Security is and always will be an important topic, especially in the computer world. I’ve outlined and explained some of the basic and most common forms of exploiting and what you should be keeping in mind. Thinking outside the box Using an application in a way that it wasn’t designed is key. Generally when using [...]
Throughout my time as a designer I have been constantly surprised by the fact that there is a better way to do something that I had been doing for years. These things can be small like a keyboard shortcut that might save you a second or two but in the course of a few years [...]
The idea of a queuing service is to offload something that’s potentially resource intensive and takes time to process. Moving a piece of a logic that would originally be executed at visitor run time could potentially speed up the users experience, this alone makes queuing a winner. Slow websites have become a trending topic lately, [...]
Criteria Criteria Description Start Must be painlessly quick and simple to get started. Ideally, it should take less than five minutes to have the latest version of CakePHP up-and-running with a MySQL database. Configure Environments must be easily configurable. For example, it must be easy to specify a different database config for local development and [...]
Here at the Hive anyone can host an informal workshop, known as a brown bag, to share learning’s which the team would benefit from or find interesting. This week I shared my experience about the Migrations Plugin for CakePHP. During GovHack 2012, we had three developer’s actively expanding the Bako schema and the Migrations Plugin provided [...]
JavaScript (JS) is a popular scripting language that becomes very useful when enhancing a website, an entire website shouldn’t rely totally on JS due to the following: Structure can become lost and the site may be harder to maintain. Separation between HTML and your logic is a must. Screen-readers & Crawlers don’t execute JS, this [...]
The recent release of PHP 5.4 includes a new feature called Traits. It enables method injection into classes and the concept will be familiar to anyone who has experience with Ruby’s mixins or traits in Scala. CakePHP’s ‘Model Behaviour’ functionality is also influenced by the concept of traits and mixins. Traits are similar to abstract [...]
It’s easy to label something as terrible if you’ve had a bad first impression. Before you do label the CMS/Technology with the sh*t sticker you should have some sort of idea on how it works and how to use it. Drupal is a CMS backed by a strong community and a large amount of modules [...]
A common problem the engineering team is experiencing at Pollenizer is finding the resources to dedicate to system administration duties. With the vision of reducing those duties, Pollenizer has been exploring PaaS providers. I have reviewed services offered by Orchestra, PHP Fog and Pagoda Box. The stand out is clearly the latter. PaaS providers typically [...]
Overview Web applications typically require very specific server environments in which to run. Most of us build applications from a variety of disparate components at different layers of abstraction. (We do not, for example, re-implement an operating system every time we wish to build a web app – to do so would be madness.) Assuming [...]
