Front-end performance and frameworks

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Yahoo has been researching various different techniques for improving website performance. There are a lot of obvious ones, such as making sure images are optimized, JavaScript/CSS is minified and so on. There are also a couple of less known tricks, such as putting JavaScript as the last in the document, and “flushing early”. Flushing early basically means that when you …

PHP with Microsoft IIS and Microsoft SQL server

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You often hear that using PHP under Microsoft servers is a bad idea, because it doesn’t work very well. But is that even true? You guessed it… no. It is actually possible to get a PHP based database application working under IIS and MS SQL Server perfectly fine, it just may take some configuration. You can even get Apache mod_rewrite …

Introduction to Zend_Layout (updated for ZF 1.5!)

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I wrote earlier a post about the back then new Zend_Layout component in Zend Framework. It’s one of my most popular posts, so I think it’s about time for me to write an updated version which actually works in ZF 1.5’s version of Zend_Layout. We’ll look into how to get started with Zend_Layout, and we’ll also check out the new …

Enso: A useful tool or a fancy gimmick?

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I’ve installed an application called Enso on my laptop. What is it? It’s an application, which turns the caps lock key into a small command prompt, which you can use to run various commands, such as calculating, opening applications, controlling windows etc. Enso is a product of a company called Humanized, which was founded by Aza Raskin, who is the …

Setting up Windows as a PHP development server

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Install a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment in 4 easy steps, one of which is optional and one of which isn’t really a step at all! ;) These days I’ve been working on Linux servers for a long time, so when I had to install all the things necessary for PHP development on Windows, I realized it isn’t necessarily …

Tracking the user’s browsing history with PHP

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There are various reasons for tracking what an user does: Keeping track of the refering page for forms, so they can be sent back to where they came from Tracking usage behavior for statistics etc. Let’s look at how we could implement a simple user tracker in PHP with Zend Framework. I’m going to write a bit of the theory …

Doctrine vs. Propel

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An updated version of this post is available: Doctrine vs. Propel 2009 update The two most well known ORM frameworks for PHP right now are probably Propel and Doctrine. A lot of people are probably wondering which one should they choose for their project, just like I was. I’ve used Propel for a while, and now I decided to give …