Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Rewriting TankWar: Assessing the damage

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

I have decided to rewrite TankWar, and I'll be writing a bunch of blog posts about the process. If you ever wanted to know how to write a scorched earth/worms-like game using just JavaScript, now is your chance to learn ;) This is the first one: Assessing the damage. In other ...

Dynamic precompiling of JavaScript functions for fun and profit

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Hey it's Friday so it's time to try a fun JavaScript hack - Let's go and precompile some functions! What does "precompiling" mean? In principle, it means we take a function which takes multiple parameters and pre-define some of them. All this is done dynamically, so your code can do it ...

A simple way to make your code better: Stop adding more parameters

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

You need to add some new functionality to your function or class. Let's say you need to remove all objects stored, but optionally also call a method on them. It's pretty simple, isn't it? Let's just add a parameter to removeAllObjects! If you make it true, the additional method is called, ...

More blogs that I read

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Continuing the trend from last November, when I posted some of my favorite blogs, I think it's time to highlight some other good blogs! So here's a bunch of more - be sure to check them out: The PHPDeveloper blog: Many PHP programmers probably know the PHPdeveloper website, which links to a ...

Did you think your site validated input properly? Think again!

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

You’ve written a PHP based web app, and you’ve made sure it doesn’t cause errors if the user submits unexpected values via any URLs or forms. But there’s something you quite likely forgot to test: What if the data that’s expected to be a singular value happens to be ...

Is commenting your code useless?

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

James Carr has written a well argumented post about comments. To sum it up shortly, he says comments are the lowest form of communication, and that commenting freshly written code is not a good idea. I tend to disagree, and here’s why.

Going to review Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development

Monday, October 12th, 2009

I was contacted by Packt Publishing to review a new Zend Framework book, Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development. I have previously reviewed Object-Oriented JavaScript, also published by Packt, which was a quality title so I’m looking forward to reading this ZF book. The book is written by Keith ...

Common programming errors and how to avoid them

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Back in august, I introduced the error tracking challenge. While it didn't get as much participation as I had hoped for, I did manage to collect some results. In this post, I'll go through the most common ones, and suggest some approaches to avoiding them. Suggest your own errors and tips ...

Error tracking challenge is over

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Just as a reminder: If you participated in the error tracking challenge and haven't yet mailed your results to me, please do so ASAP. The address is jani at codeutopia net I will be posting some results next week.

What is a null object, and when are they useful?

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

If you've written code, you've probably used the value null to indicate some variable is not set. This is perfectly good, but did you know there's more to nulls than just the value null? There is also a null object, which doesn't really have anything to do with the value null, ...