A Programming Language Like Playing With Blocks
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Scratch is like a multimedia sandbox, where children 8 and up are welcomed as media producers.
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Software transforms brainy games like chess and backgammon. Why not the brawny sport of the pigskin? By Sam Jaffe.
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ZIG is an easy-to-use, client-server networking and execution framework written in C++. Release v1.3.2. fixes a few more bugs on v1.3.1 (released yesterday), including a very old memory leak on buffer_c class (thanks to Milan Mimica).   Also new is that now ZIG releases are broken into three different packages: sources package ('zig'), docs ('zig-documentation') and the Win32 binary for the "minigame" example game ('zig-minigame').  Please see the changelog / CHANGES.TXT up to version 1.3.0 since that version introduces API changes that break code.  The latest release can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=61409&package_id=118720
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Sometimes, it's just not enough to sit and try to teach theory about something in programming - it's better to just jump right in and take things as they come. That's what Harry Fuecks thinks, at least in his latest post on the SitePoint PHP Blog - a look at the "Joy of Regular Expressions".   He does go over a bit of the theory and why they are so invaluable, but it's a short section before he gets to the heart of the article - working with regular expressions for:  positive matching matching all instances in a given string finding an exact match matching the start of a string validation of the contents of a string checking the length of a string  There's simple examples included for each of the items to help you get an idea of how they'd work.
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Adobe Integrated Runtime paves the way for Web applications that perform like desktop-bound programs.Images: Building apps on AIR
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Michael Kimsal points out the posting of the latest part of his "Grails for PHP developers" series to his blog site - Part Five of the series.   I've put up the latest installment in my "Grails for PHP developers".  Rather than delve too much more in to Grails head on, I'm taking this installment (and at least the next one) to delve more in to the Groovy language itself.  Groovy offers similarities to PHP, but also many differences which can trip you up if you're not careful.  I'll try to lay those out as best I can in the next couple of installments.   This new part of the series goes back and puts the spotlight on GRoovy, the base of the Groovy/Grails combo. He talks about working with variables and arrays as containers for multiple pieces of data and some possible gotchas that could come up along the way.
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Michael Kimsal has come up with the start of a series to introduce PHP developers to the world of Grails (the Java framework).   The comparisons I plan to make will be mostly to PHP, cause that's what I'm most familiar with, though there may be some other comparisons from time to time.  This is a work in progress, but I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone out there interested in this aea - Grails, Groovy, PHP, why another language/platform/framework, etc.   The first two installments have been posted - part one and part two - with an introduction to what Grails is and a brief dip into some "Hello world" sort of code to give you an idea of the structure.
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Nick Halstead has announced a contest on his blog today for PHP developers everywhere to participate in - a programming competition surrounding a challenge he's created.   It has been a lot harder than I thought to come up with a fair programming challenge that would not take too long or require lots of knowledge in any particular framework or other associated technology. It could have been to make use of a whole host of currently available API's and to make a useful mash-up but these again require other external knowledge beyond just PHP. I finally settled on a logic problem that is hopefully not too hard to solve but will test a range of PHP skills.   The problem he's worked up involves changing a word, one letter at a time, into another word using user-defined lists and choice of word. There's several requirements you'll need to follow an d rules for things like the submission process and what server setup can be used.   So, what's the motivation? First prize is a copy of Zend Studio Professional and a year of support, second prize is a Zend t-shirt, and third is a Zend Pen. For full information on participating and on all of the rules you'll need to follow, check out Nick's full post.
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Nick Halstead continues the "Programming Tips" series on his blog today with tip number nine (a very handy tip indeed) - using debug_backtrace from Larry Garfield.   Despite the proliferation of debugging tools, especially real-time debuggers, "debugging by print statement" remains the most common form of debugging in most programming languages.   An example of its use is included by way of a debug() function that returns the message it a bit friendlier format.
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Asymptote (http://asymptote.sourceforge.net) is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language for technical drawing, inspired by MetaPost but with an improved C++-like syntax. Asymptote provides for figures the same high-quality level of typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text.   Problems with loading LaTeX packages and slide presentations were fixed. Non-static variables in every loop iteration are now allocated anew. Formatting under locales with nonperiod decimal separators was fixed, along with logarithmic tick labels near the machine epsilon.  Concatenation of nullpaths was fixed. New path markers were added and the perpendicular symbol in the geometry module was improved. The skeleton routines in the solids module were split to provide finer control.  Routines to facilitate drawing 3d contours were added. Reading portable XDR binary data into arrays works again; functions for reading and writing also in native binary formats were added. The TeX preamble is no longer output in inline mode. The TeX pipe is now aware of a previously generated aux file. Memory leaks were fixed. An inline limit is now imposed on old compilers to speed up compilation. Setlocale warnings are disabled unless debugging is on. A colorspace command for extracting the colorspace of a pen was added. An Asymptote introductory slide presentation was added and a user-written Asymptote tutorial is now cited in the manual.
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In the previous article you learned how to create an animation with JavaScript using a timer mechanism, an image of a ball and CSS styles. This time you'll learn how to create a simple ping-pong game. These JavaScript tools will allow you to create games such as Breakout, Tetris, Frogger and more. By Lisha Sterling. 0809
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While attending Gunter Kniesel's "Aspect-Oriented Software Development" lecture yesterday it occured to me that it might be possible to (ab)use PHP 5's __autoload(), __call(), __get(), and __set() interceptors to facilitate Aspect-Oriented Programming with PHP.
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Launching off from this previous post on the Stubbles Blog, two more posts (from two other developers) have been posted on the same subject:  In this new post, Frank Kleine takes things a step further and talks about the same kind of type hinting but for more types - including arrays and objects. Examples of how he'd expect things to work followed. The other post is from Stephan Schmidt again and varies slightly off into the world of Namespaces to be included in PHP6 along with the use of annotations.  Be sure to check out the comments on each for some more interesting tidbits...
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Two projects; new one is "Alan" a programming language. The other is "jjLibrary" a C++ library which provides 1) jjPattern : Pattern-based container class (Hash, Tree, List, Graph), 2) jjErrno : error handling, and 3) jjCGI : CGI library.   Alan v0.25 is released.  This version supports pipe, which looks like Unix pipe, but it is more similar to iterator method chain for any container data.  Unlike Unix pipe, Alan pipe passes data as just 'reference' so it is very efficient.  Please visit Alan website:  http://jjlib.sourceforge.net/alan/doc/  Best Regards, Wells
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:IBM developerWorks: PHP frameworks, Part 1: Getting started with three popular frameworksWeb Development Blog: Tutorial: FTP Upload via cURLJoey's Blog: 8 Practical PHP Regular ExpressionsJeff Moore's Blog: Keywords and Language SimplicityAlessandro Crugnola's Blog: AMFPHP and mbstringTravis Swicegood's Blog: Why Inheritance SucksStefan Mischook's Blog: Creating Custom PHP Functions Video Tutorial - Part 3Johannes SchlÃ¼ter's Blog: PHP 5.3 UpdateInternet Super Hero Blog: mysqlnd to support PDO, mysqlnd in PHP 5.3Jacob Santos' Blog: Object Oriented Programming Isn't Easy
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Matt Cashner provides a high-level introduction to POE, the Perl Object Environment, examining the concepts that POE brings to bear when designing long-running Perl applications.
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On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's this new tutorial that looks at making the move from PHP4's object-oriented programming up to the "more complete obejct model of PHP5" - specifically with the Decorator design pattern.   While working on a project I realized one particular solution was a pretty good way to demonstrate the decorator design pattern together with some of PHP5's features, including abstract classes, interfaces, type hinting, the final keyword and the visibility of properties and methods. This article is intended for those of you who, like myself, are moving from object-oriented programming, including some use of design patterns, in PHP4, to the more complete object model of PHP5.   He sets up a scenario about the development of an online pizza ordering system to show how to "decorate" a pizza with each of the toppings on a list (instead of having to list out every pizza in every possible topping combination). Of course, all of the code is included and explained so you understand exactly what's happening. Finally, there's a demonstration of its usage - a simple call that grabs the stock level/name/cost of each of the items in stock (pizza combinations).