I got ‘pinged’ by Ben Ramsey on this topic, so here goes:

First computer was Sinclair ZX81 – 1K of RAM – soldered together from a kit ordered from UK.
Played bass in a number of bands, including a blues band when I was 18 and next youngest guy was 37.  Played for several years with some [...]

Posted in PHP, Personal 1 Comment »

Yeah, that’s about all this post will be. I read an article from IBM developerworks on the upcoming 5.3 features, and something got my dander up: closures.
I first got acquainted with closures in Groovy last year, and love them. They make sense. The syntax is pretty easy, and feels natural in the [...]

Posted in PHP, Uncategorized 25 Comments »

Testing out the demand for a community site focusing on Javascript developers. When I was investigating the Javascript Magazine idea (still in the works – got some great contributors potentially lined up!) I realized that Javascript is everywhere, yet nowhere. There are few, if any, Javascript user groups or similar resources out there. [...]

Posted in Javascript, PHP, Software, Web 5 Comments »

Just a quick thought here after looking at someone’s code I just stumbled on. This person had a “isReadOnly()” method inside of a generic “set” method which would allow them to determine if a property should be allowed to be modified or not.
It got me to thinking again how the traditional notion of “visibility” [...]

Posted in Grails, Groovy, Java, PHP, Web 26 Comments »

I’m in the planning stages of a Javascript magazine, similar to the GroovyMag publication I’ve already got out.  Before jumping in too deep, I’m looking to gauge interest in the idea.  Are you interested in a monthly Javascript magazine?  If so, click the link above and sign up.  Or, just leave a comment below.  :) [...]

Posted in Javascript, PHP, Software, Web 8 Comments »

Talking with my friend Shawn Hartsock the other day, and we got to talking about the state of software, and some of the history of software development.  He’s a big nerd on this subject, and considers ‘computing’ to go back hundreds (or thousands!) of years.  Yes, one can make that argument, but I when I [...]

Posted in Development, PHP, Society, Software, Web No Comments »

This was the analogy I came up with when teaching a PHP class recently.  I needed to review the topic of regular expressions, but it’s one that neither I nor the students seemed to have much interest in.  The examples that I had were adequate, but explaining the examples was still unnatural.  The students didn’t [...]

Posted in Grails, Groovy, Java, PHP, Software 14 Comments »

Haven’t blogged on PHP in awhile, so here goes…
It seems the PHP team has decided on using \ as the namespace separator.  I’m still flummoxed as to why :: or ::: wasn’t chosen.
So now we’ll have things like my\package\name but will we be able to use dynamic namespaces?  Like my\package\$name ?
I just have a strange [...]

Posted in PHP 33 Comments »

I perhaps have to watch my words a bit, because I’m going to start doing remote training for Zend in the next few weeks.  Having said that…
I started trying to use Zend Framework the last week for a project.  I’d started it in Grails for rapid prototyping, but there’s no hosting option for Grails that [...]

Posted in PHP, Web 8 Comments »

I’ve recently had to look at Symfony, and, while OK, it’s made me realize how much I like Grails. 
For example, in Symfony, you generate Model classes based on a schema file.  You then generate Form objects for the Models, then tie them together in ‘CRUD’ screens.  All of this is generatable pretty easily, [...]

Posted in PHP 14 Comments »