Archive for April, 2009

Optimizing JavaScript for extreme performance and low memory consumption

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

While making WidgetCity, I had to use various measures to speed up the code. In this post, I'll show you the tricks I learned - some of which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else before. A lot of performance optimization tips for JavaScript code involve things that you more typically see ...

I wrote a Sim City clone in JavaScript

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

This is why I haven't been updating lately: I have been working on a Sim City clone, written purely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript! The game is called WidgetCity, and I'm participating with it in the Betavine Widget Competition 2009. The game was designed to run in Opera Widgets mode, but it ...

PHP Magic Features

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

I wrote an article for Packt Publishing about PHP's magic features: Magic functions, methods and constants. The article has now been published on Packt's website, and you can read it here!

Do you know a build tool?

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

Do you have a repetitive task for example in a programming project? Chances are you could automate the steps with a build tool. For example, in one of my JavaScript projects I had to do the following: Put all project files to a zip file: Click each file and each dir, and ...

Making a custom front controller in Zend Framework

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Firstly, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I'm pretty busy with various things right now, so I don't have much time for blogging. Hopefully I'll have some pretty interesting/cool stuff to show you later, though! Now, here's something interesting I spotted recently: Creating a custom front controller for Zend Framework. Federico ...

Integrating FCKeditor with Zend_Form

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

How to use FCKeditor, or any other WYSIWYG editor, with Zend_Form? Another relatively common question. There are many ways you can do this, but let's look at these two as they are the best in my opinion: Adding some JavaScript to your view script Creating a Zend_Form_Decorator We'll be using FCKeditor, but you can ...

Using a builder to construct complex classes

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

Sometimes if you have a complex class, which needs to be set up in a specific way: Perhaps it takes a lot of constructor arguments, or often requires calling some setters. Having something like that can make it more difficult to understand the code. In a case like this, you may ...