Archive for the ‘Coding’ Category

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Getting XML data into Symfony, automatically.

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

The problem

We have a complex XML file with many different node types, etc. supplied by a third party via a URL reference.
There’s an initial dump, and then an incremental update every couple of weeks, with additions, deletions and updates.

What I’d like to be able to do is to drive a symfony app with this data.

Some thoughts so far

I’m a symfony noob.

Getting the data

I could manually transform the XML into YAML to create the schema and the initial data load, and then build the app. But I don’t want to have to do this manually for the regular updates. Ideally, I’d like to use the symfony ORM to handle all the transactions, rather than a completely separate (outside symfony) script.

… and some images

The XML also contains URIs for remotely hosted images, and I’d like to be able to automagically pull these down to the local app file system and rewrite the references.

Anything that will help us to get started in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Posted in Coding, Tools | 4 Comments »

Goodbye .clearfix, old friend.

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

You all know the old ‘floated elements inside a container cause the container to collapse’ problem?

Well, up until recently, I’d always just called on an old friend, .clearfix, and he’d sorted it out for me. I met .clearfix three or four years ago, and hardly a project has gone by since where I haven’t required his services. You know, I didn’t really ask him how he did it; he’d just quietly go about his job as I directed him, much like Michael Clayton, but without the gambling problem.

But yesterday, when I asked him to help out a colleague for me, little did I know I’d given him his last assignment.

Something happened early this morning – completely coincidentally. A little bird (or rather a tweet) came by and told me that, despite the fact Blueprint CSS uses .clearfix, .clearfix was no longer the way to go. And to be honest, it was almost a relief; the reason I’d never really asked .clearfix how he did his work was that deep down I knew that he was really a hack, and that if I just turned a blind (or ignorant) eye, then I could just pretend like everything was okay and we could all just carry on getting work done.

.clearfix is indeed inelegant, and really is a hack. And would you believe that the alternative solution is not so tricky…
Using overflow: auto; (or overflow: hidden;) on the container with a width will sort it all out for you.
Rather than explain it all here, I’ll just link to a few articles that have already put further effort into describing this:

So, farewell, .clearfix, you’ve served us well.
…and thank you, MB, for the enlightenment.

Posted in Coding, Link, Tools, Web Standards | 2 Comments »

Does developing in .aspx produce bloated code?

Friday, July 4th, 2008

This started out as a comment in response to Robbie’s question on my previous post, but thought I’d turn it into another post:

So is it that they are written in aspx which makes them bloated?.

Well, I guess that’s what I’m kinda implying.

Building in the .NET framework with the Visual Studio IDE tends to mean that lots of components and snippets are provided for you. So by default you get things like having all your page content wrapped in a <form> element and you get the lovely __VIEWSTATE hidden input field and stuff like that.

I think that there can be a tendency amongst back-end developers, i.e. .NET, Java developers, to produce something that works well technically, and then take the PSDs that the designer gave them and put them on the front, so you’ve got something that looks like it’s supposed to, and works kinda like it’s supposed to, but with the interface between the front- and back-ends being very ugly, slow, and inefficient. Of course this has an often considerable negative effect for the end user.

While this may be a generalisation, I’ve experienced it first-hand, with developers who struggle to understand, or at least show some care, about good clean lightweight, semantic front-end code that performs well in the browser.
When you’re developing with .NET in an IDE like Visual Studio, you have to put in a bit more effort to get that good code.

Developing in .NET doesn’t necessarily produce bloated code, but I think if you took a look at the average .NET (.aspx) site, I think you’ll find greater code-bloat than in your average hand-crafted-in-TextMate code.

Posted in Coding, Commentary, Design, Tools | 2 Comments »

Web site performance

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Last week I read Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites. While I already have a fairly good understanding of site performance, having completed a fairly extensive performance analysis of tvnz.co.nz a few years ago and being familiar with Yahoo!’s YSlow plug-in for Joe Hewitt’s Firebug plug-in for Firefox, it was good to get into a bit more detail.

But lately, I’ve come across a few sites that have made me cringe; a colleague pointed out a couple of Swiss ones: migros.ch, and gate24.ch, and I came across the new upandgo.co.nz site on newsites.co.nz.

Let’s look at some stats, with vodafone.co.nz (my old gig) thrown into the mix:

Site YSlow score HTTP requests
(unprimed cache)		 Size
(kB, unprimed cache)		 Size
(kB, primed cache)
gate24.ch F (40) 55 501 49
migros.ch F (39) 85 996 134
upandgo.co.nz F (35) 77 748 284
vodafone.co.nz B (88) 41 195 23

The first three sites are ASPX sites, with bloated, invalid, (W3C) table-based markup, and what appears to be no performance tuning whatsoever. Sure, they are visually heavier than vodafone.co.nz, but being visually heavier doesn’t necessarily equate to looking better, and more often the end-user benefits of the visual components are offset by the performance overhead they introduce.

So, if you’re a web developer and you don’t use, or know of, Firebug and YSlow, stop what you’re doing right now and get familiar with them. Chris Pederick’s Web Developer toolbar for Firefox is also invaluable.

Learn about ETags, far future Expires headers, gzip, script placement, semantic markup, reducing the number of HTTP requests.

These are all vital factors in presenting a great website.
Figure out what you can do to make your site lighter, faster, and more search engine-friendly.

Posted in Coding, Commentary, Design, Tools, Web Standards | 5 Comments »

Extensible CSS

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

Cameron Moll has published Part 1 of his new series The Highly Extensible CSS Interface. He looks at meaningful, lightweight markup, resetting CSS, and resolution dependence.

Posted in Coding, Commentary, Web Standards | No Comments »

Jeff Croft goes brown

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

Jeff Croft has redesigned – and it’s brown, yo.

I must say, it’ll take a bit of getting used to.

Posted in Coding, Commentary, Design | No Comments »

Charts and graphs and stuff

Monday, December 10th, 2007

It’s funny how things come in droves.

A good friend of mine has, over the years, written a few applications that require graphing. He has written them as VB applications and when I’ve suggested he make them as web-apps, one of his fairly valid objections is that it would be tricky to create good-looking graphs with dynamic data.

Google’s Charting API

So just this morning, the Barnacle drew my attention to Google’s new Charting API (Read the Developers’ Guide). It takes some query string parameters and returns your chart as an image.

Check it out:

Line chart with unevenly spaced data points and lines in red, green and dashed blue

Line chart with a pale blue horizontal band stretching from 25 percent to 75 percent of the way up the y-axis and a thin horizontal line ten percent of the way up the x-axis Three dimensional pie chart with May, June, July, August, September and October labels for each segment

Now that’s pretty cool, isn’t it?
Although I think the data encoding, while clever, seems a little quirky.

Flot for jQuery

And so having spotted that this morning, I’m stumbling around the net this evening and discover Flot, a charting plug-in for jQuery. This is teh awesome; just check out the examples, especially the zoom!

So, while you’re waiting for other browsers to support SVG, here’s a veritable choice of quality charting goodness to satisfy the most particular of needs.

Posted in Coding, Commentary, JavaScript | 1 Comment »

How to hack mintshot; the problems continue.

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Here’s another post about mintshot hacks.

I’m not sure what happened to the page I linked to the other day; it seems to be down. [Edit: Here's the google cache of that page.]

There are a few good lessons that can be learned here:

  • If you’re going to have any sort of site with user accounts, ongoing earnings, prizes, etc. and/or anything that can convert or relate to actual monetary value, then I’d recommend not using a standard open-source platform (i.e. Joomla). If there’s money involved, then you’ll quickly attract hackers.
  • Don’t attempt to do any sort of worth-related calculations client-side, returning a response via a form POST. Any savvy geek will mess with the HTTP headers (using Charles, for example) and will get rich quick.
  • Get your site a proper security audit from an outfit like security-assessment.com. It can cost a few grand, but for the sake of an embarrassing mess, I’d say it’s money well spent.

I’m interested to see what will ensue.

Posted in Coding, Commentary, Design | 4 Comments »

Win millions of Mintshot dollars!!

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Mintshot is a mess! Cheating, hacks, security flaws… Wow!

I must say, I wasn’t overly impressed with Mintshot’s shoddy layouts and presentation, but I never thought it would be so crappy underneath!!

Posted in Coding, Commentary, Design | 1 Comment »

Frameworks. CSS and otherwise.

Monday, November 19th, 2007

Jeff Croft hosts a hornets’ nest of a debate over the use (or not) of frameworks in web development.

It may pay to first read his previous post on this topic. And probably Jeff’s article on frameworks that he wrote for A List Apart.

Posted in Coding, Link, Tools | No Comments »

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