Dev Corner

One of my projects in the past few weeks has been to put together a SOAP server for a client. So suddenly I've had to learn a lot of the nitty gritty details about what works and what doesn't...

While they're fresh, let me jot them down here. WARNING: Extremely technical content ahead.

PHP development is one of our specialties at Freelock Computing. I've written quite a few PHP applications, some from scratch, some starting with other people's code, some as extensions for open source projects.

Before code can be customizable, it must be clear. But clarity is not enough, if you're going to be using a codebase in multiple places.

Programming is an exercise in understanding a problem. To program effectively, you need to fully understand, in intricate detail, the problem your program is solving. Sometimes as a programmer you don't fully understand the problem until you've wrestled with it a few times in code.

Programming borrows a lot from the construction industry. Many programming terms derive from construction: hacking, builds, development, architecture, scaffolding, frameworks, and dozens of others. But in some ways, programming has an element of power beyond construction.

Continuing on the series, the next item on the list seems to be the mistake I see the most--putting slow code in loops, loading up things that don't need to be loaded, making simple requests expensive.

Josh over at Web 1 Marketing writes about using www versus leaving it off. What’s wrong with no-www:

Open Source projects have to deal with something most proprietary projects don't: forked projects. What's that? It's when a person or group exercises the terms of an open source license to create a derived version that competes with the original.