Via PHP Everywhere, JavaWorld: Joshua Bloch: A conversation about designing API's. "Bill Venners recently visited the Sun Microsystems campus in Santa Clara, Calif. to interview Joshua Bloch, an architect in Sun's Core Java Platform Group. In this interview, Josh explains his unique insight into API design, extreme programming, code quality and reuse, refactoring, defensive copies, and the extent to which client programmers should be trusted."

Yet again, I'm not going to get to read this until I get home on Saturday (and maybe not even then since I'm going to be going to Sean's debate), but it looks like an interesting read so I've gone ahead and blogged it anyway

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Programming | id 1267

22:25 (utc-5)
edited: 22:32 (utc-5)

 

Check out this SQL Tutorial from W3Schools.com.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Programming | id 1266

05:00 (utc-5)

 

I just updated my PHP Calendar code. I did a major update, actually. Yet again the code turned out shorter, as well as more powerful, and hopefully easier to understand, but just to make sure I added a whole bunch of comments that unfortunately increased the total size of the file.

Because of PHP's limited features, I had to make a little trade-off. I got a ton more flexibility, but I had to use from zero to three global variables, depending on what features you want to use. You can easily name the variables whatever you want to avoid name clases, and the default names should be safe enough. Actually, now that I think about it, you can avoid the global variables if you really try (by serializing them and unserializing them into the 'eval'ed code I use, but that gain is not worth the pain.

New feature: Now, instead of providing an anonymous function that controls which days have the date linked, you just provide some code to eval. That code can use whatever variables it wants (that's where the globals come in). The code can return up to three types of metadata. It can return a URL to link the date with, a set of CSS classes to link the day with (I'll be using this for my task manager to make certain days come up with different colors depending on whether there is any task for that day and what the task's priority is), and finally a string that can be substituted for the date, so if you want to say "first", "second", "third" instead of 1, 2, 3 in your calendar, you can do that (I'll be using this for my task manager too).

That's about it. Check out the code, and feel free to e-mail if you have any questions.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Programming | id 1265

04:16 (utc-5)

 

Apocalypse 4 is out!!!

"This Apocalypse is all about syntax in the large. The corresponding chapter in the Camel book is entitled "Statements and Declarations", but it could just as easily have been entitled, "All About Blocks". The basic underlying question is "What exactly do those curlies mean?""

"For Perl 5 and earlier, the answer to that question was, "Too many things". Or rather, too many things with inconsistent rules. We'll continue to use curlies for much of what we've used them for up till now, but by making a few critical simplifications, the rules will be much more consistent."

Aaaah, it's like 9 pages long (uh, and 42 pages long according to Internet Explorer's print preview), and I'm in my friend's dorm, and I can't print it out, and even if I could the lights are out because my friend and his roomate are going to sleep, so I couldn't read it anyway. I'll have to print the whole thing out and read it when I get home on Saturday.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Programming | id 1264

01:18 (utc-5)
edited: 01:23 (utc-5)