However, at work, some colleagues are being asked to estimate hardware requirements based on software that is not yet written.  They’ve been given [...]

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I’ve inherited maintenance of a system which relies on include_path being set in an Apache .htaccess file.  Beyond the obvious portability problem of using this on a non-Apache system (which isn’t a concern as it’s a controlled environment, not a public project), this also means that all the code can only run in the context [...]

Posted in Design, Development, Ideas, PHP, Web, opensource No Comments »

I’ve inherited maintenance of a system which relies on include_path being set in an Apache .htaccess file.  Beyond the obvious portability problem of using this on a non-Apache system (which isn’t a concern as it’s a controlled environment, not a public project), this also means that all the code can only run in the context [...]

Posted in Design, Development, Ideas, PHP, Web, opensource No Comments »

In a previous post, I mentioned the need to be up front with a client/customer about what they will and won’t get a in a project.  It’s not something I used to see mentioned much, but it seems to be something which is slowly creeping into the style of people I come in contact with [...]

Posted in Business, Design, Development No Comments »

In a previous post, I mentioned the need to be up front with a client/customer about what they will and won’t get a in a project.  It’s not something I used to see mentioned much, but it seems to be something which is slowly creeping into the style of people I come in contact with [...]

Posted in Business, Design, Development No Comments »

I was discussing things with my brother the other day and I came up with a problem which he helped name.  I’m currently maintaining some code, and it’s quite a jumble.  One of the things I can tell is that one of my predecessors began adding new sections of code to clean up the logic [...]

Posted in Design, Development, Ideas, PHP, Web 2 Comments »

I was discussing things with my brother the other day and I came up with a problem which he helped name.  I’m currently maintaining some code, and it’s quite a jumble.  One of the things I can tell is that one of my predecessors began adding new sections of code to clean up the logic [...]

Posted in Design, Development, Ideas, PHP, Web No Comments »

Just as ‘design patterns’ have given architects and developers a common way to describe certain types of software problems, Tony Marston is now challenging the community to begin thinking in transaction patterns. The title of his paper is somewhat overstated (as he later admits in his conclusion) but the premise is certainly on target. [...]

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