Daniel Brown at Endlessly Curious wrote an interesting post on the current state of teaching programming.
He raises points such as the new generation of programmers getting taught mostly high-level languages such as C# and Java, and that they should be taught more assembly or C instead.
After pimping from various sources, I have decided to try Twitter. You can find me here. Not sure if I’m going to keep updating it, but I am for now =)
Dojo provides a useful component called dijit.Tree, which is basically a quite typical tree component. However, it doesn’t do much out of the box, and I needed it to make some tree nodes selectable with checkboxes for the packageizer script.
Let’s see how the tree was made to play nice with checkboxes and some ajax tricks.
David Otton posted a short but thought-provoking post about stdClass, which many think is the “base class” all PHP classes automatically inherit from. I have to admit that I had this misconception as well.
On the other hand, “true” OOP languages such as C# and Java both have a base class which all other classes inherit, even if you don’t explicitly define it. They also tend to have somewhat deeper inheritance chains, as James Titcumb points out, in reply to David’s post.
This presents some room for analysis in how things are handled in dynamic and static languages, and how those differences affect things…
As of late, I’ve been working on developing a widget that runs on both PCs and mobile phones, for Opera’s X-Widgets Challenge.
The widgets for the challenge must work on a QVGA (320×240) screen, and that presents certain challenges. For example, as the size of the widget is so constrained, you need to think what is absolutely necessary - does the user have to see this piece of information on this screen, could it be shown elsewhere, or is it actually relevant at all?
Yesterday I finished the development of my widget. Let’s look at some things I had to consider to make it work on a small screen, and what could’ve been done even better.
Last month, I introduced the packageizer, which allowed you to choose a class from the Zend Framework and get it as a zip with its dependencies.
Now, based on some feedback from users, I’ve improved the user interface of the tool: You can now select multiple items for inclusion in the package, and I’ve made it possible to get the packages in .phar format. It also has initial support for different libraries, ie. Zend Framework 1.6 and Zend Framework SVN trunk, but currently only 1.6 stable is available.
Check out the improved packageizer! Let me know what you think.
I also used this chance to familiarize myself with Dojo. The improved packageizer uses Dojo’s Dijit widgets to provide a better way to choose classes and display their dependencies. Despite the fancy new dijit.Tree and all, it also works without JavaScript, in case someone needs that.
I’ve usually dismissed the Dojo Toolkit as a difficult, poorly documented JavaScript library.
However, Zend Framework recently decided to choose it as the default JS library to bundle with the framework. It can’t be all bad if that happens, right?
This sparked my curiosity towards Dojo again - Maybe it was time to actually try it for real, armed with patience…
I often have problems finding blogs that post content that interests me. It could be that I’m really picky, or it’s just really difficult to find quality programming blogs.
So, today I’ll introduce you to some of the blogs I read. Perhaps you’ll find a new blog to read as well?
I recently got into the beta of BumpTop - You may have heard about it: it’s a replacement for your Windows desktop.
BumpTop lets you use “real” actions such as tossing items around the desk, creating piles of items and such. Their site claims that BumpTop is “a fresh and engaging new way to interact with your computer desktop”…
So does all this actually work, and most important of all, is this a practical way to manage your computer desktop?
It seems as if the browser is becoming easier to understand than other applications for people who don’t know much about computers in general.
For example, if an application has a settings dialog and you ask the user to go back or close the dialog, they aren’t always sure what to do - should they press Cancel, OK or the X in the top corner? - On the other hand, in a browser it’s quite obvious: press the back button.
Should applications be built with interactions more like browsers, or should you simply build the application around a website?
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