The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

If you want some dummy html content for test purpose like form, paragraph or list content then you can use content from http://html-ipsum.com/

Hello dear readers and attendees,

This is the post that I will be/ will have been referencing during my presentation to the Seattle Central Community College’s Byte club on Thursday, December 10th at 1500-1630.

I will begin with a bit of an autobio and find out what kind of students we have in attendance. Please feel free to comment if you’d like to keep in touch before or after the presentation. I will discuss some of the bits and pieces of some industry standard platforms which I’ve developed, deployed, maintained, managed, co-operated, administered and replaced. We can discuss some of the patterns that work well in the industry, and some that are a bit harder to tame.

Once we have touched most of the areas of specialization represented at the meeting, I will dive in to an AngularJS demo I am developing in github here:

…

First of all, Happy New Year!

IEEE Spectrum published a ranking of the most popular programming languages. Computational journalist Nick Diakopoulos wrote the article. While it may surprise some, I wasn’t surprised to find SQL in the top ten.

Nick weighted and combined 12 metrics from 10 sources (including IEEE Xplore, Google, and GitHub) to rank the most popular programming languages.

• Compiled programming languages (Java [#1], C [#2], C++ [#3], C# [#4], Objective-C [#16])
• Interpreted programming languages (Python [#5], JavaScript [#6], PHP [#7], Ruby [#8], Perl [#11], HTML [#12])
• Data languages (SQL [#9], MATLAB …

Today social media applications plays an important role in our day-to-day activities as a result of the Web 2.0 revolution that took place in the Internet. It has revolutionized the lifestyle of almost all the individuals and business entities, for the majority of them spending at least few minutes with it has become an integral […]

Many people use MySQL in the console to execute a simple command, but did you know that MySQL can format the result of the query directly to XML or html?

The option -X will output the query result as XML
-H can be used to generate a HTML table containing the data.

$ mysql -X -e "select * from test" test

<?xml version="1.0"?>

152710

Output as HTML

$ mysql -H -e "select * from test" test

The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com

I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc.

When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am now re-jiggering the software bridges so …

Two examples of escaping data are the following:

• Before you insert a value into a SQL query, using for example mysqli::real_escape_string() or PDO::quote().
• Before you insert data into your output HTML, using htmlspecialchars().

The question I'd like to ask today is, when to do this? There are two possible moments:

1. Right when the data comes in. For SQL this used to be done with 'magic quotes' quite a bit in PHP-land. In general I don't see this happening a lot anymore for SQL. I do however see data encoded using htmlentities/htmlspecialchars before entering the database.
2. The other way to go about it, is to only escape …

Not part of my Don’t Assume series, but when a client states “Why is my database slow”", you need to determine if indeed the database is slow.

Some simple tools come to the rescue here, one is Firebug. If a web page takes 5 seconds to load, but the .htm file takes 400ms, and the 100+ assets being downloaded from one base url, then is the database actually slow? Tuning the database will only improve the 400ms portion of 5,000ms download.

There some very simple tips here. MySQL is my domain expertise and I will not profess to improving the entire stack however perception is everything to a user and you can often do a lot. Some simple points include:

• Know about blocking assets in your <head> element, e.g. .js files.
• Streamline .js, .css and images to what’s needed. .e.g. download a 100k image only to resize to a thumbnail via style …

I like both Adobe (Lightroom rocks!) and Apple (iPad rocks!), but I’ve been asked over and over again what I think about Apple’s new 3.3.1 policy. You know, the one that basically bans cross-platform development frameworks. And, in particular, basically nails the Flash coffin shut on iPhone/iPod/iPad. So, what do I think?

I love it.

And I’m surprised more developers, end users, business leaders, and general web standards lovers everywhere aren’t posting about how great this is.

It’s good for end users.

The App Store already has a signal-to-noise problem. With hundreds of thousands of apps, finding the good stuff is tough. Bear in mind that every single one of those Apps was built by someone intentionally designing for these devices – and we’ve still got plenty of …