Refactoring

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Today I’d like to point out a bunch of good articles about refactoring – the process of improving code without changing the functionality. Sameer Borate has written four posts about the topic in his blog, and I encourage you to check them out: Refactoring: An introduction to PHP programmers Refactoring 1: Conslidate conditional expressions Refactoring 2: Extract method Refactoring 3: …

Unit testing: Introduction

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Due to popular demand, I’ll be writing a bunch of posts on unit testing. In this post I’ll introduce unit testing: What it is, when it’s a good idea and when it might not be. I’ll also discuss a bit about what makes for a good unit test. Next week I’ll post a followup to this, which will be more …

What would you like to read about on CodeUtopia?

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I haven’t had much ideas to write about lately, so how about this: You, my dear readers, get to tell me your favorite topic that you’d like to read/learn about. Is there a specific topic you would like me to write about? As long as it’s somewhat relevant to this blog’s past content, post your idea to the comments! – …

Should I try Git if Svn/CVS/other works for me?

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I’ve been using Subversion for quite a while, and while it has some minor annoyances like complex merging, it never really bothered me. Then along comes Git, touting that it’s easy and that you’re stupid if you don’t use it. The technical stuff people said about it were impressing, but not enough to actually warrant trying it for me – …

How to pass variable values to JavaScript

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A relatively common task in today’s Web 2.0 apps is passing values from a server-side script (or through a link) to JavaScript, affecting the client-side script execution. Not surprisingly, there are a few ways to do that. Let’s look at three and their pros and cons: Embedding scripts into templates Passing variables in URLs Using configurable scripts

Doctrine vs. Propel: 2009 update

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The best PHP ORM libraries, Doctrine and Propel. Last year I compared them to each other, and now it’s time to get a fresh look at how they have advanced in about a year – Is Doctrine still the better of the two? This time, I’ll also look at the features of each in more depth.