2011 has been a transformative year for Streamhead. Due to some major work and planning behind the scenes, I haven’t been able to post as much as I would have liked. But all this hard work is about to pay off and you, my dear reader, will enjoy the fruits of it. In 2012, I plan to double down on in-depth articles, tutorials and case studies. All practical hands-on information. Read on for a review of 2011 and my goals for 2012.
My latest project is ExpensesSpreadsheet.NET. It is the simplest and easiest solution I could come up with to track and categorize expenses … in a spreadsheet. Let’s call it a niche web application, so it’s probably not for every one, but it should fit some extremely well. It runs on Heroku’s Node.js stack.
For SEO reasons it’s important to make sure that users only visit your site through a single domain name. Either www.example.com or example.com, but not both. In most cases a .htaccess change is the easiest fix. But not when you’re deploying to an environment that doesn’t have Apache, like Heroku. Here’s a quick way to get this functionality using Express on Node.JS
If you want to integrate PayPal with your Google AppEngine application, there are a limited number of options available. My own open source project offers a servlet that can parse and log IPN messages. This will quickly get you up and running with PayPal Payments Standard.
If you’ve ever created anything using jMonkeyEngine’s SimpleApplication and you use something other than the American standard QWERTY keyboard, you might have had the same frustration as me: Why isn’t there quick way to switch the keyboard layout? The SimpleApplication base class is supposed to make your life easier, yet there you are, completely stuck with that unnatural keyboard layout. Read on for a quick copy-and-paste solution.
Whenever you’re proposing a web site or application to a client, showing him what it’s going to look like can work wonders. It avoids confusion and can fix doubts. But how do you show off a website when you haven’t written one line of code and HTML? Wireframe tools and website mocks are the answer. This article compares a few of the many tools available.
PHP in Action is all about using PHP. It is not about learning PHP. In the book, you’ll study practical ways of applying software patterns to real life situations. It is not a book for beginning PHP programmers, but it is a treasure trove for those looking for good ways to solve common problems in web application development.
One question I get asked a lot, is where and how to host your Java web application. It’s all fine to create it inside Eclipse with an embedded server, but how do you get it to the people? For a long time, there was no answer for enthusiast programmers. There were only expensive and way oversized options. Things have changed lately, but it’s still not an easy choice.
Therefore I have created a small flowchart that will try to guide you in the maze.
Out of the box, Google’s App Engine supports versioned deployments. You can switch back and forth between revisions very easily, which is a great feature for properly testing an application before going live. There is one major problem: All versions of the application share the same datastore. So if you’re migrating your data you run a serious risk of influencing your current production application. Hence the need for a proper staging environment.
If you have a WordPress.org blog and want to try a new plugin or a new look, you have two options: You could just install it on your running production site and risk crashing it. Or you could first experiment with it on a different test installation. Ideally this test system would resemble the real site as closely as possible. I think you can guess which one is the right way and which is the one most people go for. This article show how to copy your existing blog to a local computer and run it there, so you don’t have to fear trying out something new.