phpmail() IS OUT! Get rid off it. Now!

One of the most common sources of spam are “hacked” webservers and poorly or even non-secured forms. By using phpmail the webserver must be allowed to send mails without checks for a valid sender. This results – mostly on a shared web host – in having checking every clients installations for the bad script while the mailserver gets blacklisted due to the spam wave.

There are enough possibilities out there on how to send mail without using phpmail such as PEAR Net_SMTP. I even encourage every webmaster to turn off phpmail by blacklisting this function in php.ini. This way the developers would be forced to name an smtp account for sending mail which is much easier to track (and shut off if neccessary).

although we don’t like to blindly follow trends we decided to open up a twitter-account.

You can follow us here. You can expect to be informed when a new blog post is published and we will tweet links and interessting stuff which would be too small for a whole article.

We hope you like our new way of communicating with you and would be glad if you follow us.

easy_install http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/branches/0.11-stable

Since the release of Subversion 1.5 the version of easy_install included in the Debian repository ran into a compatibility issue. Instead of working as expected it always complained:

error: Unexpected HTML page found at http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/branches/0.11-stable

The problem seems to be that the SVN-Web-Output generated by Subversion 1.5+ is not being understanded by setuptools. In the issue tracker for the trac-plugin-project trac-hacks.org I found the easiest way to solve this problem. You will use the setuptools to update itself and then you won’t have problems anymore:

easy_install -U setuptools

PS: This problem also occured when trying to install plugins from trac-hacks.org since they also use SVN 1.5+.

I just love it. Thank you so much!

Link: Andy Maleh – Code Painter: Mouse-less Eclipse

The next steps will be a Zend Form derivate that can generate forms by using the meta information from your doctrine
model but stays fully customizable as well as cool Ajax/ExtJs support.

Download 0.001 PreAlpha

Speed – or to be more precise the lack of it – is one of the major annoyances and a main reason for users to not come back. So it is in your own best interest to reach the best possible speed.

I found a very extensive list of website optimization techniques which I wanted to share with you (and to keep a link for future references). I can’t really say that by now I even follow half the list of improvements but I will certainly try to make the next app better than the one before – as always.

Link: www.chazzuka.com: Website Optimization Best Practices, speed up your website load

Now Adobe’s looking for developers using linux to test a new release and report bugs and other problems with the new package. To check if you’re a fit for this job Adobe has outlined a few key questions you have to check before applying for the job.

If you are interested and applying you have all the best wishes from me.

Link: Adobe AIR on Linux: Call for Pre-Release Users

The team of PostgreSQL wants a redesign of their homepage and started a contest to find the new look. If you are interested to win the 2000$-prize you should visit the page and get involved.

Good luck!

Link: PostgreSQL: News: PostgreSQL.org Website Design Contest

The guys of JavaRanch.com try to accomplish just that:

Grab your marshmallows and a stick and gather ’round the campfire for some Java stories. The Ranch writers won’t be winnin’ any literary prizes, that’s fer sure. But ya still might learn a thing or two.

I find this approach very refreshing and I’m sure some of you dealing with certain more technical description will enjoy the casual written, funny illustrated yet informing stories.

So hop on your horse, ride on over to the ranch and give it a read @
JavaRanch Campfire – Getting in Touch with your Inner Class.

So these tips might become in handy if you have to design your next webapp or if you have to make another site more attractive for users (i.e. redesign/relaunch).

Enjoy.

Link: Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.

Today I stumbled upon a video which imo describes the situation of our daily work very well. So let’s whine a bit, then get a free hug from a colleague and after that GO BACK TO WORK!

Enjoy…

Thanks to m3nt0r for the article and the other good tips posted in his other blog. Keep it on!

PS: I promise to produce more content in the next few days, mainly about my current experiences with our current CakePHP project.

(morganj): 0 is false and 1 is true, correct?
(alec_eso): 1, morganj
(morganj): bastard.

Cheat sheets for:

• Photoshop (CS3 & 4)
• CSS
• (X)HTML
• JavaScript
• mootools
• PrototypeJS
• and Flash

14 Most Useful Web Design Cheat Sheets | Web Design Ledger.

I guess many people had this problem before and I think everybody managed to solve this quite similar. Anyways, just in case this is useful for anybody: here’s how I added a pagination to a site recently.

Given you have an array of products for example. Or maybe search results, a list of articles… something like that. Unfortunately they are too many to display them on a single page. Well, sure, you could but let’s be honest: that isn’t an option as the page would exceed its “scrollable-with-no-harm-to-scroll-fingers” length. And you don’t want to get sued by your visitors, right
Ok, so you’re going to add a nice pagination to your site, so that everybody is happy.
What I found out to be a bit tricky was to calculate the actual number of pages. We need that number so that we know, how many page links we will show next to our current view.

Two simple examples to illustrate the probelm:
Let’s say we have 8 items. 8 divided by 4 is 2, so we’re going to need two pages. No big deal, right?
Okay then we try this with 9 items. 9 divided by 4 gives us 2.25. So we will clearly need a 3rd page for product number 9, but how do we calculate this from our result?

$itemcount = $res->length();
$pagemin = $itemcount / 4;
$pagemax = ceil($itemcount / 4);
if ( $pagemax - intval($pagemin) === 1) ) {
$pages = $pagemax;
} else {
$pages = intval($pagemin);
}


The code explained

That’s why I compare two values here: the actual division result and the next bigger integer. Now we try to find out if both values differ. If they do, we have a scenario where we do want another page, so we pick the bigger result as our page number. If not we are just happy and use the smaller number.

So now that we know our actual page count we can do something (slightly simplified) like this:


while($i = 0;$i < $pages; $i++) {
print '<a href="?page=' . $i . '">Page ' . $i . '';
}


A pagination helps to navigate through long lists of items

With a little bit of styling this even looks nice. And of course, this is just a start. You also might want to add “previous” and “next buttons”, or those “first page”, “last page” buttons, limit the maximum number of page links shown, or you could center the currently viewed page in the middle, hide the previous button on the first page, etc… There are a lot of fine tuning options that will improve the user experience of your pagination.

With this in mind you might tend to avoid any newer techniques, features or elements just to be on the safe side. But this also keeps you from using shortcuts and often results in worse quality.

If you planning to use a newer feature it might help if you knew which users won’t be able to enjoy your work to the full extend. To help everyone with this problem Alexis Deveria compiled a long list of the features and how are they supported by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. This list is even searchable and customizable to your needs (e.g. exclude browsers).

I can’t thank him enough for going through all that trouble finding these information and I am certain that this list will have a top spot in my future bookmarks and maybe in your’s too.

Link: When can I use… – a huge, searchable list of browser capabilities

1. Choosing a proper HTML DOCTYPE

The HTML DOCTYPE is a very important point to consider when starting to generate HTML output, because it can influence the appearance on different browsers drastically. There is a bunch of different Doctypes available and the most important effect is to trigger the so called Quirks mode in different browsers. Basically the Quirks mode is used to simulate former browser bugs to ensure, that pages that have been developed against these bugs are still displayed properly.
So to make sure that you won’t have to deal with these bugs choose at least a doctype from the Quirks comparison table that makes even the much loved Internet Explorer work in an “Almost standard” mode. I use to choose XHTML strict doctype

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
because it can be handled like a normal XML document. Let’s just hope for HTML 5 where a
<!DOCTYPE html>
is enough.

2. Make your HTML valid

In October 2008 Opera published the markup validation report showing that in January 08 only 4.13% out of 3,509,170 pages validated against their Doctype.
So even if it may sound easy, especially in larger web projects or when using HTML generating Frameworks, CMSes or Plugins etc. it is really hard to ensure that all you pages have valid HTML, but it can save a lot of a hassle. It happened to me quite a few times, that seemingly browser specific displaying errors have been caused e.g. by a misspelled HTML tag and therefore invalid HTML. For local developing I’m using the HTML Validator Firefox Plugin. It has a lot of nice features and you can see if your page validates against the W3C validation algorithms in an instant.

If you could answer all these questions with a “yes” you might have noticed afterwards that you can’t do anything with this project because eclipse created it as “general project”, meaning no java, php or anything other specialized nature. This results in certain functions like Run as Java application not being accessable.

There are several solutions to that problem – but most of them are really ugly, imho. But since I don’t want to keep anything from you I will explain these methods too. So let’s get started…

The wrong way

The intuitive way you propably would start the task “to checkout a new project from SVN” might be “File -> New -> Project -> Others…-> Checkout a project from SVN”. In the result you’d have the previously mentioned “general project” which is pretty useless.

solution #1: edit .project

After the creation of the new project you quit eclipse, browse to the project folder in your file system and open the .project-file in a editor.

You’ll find these lines:

<natures>
</natures>

Change it to match:

<natures>
<nature>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javanature</nature>
</natures>

Save the file and fire up eclipse again, you will have your svn-project recognized as Java-project. This solution might be quick but the drawbacks are the quit/edit/start-sequence outside of eclipse and the necessity to find the right “nature” for your svn project.

solution #2: delete and recreate

After having completed the checkout you will delete your project. Yes, you read right. (I told you these methods are ugly! ) But when deleting be sure you don’t check the box for physically deletion of the files (so they’ll remain inside your workspace).

When you finished deleting the project you create a new project for the kind of project the svn project should represent (i.e. java, php etc.). While in the creation wizard be sure you select the same folder where the svn project has been checked out into.

The newly created project will have the right project type and will contain all files from the repository. Sometimes it is necessary to refresh the workspace (windows: hit F5 on the project).

Although this method also results in having the right data with the correct project type it has a bad taste jumping through these hoops in order to finish a simple task like that.

Since I wasn’t pleased with all those solutions I kept on looking. Finally I found…

The right way

Besides the following solution is the one most hoopless (no pun intended) the claim “right” is justified because it seems that this is the way the eclipse devs want us to check out a project.

In order to accomplish the task at hand you have to

• open the SVN Exploring-perspective
  ( Windows -> Open Perspective -> Other… -> SVN Exploring)
• create a new repository location or select the desired source
• browse to the parent folder of your new project (e.g. trunk)
• right click on the folder, choose Checkout…
• in the new dialogue you will have the chance to select Check out as a project configured using the New Project Wizard, take that chance, fill out the rest as you please and hit Finish
• in the new project wizard which will open next you can choose your desired project type (e.g. java) and set up everything like you would in a normal project (e.g. compliler compliance level, JRE, related projects etc.)
• after hitting this finish button you will notice that the svn is queried to retrieve the code
• and you’re done!

In my opinion this way is the most hazzle-free way to check out a new project though I love to see it the other way around too (New->Project->New Project from SVN -> yada yada yada -> “Please select a project type or press OK to let it remain a generel project.”). Until this is implemented I will go with the second best solution.

There are two changes I consider “my favorites”: as Firefox is about to close the gap between itself and the highly innovative Webkit browsers Safari and Chrome, more CSS 3 properties will be supported in Version 3.1. I’m looking forward to use text-shadow because it simply looks great.
And then there is word-wrap.
Whilst other browsers – even the worst of them – have been capable of word splitting for several years, this one has been a major annoyance in Firefox. Now that v3.1 introduces word-wrapping one should be able to use narrow columns more effectively without having to be afraid of (long) words flying outside of their columns. And even for regular dimensioned sidebars, an enhanced typeface is something to look forward to.

Have a good look a the compiled list and be sure to bookmark it for the next crisis with TSVN…

Link: Subversion and TortoiseSVN tips and tricks.

According to him, Sun will continue the work on Swing and even more try to ease the development and enhance the deployment and runtime performance.

The whole post sounds very convincing that Sun hasn’t given up and that Swing will become more and more useful (again).

Danny also mentioned new components in JDK7 like the DatePicker and CSS styling – both are very attractive to me and I can’t wait to use them in the next project.

Read the whole post at: Swing and JDK 7 : The Planetarium.