Mauro Pirrone | Blog

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Small but informative website about Joe Spiteri Sargent has been launched. The purpose of this website is to promote award winning Spiteri Water Pump (SWP).

[ www.joespiterisargent.com ]

A new real estate website has been launched. More info regarding this website coming soon. Any comments are more than welcome

[ www.rsb.com.mt ]

A four-day event related to technology, creativity and business is coming up this week, between 3rd July and 6th July 2008. It’s going to take place at the Hilton Conference Centre.

There are various workshops and seminars about different topics including:

• Photography
• Graphic Design
• 3D Animation
• Audio
• Video
• Lighting
• Business
• Business Administration
• Business and Business Applications
• Business Supply Chains
• Careers and Opportunities
• Design and Business Administration
• Design and Marketing
• Marketing
• Mobile Technology
• Network Administration

The workshops are free for all and there are the last few seats available! Click the link below for more info and to book your seat!

http://www.digitalartsexpo.com/

A web service is a software program identified by a URI which can be accessed through internet. It consists of well-defined, re-usable, software components that perform specific, encapsulated tasks via standardised web-oriented mechanisms.

Web services can be used with any programming language such as PHP or ASP.NET. With little code and some XML, you can include some of Google’s or Yahoo’s functionality in your own website!

But what’s exactly XML? XML is simply a mark-up language that defines other languages and protocols:

• WSDL - Web Service Description Language
• UDDI - Universal Description, Discovery and Integration
• SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

If you are new to XML, I suggest taking a tutorial here.

In PHP it is very easy to use a web service. It’s a matter of few lines of code!
http://www.php.net/soap_soapclient_soapcall

And one last thing…here are a list of web services which you might use in your website or web app.
http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory/1?sort=mashups

In the near future I will be publishing an article how you can create an ajaxed site search using a web service. As always, feel free to send your comments!

ShrinkSafe is a JavaScript compression utility which can practically reduce file size by a third or more. The idea behind this is very simple…faster web page download!

Start shrinking your JavaScript files:
http://shrinksafe.dojotoolkit.org/

Here’s a link which points out the best practices to have exceptional performance websites:
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Here’s also a library which helps solving some of these rules:
http://code.google.com/p/minify/

Flickr is an image and video hosting website. Luckily enough, they provide a web service to access your photos and use them in any way you want. To get you into perspective, here’s the Flickr photoset which I am using, and here are the customised photo gallaries which I created using PHP:

• Photo gallery using Lightbox
• Photo gallery using PostCardViewer

Although I’m showing you how to integrate Flickr with Lightbox and PostCardViewer, this technique works with any photo gallery including the commercial one SlideShowPro.

Step 1

Downlaod the phpFlicker library from http://phpflickr.com/

Download Lightbox or PostCardViewer (or any other photo gallery).

Step 2

To access Flickr using a web service, you need an API key. You may get one from http://www.flickr.com/services/api/keys

Step 3

Get the photoset ID. In this case I am using photoset id ‘72157605353756648′. Note that the photoset id is part of the URL. For example, http://www.flickr.com/photos/26262208@N07/sets/72157605353756648/

Step 3

Step up your php script.

require_once("phpFlickr/phpFlickr.php");
$f = new phpFlickr("your api key");
$photoset_id = '72157605353756648';
$photos = $f->photosets_getPhotos($photoset_id);

Step 4

Loop through each photo in the photoset and you’re done! The following example uses the Lightbox photo gallery.

<ul>
<?php foreach ($photos['photo'] as $photo): ?>
<li><a rel="lightbox[roadtrip]" href="<?= $f->buildPhotoURL($photo, ‘medium’) ?>" title="<?= $photo['title'] ?>"><img src="<?= $f->buildPhotoURL($photo, ’square’) ?>" alt="<?= $photo['title'] ?>" title="<?= $photo['title'] ?>" /></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

Notes

• You may easily change the file size by specifying either square, thumbnail, small, medium, large or original. For example: $f->buildPhotoURL($photo, ‘large’)
• You may programmatically get the photoset ids by using the API call photoset.getList (or photoset_getList method)
• You may also use API calls to get comments, upload photos, and so on
• For the complete API documentation visit here

Source Code Download

• Lightbox Example
• PostCardViewer Example

Here are some Firefox extensions which I find very useful. If you would like to suggest other Firefox extensions which are not listed over here, feel free to do so by sending a comment.

General

PicLens
PicLens transforms your browser into a visually stunning experience for enjoying online photos and videos. It is also integrated with Facebook. Must try this out…it’s amazing!

ColorfulTabs
Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying enjouting the overall appearance of the interface.

Download Statusbar
View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar - without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing.

DownlaodHelper
The easy way to download Web videos from hundreds of YouTube-like sites. This works also for audio and picture galleries.

PDF Download
PDF Download relieves the pain experienced when encountering PDF files on the Web. Whenever you click on a PDF file, PDF Download lets you know before trying to open it, and then offers you choices such as downloading, opening, or converting it straight to HTML.

Extended Statusbar
A Statusbar with Speed, Percentage, Time and loaded size (like in Opera)

Gmail Notifier
A notifier for Gmail accounts.

ChatZilla
A clean, easy to use and highly extensible Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client.

Web Development

Web Developer
A do everything addon for web developers. Must install!

IE Tab
An extension which uses IE’s rendering engine to view web pages inside Firefox. Very useful when you want to switch between Firefox and IE.

Page validator
Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service.

Firebug
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

FireFTP
FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

Selenium IDE
Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.

Social Networking

Digg Firefox Extension
The Digg Firefox extension allows you to interact with Digg (http://www.digg.com) and see information about the web page you are currently viewing while you use Firefox.

MVC which stands for Model View Controller is an architectural design pattern used for building modularised web applications. The main idea behind this model is to separate the business logic from the user interface. As a result, the application would be easier to manage and maintain since any changes in the business logic will not affect the user interface.

MVC consists of:

• Model which consists of the application’s data and the business rules (methods) used to modify the data.
• View is the application’s presentation layer which consists of text, buttons, and other objects.
• Controller which uses a model to invoke methods for data processing and views to output the results.

As with regards to the PHP programming language, there are many open-source frameworks which you can use including the following:

Zend Framework
Zend Framework is well designed and specifically targeted for PHP5. The nice thing about ZF is that all modules are self-contained. Practically should can take any module from this framework and plug it into your application. Video Tutorial

CodeIgniter
CodeIgniter works with PHP 4 and 5. CI is very easy to use and it is very well documented. Video Tutorials

CakePHP
CakePHP works with PHP 4 and 5. It is feature-rich and has built-in support for ORM (Object Relational Model) and Ajax. Video Tutorials

Symfony
Symfony is much like Ruby on Rails since you have to use a command line. Video Tutorials

All the above frameworks support MVC but there are some differences when it comes to the framework’s functionality. I would suggest trying them out!