Apache Lucene can be said to be one of the strong applications that can draw you towards Java land. Either you choose Java for your work or you end up writing a Java layer to make use of that. There are many applications which are not very good at search, and it is mainly because efficient fulltext search engines are not easily available. [Continue]
There were a couple of posts last week which brought out the CGI goodness of PHP. PHP has been bashed a lot, by language lovers and by web lovers. However, PHP is still the most popular P in LAMP today. [Continue]
Andrew Wulf has listed his favorite open source tools and frameworks. I am going to pay heed to his call and list my favorite open source tools and frameworks for programming here. However, mine are more heterogeneous in terms of the programming language and includes both desktop and web programming. [Continue]
PHP 4 is about to die. At least the PHP core wants to kill it, but there is a rift in the PHP community. A lot of PHP developers feel that PHP 5 has betrayed them because of the backward compatibility issues. [Continue]
Ryan Boren discusses adoption of PHP 5 for Wordpress. I see two factions here - the developers who like the goodies in PHP 5 and want to use them, and the application developers who want to make sure that it does not hurt the end users. Both of them are right in their own place, in my opinion. [Continue]
Paul Stamatiou details XML parsing in PHP 5 using SimpleXML. SimpleXML lets you navigate the XML document as a data structure. PHP 5 also introduces a class called XMLReader that operates in stream mode and lets you do pull parsing. [Continue]
I was successful in eliminating PHPSESSID from the URL, but it still gave me validation errors. It was because a hidden input element was being inserted immediately after the form element, that is, not in a fieldset, which causes XHTML invalidation. This seems to be a PHP bug itself. [Continue]
A while back Binny VA and recently Rishi alerted me to PHPSESSIDs in some of the URLs. PHPSESSID is used to indicate who owns the PHP session, something useful in case you are tracking sessions, like in case of shopping carts. However, PHPSESSIDs in the URL can make search engines to think it is duplicate content since technically there are two different URLs. [Continue]
Jono Bacon explains how to build software for weblogs. It is a good read for anyone who wants to fiddle with the blogging tools available. It explains the basics very well - right from creating the database to coding for displaying the blog entry. [Continue]
Christian Montoya shows his nifty implementation of a cookie-based style switcher for Wordpress. I learnt about this first while reading Roger Johansson’s implementation of the style switcher. can add capability to your application to give your user a choice of the style. [Continue]