CodeUtopia

NetBeans Platform 6.9 Developer’s Guide review coming soon

I have recently received a review copy of Jürgen Petri’s book, NetBeans Platform 6.9 Developer’s Guide, and I will be posting a review of it after I finish reading it in the coming weeks.

You can check the book out on Packt’s store page.

Some of you may recall I was also doing a review of Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development. This review was delayed becayse of me being the usual me and forgetting things, so I’d like to apologize to anyone who has been waiting for it. I’m going to post my review of it next week – I already have it written too and it just needs minor edits, so this time I’m not going to forget about it

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Now you can write PHP code… without writing any code

Yes, you heard that right! You can now code in PHP without having to write a single line of code – amazing, right?

The application that makes this possible is called Lemon ADE, and it runs on the iPad.

In this post I’ll go over how Lemon ADE works, and I have also recorded a short video demonstrating coding with the app.

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Posted in Programming | 3 Comments »

Exceptions and abstraction

So you already know how to handle your errors properly. Even if you’re already using exceptions, there are some nuances to the use of exceptions that are important to know and understand in order to write code that is easier to reuse and more decoupled.

Let’s talk about exceptions and how they relate to your classes and abstraction.

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Posted in Programming | 3 Comments »

The “do X or die()” pattern must die

What’s the most common pattern for error handling you see in beginner’s PHP code? – That’s right, do_X() or die('do_X failed);.

That’s nice and all, as at least you have some sort of error handling, but I think this way of handling errors must go. There is no place for it in modern PHP code – it’s the worst way to handle errors, not much better than not handling them at all.

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Posted in Programming | 15 Comments »

Wicket from the point of view of a PHP developer

Not long ago, I had to learn some Wicket. What is that? In this case it has nothing to do with cricket – The Wicket I’m talking about is a Java web application framework.

I’ve mostly used PHP and Python to do server-side web application sort of programming. Compared to what I’m used to, Wicket is way different.

Read on to find out about a different way to develop web applications.

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Posted in Programming | 6 Comments »

How to learn from Stack Overflow without asking questions

Stack Overflow is great for finding answers to programming questions.

But did you know it’s good for learning even if you don’t ask any questions – just answer them?

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Posted in Programming | 5 Comments »

Unity: The best game development platform?

One day I saw a webpage which had some game, and wanted me to download the Unity web player plugin for my browser.

I thought “What crap is this? I’m not going to install it!”. That was stupid, because Unity rocks as a game development tool!

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Refactoring explained to an absolute beginner

Recently while on a drive with a non-programmer friend, I talked with him about code complexity and manageability, how very complicated code is detrimental to productivity and stuff like that.

Later on, I decided to explain it to him with actual code examples, although the most he has ever done was some HTML back in elementary school.

Here’s what I told him…

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Posted in Programming | 11 Comments »

The best old “indie” games

Just for fun, here’s a list of the best old shareware/freeware games I played before Windows XP and such even existed… The word indie is quoted because these games would probably be called that nowadays, but weren’t back then

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Posted in general | 3 Comments »

Blog moved

If you see this it means everything has now been moved and the DNS has propagated correctly

Please let me know if anything appears broken (Leave a comment or contact me via email/IM)

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