PHP has typically been partnered along side of MySQL as a DBMS for a long time now. While MySQL is very powerful PHP can utilize many other DBMS’s as well such as PostgresSQL, Oracle, and even Microsoft SQL. The problem is that connecting to and using the different databases means you have to load different drivers with different coding conventions. For a long time you couldn’t use the same code with Microsoft SQL as you did with MySQL. Not until PDO.
Archive for October, 2008
So whats up with the hype?
To really appreciate JSON its good to understand XML and why an alternative to XML exists. XML is a powerful robust markup language that makes many things that were formerly very difficult much more feesable. One of those things is data interchange between different systems. Data interchange between different systems has always been possible, however up until recent years it has been very difficult because of the lack of a unified protocol. These days most modern languages and DBMSs have XML parsing functions that allow you to grab the data that you need and search and filter your data with Xpath. XML has many uses. Everything from styling to configuration files to web services and site maps. More recently, XML has been used to encapsulate data in AJAX HTTP requests. XML is very powerful in that it is platform independent so you can conceivably transfer data between multiple operating systems, languages, databases, and other systems and sub systems. You can see what XML looks like here (more…)
Smushit is an interesting web service that reduces the size of images by trimming off the "cruft" that is leftover in an image, but without reducing the quality of the image. Photoshop allows you to reduce the size of your image but it reduces the overall quality of the image. Smushit allows you to quickly upload your image to the smushit site, it then reduces the size of the image/images and then sends you a zip file with all the optimized images. Not bad for just a few minutes of work.
The new firefox 3.1 has just been released. Touting its new "tracemonkey" javascript engine it is certainly one of the most powerful browsers on the market to date. I’ve been using it throughout the day and am extremely impressed. Sites that use javascript heavily are far less clunky. Firefox 3.1 is just another example in the web trends we are now seeing. Clearly there is no doubt that javascript is not a dead language. Far from it. It is, and is becoming more and more the web standard. Web sites are no longer exciting if they don’t have javascript special effects and AJAX. We have yet to hear from Microsoft what IE is doing to keep up the pace with other browsers. Hopefully we will see something soon.
Yates Jarvis posted an interesting article on Google expanding their advertising on yahoo. Google adsense has been the gold standard for internet advertising for quite some time now and it just got better. It seems that these days everyone is trying to get a piece of Yahoo. Google has the most significant piece of the market share, but microsoft wants in. They have been trying to wiggle their way in with yahoo which hasn’t happened so far. Now it looks like Google has made headway with Yahoo and pushed Microsoft further away. Yahoo seems to (wisely) want to work both ends of the spectrum. Google has alot of technology and success, Microsoft has alot of money. Win win situation for them.
Phone companies have been kicking around wireless handsets for years. Everyone claiming that the future was wireless handset devices. Soon we won’t need our laptops anymore. We’ll have all the computing power, media and communication we need all in the palm of our hands. There are alot of technical challenges though that havn’t been overcome quite yet. Thus, no large group has bought into one particular mobile device. Not however, until the iPhone.