Jason E. Sweat's weblog

Well, I finally had a chance to play around with Harry’s ScriptServer.

First of all, if you are unfamiliar with the project, the goal is to hook up client side JavaScript functions with server side PHP scripts. Seamlessly, and without requiring a new HTTP requests.

And ScriptServer is great!!! It took minimal amounts of code to hook up a button of a form to collect several fields from a form, and post them directly to a class method in PHP, and allowing javascript to get a chunk of HTML back from the function for use in replacing the .innerHTML of another division on the page. The results are fantastic, no submit and quick in place edits.

The particular project I was working on that needed this kind of functionality had a large form for the base record that takes some effort to validate and update. Meanwhile, there are several one-to-many relationships that are a part of the model, which is where I am able to put the scriptserver “in place editing” to greatest effect. Essentially I handle the “quick and easy” relationships with this javascript RPC mechanism, and handle the bulk of the base record edits when the main form is submitted.

The only minor issue I encountered was with the new PHP5 case sensitivity of method names.

Anyway, kudos to Harry, works great, check it out. 8)

Here are the slides to the talk “PHP Development with Oracle” I presented at PHP|Works in Toronto on Friday, September 24th, 2004. The presentation is in Microsoft Power Point Slide show format.

Here is the presentation I made on the subject of “Documenting PHP Applications” at PHP|Works in Toronto, on Thursday September 23rd, 2004. It is available in gzip or winzip formats. The presentation itself is in a powerpoint slide show format.

The php|works conference in Toronto is officially underway. They have WIFI access from the atrium (and from my room, since if faces into the hotel ). Tested it out from the conference rooms as well, so all is good with internet connectivity.

Looks like a very good line up of speakers. Went out to dinner with a few of the other speakers last night and had a number of engaging conversations ranging from trends in rich client-side applications to baby care techniques (seems like there are quite a few new PHP fathers, and I abandon my wife at home with a two year old with 103 degree temp ).

My presentations are tomorrow at 2:00—Documenting Source Code—and Friday at 9:45—PHP and Oracle. Both of them are of course biased towards my perspective of using PHP in an enterprise development environment.

Hope to see you there. Drop by and see me if you are here.

Ran across this and thought I would share:
http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html.

Happy Reading

Marcus Baker (author of SimpleTest php unit testing software) now has a blog at http://www.lastcraft.com/blog. Right out of the gate he has several thoughtful and insightful essays reminiscent of his many similar posts in the Advanced PHP Programming forum on SitePoint.

His post Design Drool brings up some of what I have only been vaguely hinting at in some of my posts, the mindset of a good programmer. Marcus does a great job of summarizing our own internal hidden agenda…and he was spot on with that old sprite based spaces invaders game . Even brought up the memories of the first program I was paid to write: a scheduling program for a machine shop. Boy was that ever a nightmare to try to cram both the BASIC source code and the data into 64k 😯 !

Wired published an article titled “Scientific Method Man” regarding Gordon Rugg’s solution to the problem of the Voynich manuscript (a manuscript written in a code that has not been broken for 400 years). His solution was to prove that the manuscript was a hoax. To do so required some creative, out-of-the-box thinking, and a challenge to the dogmatic thinking of the experts in that domain.

I was attracted to this article because I see this kind of creative thinking being required to solve many of the issues I see at work, but it seems a rare trait indeed to see people with this skill set