Top three posts of 2011
Dear Reader,
Assuming this post does not take off like wildfire and get more than 10 views, here are the top 3 most viewed posts on this blog in 2011 as reported by Google Analytics.
#3: 5 Tools Every PHP Developer Should Master
If you know me, you know that PHP is my passion. Talking about PHP is fun, working with PHP is fun, helping others work with PHP is fun. Heck, I love PHP so much that I’ve worked it so that my day job for the last 3 years has been working with PHP and developers.
Over the past nine years of having fun with PHP, began to see that there are five categories of tools that I rely on more than any others. Sure, I’ve got a code beautifier, a standards checker, and a hand full of hand-written scripts I use for various things to make life easier. However when it comes down to it, there are five that I rely on every day.
So here they are in acceding order of importance. Let me know, what are your five? (let’s not start a meme or anything though, ok?)
#2:Four reasons why Drupal should fork PHP
I attended my first DrupalCon earlier this year and was amazed by the fact that I was surrounded by people who were using a project built on top of PHP – a project I dearly love – and many had no idea. In fact, out of 3,000 people in attendance, I ran into 2 members of what most of us consider “the PHP community”. Granted, I didn’t meet everyone but I did expect to run into more PHP developers. What I discovered throughout the ‘Con was that there are many developers there that are intimately familiar with PHP but identify with Drupal; they are Drupal developers, not PHP developers.
With that thought in mind, I began to think back to MSWDC’09. A discussion “erupted” there during one of the sessions that was quite telling. A core PHP developer challenged a core Drupal developer with the statement “What would happen if development stopped on PHP tomorrow?” The Drupal developer retorted “Then we would move Drupal to another language.” The room got quiet for a second as what he said sunk in. The Drupal core is interested in Drupal, if PHP becomes a pain-point for them, they feel they can switch to something less painful.
That conversation (which went on for a while longer) has stuck with me. Drupal is obviously an important project. The United States Government has begun adopting it at the highest levels, major sports leagues are adopting it, and yet it is still available for local businesses to use. Obviously moving the functionality – not to mention the existing userbase – to a new language would be a herculean task; but what if the new language was just a version of the old. What if Drupal forked PHP and began working on its own version?
With that thought in mind, I began to think hard about reasons they would want to do this. Here are the four best I came up with.
#1:Dynamically loading images from the web in Flex 3
This weekend’s Flex project was more successful that last weeks. At least the code has survived this far without me declaring it a bust and moving on to the next project.
This week’s project involves (among other things) calling an API that returns a graphic and then displaying it on-screen. Being the Flex neophyte I am, I assumed that this was a simple call to HTTPService. Unfortunately, as I found out, that won’t work. HTTPService is designed specifically to work with APIs that return specific types of data.
There you go, a little bit for everyone. Some PHP, some controversy, and some Flex. Honestly, it does surprise me that an almost 2 year old Flex article is still #1. I think I need to start blogging more. :)
Until next time,
I <3 |<
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