Ideaticus.com

I want to share some ideas about using AJAX in web interface development. Working with Dojo, jQuery or any other JavaScript framework any web developer is able to offer a higher level of usability. In my projects I try to implement the following:

Error checking in forms:
Detecting duplicates of username, e-mail, security number etc requires additional hits in the database without reloading the entire page. Build small AJAX calls to retrieve data from the database and to establish if the user input is correct or not.

Submit user comments:
User should never leave the page of a product to post a comment or to rate a product. Continue Reading »

I had a small conversation with a junior PHP developer and I was disappointed about the lack of knowledge on PHP caching. In this article I will cover some ideas about APC.

What is APC? Php.net offers a laconic presentation: ” The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP”. That’s awesome, but what exactly this APC does? If you are not familiar with PHP internal process, you should read the following paragraph. If you are familiar, just go to the APC manual and start using it.

Let me describe in few words how a request is processed in PHP: Continue Reading »

This is not really something new, but I had to use it few days ago and I decided to write my experience with the new Query Profiler from MySQL. Jeremy Cole from Proven Scaling did a great job and since MySQL Community Server 5.0.37 we have now a built-in tool for performance analysis.

I wrote a very simple class to help me identify slow queries: Continue Reading »

Attention: this is a technical article.

Sometimes site owners, with almost zero technical knowledge, want a way to save their database then to import them directly from their web application. For this I usualy save every table as CSV file and for import, I parse every csv file and import in the corespondent table. Continue Reading »

I managed to finish another article about Human Computer Interaction. In the previous episode we covered some rules about search results. Maybe some of you found them useful and I decided to write about Graphical User Interface (GUI).

The most used paradigm in Graphical User Interfaces is “window, icon, menu, pointing device” (WIMP). First approaches on web documents were mostly linear documents with some embedded graphics. In 21 century we have modal windows, tabbed browsing, interactive interfaces and many others that make our life easier. Continue Reading »