PHP Developers

2007-11-16T04:10:00.000-08:00

Choosing The Best PHP Host For Your Website Or Blog
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Darren_Lambert]Darren Lambert

Choosing the right PHP web hosting company for your website or blog is critical. The downtime and lack of configuration offered by the low-end hosting providers can be severely detrimental to the performance and success of your website.

With so many PHP hosting companies advertising their services on the internet it can be difficult to chose which is the right one for your website or blog. If you chose the wrong host, and subsequently suffer problems, moving your website to a new host can be a painful and time consuming task.

I'll discuss the key features to look at when assessing a potential hosting company:

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the total amount of data that your website can deliver in a single month. If you exceed the bandwidth limit your account may be suspended until you buy more bandwidth, or upgrade your account. Ensure you select a hosting package that allows you enough bandwidth for your current traffic, and for the foreseeable future.

Disk space

This is the amount of space you are allocated on the web server to store all of your files. Media rich websites can often use up disk space quickly. Ensure your potential PHP hosting package offers enough disk space for your current website, and its future growth.

Domains

Most people use one domain on a single hosting account. However, some people like to run several websites, or domains, from a single hosting account. If you intend to do this ensure the hosting package allows add-on and parked domains.

Databases

PHP hosts set a limit on the number of database you can use. If you are using a Web 2.0 application, or any other type of PHP application than uses MySql databases, ensure the hosting package has sufficient databases for your needs.

Uptime

This is the amount of time that the web server will be able to deliver your website to readers. 99% is ideal, cheaper hosting often offers less.

Fantastico

Fantastico is a system that quickly and easily installs popular Web2.0 applications into your hosting package. Most hosts include Fantastico, which allows you to easily install WordPress, Drupal and other blog and CMS systems.

Taking the time to chose the correct PHP web hosting company and package can save you a great deal of time and money as your website or blog grows.

Compare the [http://www.ascenddirectory.com/best-php-hosting ]best PHP hosting companies and packages. Darren is an experienced webmaster and PHP developer, and has worked with many PHP hosting companies.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Darren_Lambert http://EzineArticles.com/?Choosing-The-Best-PHP-Host-For-Your-Website-Or-Blog&id=812052

Posted By: Illusion Technologies
http://www.illusiontechnologies.com

PHP Developers

2007-11-15T02:28:00.000-08:00

How to Learn PHP and MySQL as Quickly as Possible
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Clint_Lenard]Clint Lenard

Learning Programming is a tough subject, no matter which language you choose.

It took me months to figure out php and MySQL enough to build real, quality, Websites that were "good enough".

Eventually I figured out the easiest way to learn. It took me MONTHS to figure it out... but I did.

So what does it take to learn a Programming Language such as PHP?

"Doing" is what it takes. 90% of the people who try to take on such a task end up feeling "dumb" or "slow". This usually is NOT the case. I've found that, like myself, most people try to learn PHP from reading and going through code to "understand" what it means.

I was the same way until I was told "just do it". My mentor must have been the most patient man on the face of this earth - because I was constantly telling him I could not do it. But he kept on me telling me the same line I'm telling you: "just do it".

What does this mean? It means trying to create your very own scripts, whether small or of decent size. Start out with printing out the date to the browser. Continue with Loops. Create scripts that create mathematical equations. Print out your name, last name, etc.

Once you figure out the basics, make sure you continue to learn by doing! You will never be able to take your skills to the next level just by reading.

I also stress to other newbies that they need to learn by watching as well. Writing code can become quite a task and it's better to see someone else do that, if possible (which it is by watching videos).

It's quite easy to get caught up in bad practices while writing code if you do not follow good programming standards. Sloppy (spaghetti) code seems to be the evil of the programming world that occurs from newbies who read online tutorials by so called "programmers". Most of these "programmers" are NOT what they claim to be. So be careful of whom you choose to learn from.

PHP and MySQL (database) go together like peanut butter and jelly. I cannot tell you how important it is to learn these two languages together. MySQL may not be the "best" Database in the world but it is very easy to learn and very capable of building large scale applications.

So remember: if you're not "doing", you're not learning. Start learning PHP basics and make sure you're following along and trying to code your own small scripts when starting out. I know, I know... it LOOKS like it's too hard. It's not. This is not something you're going to learn overnight, but it's quite possible that you can learn enough to do what you need to do in just a matter of weeks!

Keep learning and continue doing.

Want to learn PHP at rapid speed? [http://learnbyvideo.blogspot.com/2007/11/learn-php-by-video.html]Check out these awesome Video Tutorials I've found!

If you're looking to become a PHP programmer - you need to see [http://learnbyvideo.blogspot.com/2007/11/learn-php-by-video.html]these videos!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Clint_Lenard http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Learn-PHP-and-MySQL-as-Quickly-as-Possible&id=819035

Introduction to PHP

2007-11-14T01:59:00.000-08:00

Introduction to PHP
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Gagandeep_Singh_Tathgar]Gagandeep Singh Tathgar

What is PHP?

PHP stands for "PHP: HyperText Preprocessor". PHP is a server side scripting language for making dynamically driven websites. PHP written scripts can be used to keep track of your visitor’s activities on your site, send out emails to your subscribers, let your users upload files or images to your site, and drive the content on your site dynamically using databases. The possibilities are endless. Most of the social networking websites you visit are writing in PHP. Yep! PHP is that powerful.

What are PHP benefits?

PHP is a free open source language. That means you don't have to pay thousands of dollars in licensing fee to acquire PHP. Best of all, it is easy to install. The most striking feature of it is that it is easy to learn. PHP is used by millions of people and developers around the world. There are thousands of websites on the internet which are written using PHP. One primary example is Yahoo! Bookmarks.

What PHP can do for me?
PHP can greatly enhance the functionality of your website. It allows you to write scripts which let your visitors interact with you through your website. If you run a small business website, you can use PHP to let your users send you feed back to you on your products ad services or create a form which will allow your customers to send you emails, etc, etc.

Is PHP easy to learn?

Thou PHP will allow you to almost do anything complicated on your website. But you can implement simple forms or logic on your site very easily. At [http://php-learn-it.com]PHP-Learn-It.com, i explain some of those techniques with examples.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gagandeep_Singh_Tathgar http://EzineArticles.com/?Introduction-to-PHP&id=556967

Posted By: Illusion Technologies
http://www.illusiontechnologies.com

PHP Developers

2007-11-02T01:14:00.000-07:00

Speeding PHP using APC PHP Cache
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jon_Murray]Jon Murray

If you look at a PHP source file you will notice one thing. It's a source file. Not particularly surprising, but think about when you deploy a PHP application, what do you deploy? PHP source files. Now for many other languages; Java, C, etc when you deploy an application you deploy the compiled file. So, the question that you want to ask yourself is this, how much time does a PHP application spend compiling source files vs running the code? I'll answer that for you, a lot.

There are advantages to being able to deploy source files though. It makes it easy to do on the fly modifications or bug fixes to a program, much like we used to do in the early BASIC languages. Just change the file and the next time it's accessed your change is reflected. So, how do we keep the dynamic nature of PHP, but not recompile our files every time they are accessed?

A PHP cache. It's surprising to me that this concept isn't built into the base PHP engine, but perhaps that's because some company's can sell this add on to speed up PHP. Luckily for us, some companies/open source projects provide this plug in to PHP at no charge. These plug ins are generally known as PHP accelerators, some of them do some optimization and then caching and some only do caching. I'm not going to pass judgement on which one is the best, any of them are better than nothing, but I decided to use APC, the Alternative PHP Cache. I chose this one because it is still in active development and is open source and free.

Alternative php cache can be found at php.net, just look down the left column for APC. It comes in source form, so you will need to compile it before installing it, don't worry about that part. If you're using Red Hat 4 or CentOS4 I'll tell you exactly how to do it. If you're using something else, you'll need the same tools, but getting the tools might be a bit different.

1. The Tools
Do you know how many web sites, forums and blogs I went to with my error messages before I found the answers as to what I was missing when I was trying to install APC - Alternative PHP Cache? Two days worth, but I finally found the correct combination and it's really quite obvious as is everything once you know the answer. There are three sets of dev tools that you will need.

1a. You'll need a package called "Development Tools" this will include all the important dev tools like the GCC compiler, etc.
1b. You'll need a package called php-devel which as you might guess are development tools for PHP
1c. You'll need a package called httpd-devel which of course are dev tools for Apache web server.

On Red Hat or CentOS getting these should be as easy as the following 3 commands:

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install php-devel
yum install httpd-devel

You'll do these three one at a time and follow any instructions (usually just saying yes).

Now it's time to follow the instructions contained in the APC package. Since these may change over time I'm not going to go through them. They are very complete. If you follow the instructions and get an apc.so file out of it, then you're all set, just modify your php.ini file and you're good to go.

There are two problems that I encountered that you may encounter too. The first is an error when running phpize. I ignored this error and everything succeeded okay, but not before I spent hours looking for the solution to this error. Here is the error.

configure.in:9: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_WITH_PHP_CONFIG

run info '(automake)Extending aclocal'

or see http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Extending-aclocal

configure.in:32: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_BUILDDIR

configure.in:33: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_DIR

configure.in:34: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_SRCDIR

configure.in:35: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_ALWAYS_SHARED

acinclude.m4:19: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_PROG_RE2C

People would have had me updating my PHP version from 4.3.9 and everything else under the sun to get rid of this error, but in the end it didn't matter. My APC compiled and installed nicely and I am good to go.

The other slight problem that I ran into was the location of php-config. The install instructions wanted me to do the following:

./configure --enable-apc-mmap --with-apxs --with-php-config=/usr/local/php/bin/php-config

However my php-config is in /usr/bin/php-config. Making that change allowed this part to work.

So, have at it, once it's done you can expect to see huge improvements in your web site response times and reductions on your CPU load. One more quick note, My server hosts about 20 web sites, but only 3 or 4 are really busy. To reduce the memory footprint of caching everything for all 20 sites I used the apc.filters property. Although this property is slightly flawed for non qualified includes, it worked nicely for my Serendipity blogs. Your mileage with this property will vary according to the software you are using and how it does it's includes.

Jon runs UFC fan site [http://www.ufcresultslive.com/categories/39-UFC-Results/]UFC Results come to UFC Results at http://www.ufcresultslive.com for UFC Results, Predictions, News and of course Fighter Rankings.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jon_Murray http://EzineArticles.com/?Speeding-PHP-using-APC-PHP-Cache&id=800655

Posted By: Illusion Technologies
http://www.illusiontechnologies.com

PHP Developers

2007-10-31T22:39:00.000-07:00

How to Implement CAPTCHA With PHP and GD
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Ivanov]Andrew Ivanov

So, you have a public submission form on your website (contact page, forum submission,blogs comment form) and need to prevent spam by auto-submitters. Common way to do this is to implement CAPTCHA - an image with randomly generated string
(quote from Wikipedia, free online enciclopedia: “A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. "CAPTCHA" is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University.”)

Simple, quick and efficient PHP solution for implemet CAPTCHA:

the advantage of this solution: it is easy to read symbols by human and automated captcha processor software, but hard to process the image by computer because common CAPTCHA processors can't understand which one of the outputted symbols it must ignore!

obviously you need PHP engine enabled for your webserver, for execute PHP scripts, and GD (PHP graphics library) for generate the image. Webserver, PHP and GD versions are no matter, the solution below is tested for Apache(Windows and Unix), IIS(Windows), PHP-4, PHP-5, GD, GD2

1) Make a PHP script (separate file captcha.php) which will generate the CAPTCHA image:
[?php
session_start();
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);
header("Pragma: no-cache");
function _generateRandom($length=6){
$_rand_src = array(
array(48,57) //digits
, array(97,122) //lowercase chars
// , array(65,90) //uppercase chars
);
srand ((double) microtime() * 1000000);
$random_string = "";
for($i=0;$i

PHP Developers

2007-10-29T21:45:00.000-07:00

Choose Wisely: PHP Templates and Search Engine Rank
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp]Jacob Filipp

This article is intended for PHP web developers who create template systems for consistently presenting website content. PHP designers who create their own template systems should be concerned about how their choices affect the website's position in search engines. Below is a discussion of three types of systems, their impact on search ranking and a recommendation for the best approach.

Webpage as a CGI Argument

In this architecture one PHP script contains the entire template, and plugs in content from a file it reads in - getting the file name from a CGI parameter. These types of systems are not only prone to security problems (as users can modify the path argument to retrieve arbitrary files) but are also ineffective for search engine optimization.
This particular design does not allow for titles and keyword/description meta-tags to be associated with individual pages. This is because the header portion of the template includes the section within it, and only allows for one site-wide title and set of meta-tags. Titles are one of the most important page elements, and having one title - unrelated to the actual content retrieved - results in a lower rank in search engines.

There are two other detrimental SEO effects this type of system has. The first is that each unique page is viewed as an aspect of the template script, rather than as a unique standalone page. This can result in search engines lowering the importance of individual content pages relative to the template script - which is often not the desired result. The other weakness of this approach is that having individual pages set up as CGI arguments makes site metrics harder to track, as statistics often show a visit to a specific page as a visit to the general template script. The popular web statistics packages AWstats and Webalizer are most affected by this.

However, this type of templating system is popular and sucessfully used in the world of e-commerce. In such systems, product information is stored in a database and is inserted into the template when a product is requested by its code. This means that both a unique title and a set of meta-tags can be stored alongside the product data (or generated on the fly), and inserted into the global template effectively. The only detrimental effects that remain are the latter mentioned two, and are usually an acceptable tradeoff for the increased ease of administration that a database-driven system provides.

Template as an Include

In this architecture, each page on the website has its own filename with a .php extension. The top and bottom portions of the template are stored in separate files that are included (using include_once() ) by each content file. This technique increases the importance of the page with search engines, as each page is its own standalone page rather than a CGI argument. This type of template system also makes it simple to track page views through regular website statistics software.

On the other hand, this type of template system still has the weakness of having one title and one set of meta-tags for the entire site. This is, again, because the header portion of templates has to include everything from the opening of the tag to the end of the code for the header portion of the template. And this area includes the title and meta-tags. One workaround for this type of system is to code the top template page to check which file it is being called from, and to substitute a suitable pre-coded title. Although effective, such a system is cumbersome to maintain as each new page that is published warrants a new title and meta-tag entry in this secondary system.

Body-Only Includes

The ideal PHP templating system will permit content producers to enjoy the reusability of templates, while maintaining unique titles and metadata for each page with ease. The system that meets all of these SEO needs is a "body-only include" system: a system where each php content page includes the top and bottom portions of the template (as in the previous approach), but only includes the elements below the body tag. This translates into a document that has its own html, head, title and meta tags, has an include_once() statement which is called at the top of the body element and includes the top portion of the template, has the content, and an include for the footer portion of the template. Such a system allows for individual editing of the title and meta-information during the creation of documents and solves the problems that both of the aforementioned systems face.

I find this system the most search-engine friendly, because it keeps the title information and the content together - allowing for the presence of relevant, unique titles for each page. This system is also the most human friendly, as storing the title information in the same file as the page content allows for fast updating and avoids maintaining a second "workaround" system that attempts to match titles to content.

Conclusion

The types of template system that PHP developers choose to implement for clients' sites have a crucial impact on the future search-engine popularity of the client's webpages. Important factors to consider when developing a template solution are: relevant titles tied to content, relevant meta-tags, standalone files and ease of statistics tracking. The popular approaches of page-as-an-argument and template-as-an-include do not effectively provide these functions. Including template information after the body tag, and keeping headers intact is the best way to ensure that sites are optimized for search engines - and this is why you should consider using the Body-Only Includes model during your next project.

Jacob Filipp is a Canadian search engine optimization specialist at [http://powerspiritonline.com/contact.html]Powerspirit. Jacob has 7 years of experience as a web developer and webmaster.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp http://EzineArticles.com/?Choose-Wisely:-PHP-Templates-and-Search-Engine-Rank&id=597857

PHP Developers

2007-10-27T04:01:00.000-07:00

SQL Server ASP Websites - First Steps for Novice Developers
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Margaret_Cruise_O'Brien]Margaret Cruise O'Brien

Database-Driven Websites

Ten years ago, novice web developers worked hard to create static websites with HTML and perhaps a bit of Javascript to spice up the action. Now, novice developers are starting with database-driven web pages that let web site visitors enter data and view dynamic content. When you're learning, it's important to start small and work your way up to large complex sites. So where should the novice developer start?

Your First Web Database Application

To keep motivated, you should choose a small project that will actually be useful. A great candidate is the opt-in page: a web page that lets visitors provide their name and email address to be saved to the website database. Presumably the website owner will use this data to send out newsletters and email marketing, but we won't worry about that! This is the perfect training application: a simple but useful one-page database application.

Choosing Your Tools - the Microsoft option

Once you've decided what you're going to develop, you need to decide which tools to develop with. If you're on a budget (and who isn't), then Microsoft has released a development environment available for free. You can download and install Visual Web Developer Express from the Microsoft website, which also comes with a free version of the popular database engine Microsoft SQL Server. The free database is branded as SQL Server Express.

There are other free alternatives open to you - MySQL and PHP has traditionally been a popular choice. If you come from a Linux or Unix background, you'll probably want to go that route, but if you are used to working on Windows machines, then the Microsoft option is appealing.

Creating the Table

For the simple opt-in application, you need a database table that will store names and their email addresses - this is about as simple as it gets. Visual Web Developer Express provides a GUI to let you create tables. For this project, you'll be creating a three-column table. Of course, you need one column to store the visitor's name, and another to store the email address. So why the third?

For proper database design, you should also have a unique ID column within the table that is defined as a primary key and set as an identity field. If this terminology is alien to you, you'll need to read some tutorials on SQL and creating tables. You will find lots of online articles, including [http://www.salmontraining.com/sqlexpresszone/index.html]step-by-step walk-throughs on the process. The work you put into learning basic table creation at this stage will be invaluable for future web projects!

Creating the Web Page

The opt-in web page needs to provide two input boxes to allow the visitor to enter a name and email address. If you've already done a bit of HTML coding, that's no problem to you. The tricky bit is connecting the page to the database and ensuring that the details are written to the table.

This is where Visual Web Developer Express comes into its own. With alternative programming languages, this would take lines of code to put together (and hours of debugging when it doesn't work!). With VWD Express, you use the GUI interface and wizards to drag-and-drop ASP.Net controls to access the database - the tool creates the code you need behind the scenes.

Finding a Hosting Provider

In order to go live, your hosting provider must support ASP.Net and SQL Server. Shop around - there are a number of competing providers out there. If you're working on a budget, then you'll find Go Daddy hard to beat.

Going Live

Getting things working on your laptop or PC is a great achievement! But putting your database application live is real success.

If what's been described up to now sounds too easy - well, the development process is relatively simple with the Microsoft ASP.Net development environment. The Microsoft tools hide much of the complexity of database development.

Unfortunately, developers can hit a roadblock when they try to put their new web application live on a hosted site. Getting the web page to connect to the live database is the first hurdle as the hosting provider will most likely be using SQL Server Enterprise, the big brother of the database on the local laptop or PC. Hosting providers may insist that developers use their own Control Panel to work with the database and create the database table.

Persevere! A bit of time and effort spent going live is worth the feeling of achievement when your first website visitor enters details into the web page and the data flows successfully to the live database!

Margaret Cruise O'Brien is a database consultant, and founder of [http://www.salmontraining.com]Salmon Training Check out our website for training on [http://www.salmontraining.com/sqlexpresszone/going_live_with_vwd_and_sqlexpress.aspx]going live on Go Daddy with a simple ASP.Net SQL Server application

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Margaret_Cruise_O'Brien http://EzineArticles.com/?SQL-Server-ASP-Websites---First-Steps-for-Novice-Developers&id=684430

PHP Developers

2007-10-24T01:53:00.000-07:00

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-10-22T05:27:00.001-07:00

Easy Website Builder For Beginners And Pro Web Developers
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Bruce_Manaka]Bruce Manaka

Have you ever wanted to build a website for personal or business use without the constraints of website templates or the hassle of learning HTML, PHP, web development software, and the necessary learning curve involved? Have you ever been asked by potential clients or customers whether or not you have a website where they can find out more about you and the services you provide?

Nowadays if you do not have a website, you stand the chance of losing out on a lot of business, and potential customers may not look upon you as being "professional." Likewise, for the individual who does not have a business per se, he or she stands the chance of amassing a vastly wider network of contacts through a personal website than the person who relies only on person-to-person network organizations.

Every business needs a website! It's still surprising to see so many businesses that do not have a web presence. This is mainly due to a combination of economic and time factors. It may cost anywhere between $500 to $1500+ to hire a web designer to build a business site containing 1-10 pages of content. To build a site on your own requires time and some knowledge of web development skills. Seen in this light, it's understandable that business owners procrastinate in this very important aspect of their business.

However, building a website has finally reached the 21st Century as far as ease of use and availability to the masses. An easy website builder tool is being released to the world allowing unprecedented ability for just about anyone to build their own website for personal and business use. Whether it's the beginner who wants a one page website or the web developer putting together a hundred page business site, technology just took a huge jump with the advent of Site Rubix, the brainchild of Kyle and Carson of Wealthy Affiliate.

There is absolutely no HTML coding skills needed. Images, video, screen capture and content can be added quickly and easily. With simple click and drag features, websites can be designed the way you want it to look. There is also no need to go through the learning curve required to use Dreamweaver, Frontpage and other web development software.

Site Rubix is an easy website builder that has leveled the playing field in terms of online presence. With this latest in web technology, there is no reason whatsoever to go without a website for yourself and your business!

Would you like to know more about the most recommended website builder? Find out at http://recommendedinternetmarketingresource.blogspot.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bruce_Manaka http://EzineArticles.com/?Easy-Website-Builder-For-Beginners-And-Pro-Web-Developers&id=765308

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-10-20T05:12:00.000-07:00

Wrtiting Less PHP Code With More Results
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Bobby_Handzhiev]Bobby Handzhiev

Most web development companies use their own or third party frameworks to improve their development process. If you want to work as a PHP developer in a company you will most probably need to agree to write your code using their framework. This article is for these developers and companies who want to build their own framework and improve their coding speed, the quality of their code and get paid more for less time. I will share with you the ideas we discovered in PIM Team Bulgaria while working on our PHP framework, but not the framework itself - you need to develope your own one which to suit the most your coding style. Our advises are valid for almost any other programming language.

What is a framework and why I need it?

Don't you get bored when you need to write same or similar types of code again and again? Do you hate when customer wants to change "some unsignificant thing" but you need to change it in 10 different files? Are your scripts too long? Do you write "spagetti" code? If you answer "yes" on some of these questions, then you need a set of functions and classes which will automate most of the tasks, reduce your code size and avoid copy-paste practices. That is framework. It is a set of classes and functions which you just include in your scripts and make your life of a web developer easier.

What to "put" in a framework?

Some people and companies tend to believe that everything should be generated by functions and classes and you should never have a "free flying" PHP code. As a result of that they put everything in objects and extremly complicated functions which try to handle everything for everyone. As a result the code gets hard to read, buggy, hard to change and slow to write and learn.

Other group prefers to write everything for the current situation, again and again for every project and file. They often copy-paste hundreds of rows to save development time and effort, but when they have to modify the code it turns into a pain. And all of this is because they are too lazy to create a framework.

The solution as usually is somewhere in the middle. You should be looking to optimize tasks which are repeated often in the project or in different projetcs. Here are the best propositions:

- Mail functions - it's terrible to see most developers putting all the headers in each place where they need to send a mail. Just wrap the mail() function and use the wrapper.

- Database wrappers - you MUST have one. Stop using the built in mysql (or other DB) functions directly into your projects. What will happen if the database must be changed?

- Database functions - do you really need to type manually all the 50 field names of that table and then to manually fill the values from $_POST? Sure, it is often needed when the values come in a different way. But very often, especially in admin panels you just have a form with fields corresponding to the table ones and values in them. Just iterate thru the database fields (hint: "SHOW FIELDS FROM table_name") and insert/update

- HTML code snippets - aren't you tired of creating or copy-pasting date dropdowns, checkboxes, normal dropdowns or radio groups? Create functions for each of these - it could accept parametters as name, values, selected name...

- Formatting specifics such as date, money, phone numbers etc. Yes, the PHP functions like date() allow you to format in any way. But what happens if you have dates on hundred places and the customers decide that instead of mm/dd/yy they want format "dd Month, YYYY"? Don't change it everywhere, don't use the MySQL data formatting. Create your own wrapper and use it.

- Admin panels - each and every admin panel includes screens for add/edit/delete various table contents. Why to do it each time? In PIM Team we created a class called table_editor which simply receives several massives and arguments and handles all the operations on any complex DB table, including the HTML code for the editing webform in less than 20 lines! The admin pages don't need to look nice, but yet our table_editor allows your tables to look perfect with CSS

- File and picture uploading, resizing, thumbnails. You don't really write every time all the codes in your scripts I hope. It would be crazy. You need functions or class for these

- Project sopecific functions. Many websites have specific features like displaying category trees, specific dropdowns, small tables with user's profiles etc etc. You can and must put these in objects or functions and use across your porjects.

Don't overdo your framework

You can't handle everything for every case. Maybe you can but this will make your framework heavy, slow to process and hard to use. The goal of the framework is to make your life easier, not some idealistic idea for pure OOP coding. You need to export functions and objects of things which you do often within different projects or several times in one project. You will only loose time if you try to handle some individual cases.

Bobby Handzhiev is a Senior Developer in http://pimteam.net and editor of http://knowledgebase.pimteam.net

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bobby_Handzhiev http://EzineArticles.com/?Wrtiting-Less-PHP-Code-With-More-Results&id=150773

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-09-18T00:23:00.000-07:00

User Interface Design: Key to Achieve Best Web Development
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Nikhil_Salvi]Nikhil Salvi

From early days of www, the Internet sites that are added day by day are increasing tremendously. When you will consider this pool of web, may be they are about computers, industry, entertainment, search engines, fashion, organizational or even individual, all of these sites are concerned about one major part of web development apart from the logic or programming efforts behind it is ‘User Interface Design’.

Any web site will gain your interest by its appearance in front of you as well as ease of using and understanding the contents in that particular page. Therefore many of the web developers out there are always trying to go for the best user interface design which must also be affordable, can be either done by the developer firm or by web developer individual himself or he have to outsource the site for user interface creation.

The main stages in the creation of the user interface can be roughly listed as follows:

1. Note down all the aspects of your web site,

2. Try to list items as per their priority on the web page as well as consider their categorization.

3. From this list highlight points that are required to be catchy (e.g. in most of the general web site the Chat / Mail / News are considered to be the most catchy points whereas on the online shopping site the special offers and hot selling items may be the most catchy points).

4. Then decide the color combination of your interface (As per my point of view this is the most crucial part which many of them out there do not take into consideration which results in to a web site which is nothing but a site full of color in fact site looking like a circus! (You can understand what I want to say). So if you are rally very careful about the richness of the user interface then you should not fail to consider this point.

5. Once you have decided the color combination you have already won half the battle. Now you have to draw a picture of how your web page will look like finally, where on the web page I will place the catchy points I have listed previously, what will be common between the web pages (A date and time may be there from home page to the last page of your web site).

6. Finalize placing of all the remaining points in the list prepared by you.

7. If required repeat the steps for all the succeeding pages in your web site.

8. Then and only then go for designing of the web pages using various tools.

You may take help of various image-editing softwares like Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, even normal paintbrush for giving effect to the various images, backgrounds used in the page design. You can also embody various animations in your web page to give it a nice touch. You can try Macromedia Flash, GIF Animator or Animationshop for the same.

Some important tips-n-tricks of making your web page look catchier than ever will be discussed in my next articles.

Remember more effective and easier user interface - more the number of visitor (or even customer) who will specially halt at your site to check it out.

Nikhil R. Salvi

B.E.Computer Engg.

India

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nikhil_Salvi http://EzineArticles.com/?User-Interface-Design:-Key-to-Achieve-Best-Web-Development&id=5463

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-09-17T22:36:00.000-07:00

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-09-14T01:04:00.000-07:00

Warning: The Truth About Having a Web Site!
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Judith_Kallos]Judith Kallos

If you don't have a web site yet, are thinking of slapping one up or have one that simply isn't producing, this Warning is for you!

All too often folks contact me about getting a Web Site when they really have not done their due diligence in determining even if their "idea" is one worth investing in. And although they hate spam and don't believe most of it, they do tend to fall into believing much of the fast, easy and cheap noise online in existence only to line the pockets of shysters and unscrupulous developers.

Here are some questions you need to ask and investigate getting the answers to so you can realistically determine if your idea is one worth pursuing and investing in. If any "solution" tells you these questions are not of concern, raise that red flag and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction! Certainly don't give them a dime of your hard earned money!

=> What will your online expenses be for your Web server, ISP connection, E-Commerce application, Web Site development and maintenance?

=> Why will people buy this product/service from you over any of the number of Web Sites currently online?

Have you searched at Google with your top 3-5, 2-3 word keyword phrases to get an idea of the level of competition you may be up against?

=> How do you intend to get your new site found?

=> What is your marketing plan to compete with the Sites already online that are promoting the same product/service?

=> Can you offer your product or service at a competitive price and what is that?

=> Will your suppliers support your requests and potential growth/demand for the product?

=> Is the quality of your product/service in line with the price you are asking?

=> How much will it cost to have enough inventories to support orders while additional product is in transit?

=> What options will I have for shipping, where will I ship and what will I charge respectively for shipping and handling?

=> What are the issues to consider and the best rates/providers for a Merchant Account so that I can accept credit cards securely on my site?

=> What are my policies and return procedures in regard to online ordering?

=> What are the tax and legal requirements and implications I need to consider when doing business online?

Unfortunately, all too many think that by just getting your own dot com and throwing up a Web Site - selling... er… well… anything, and then just sitting back and waiting for the orders or e-mail to roll in, they will soon be on the path to IPO-dom or financial freedom.

What happens when site owners do not do their due diligence or realize after the fact that this is a business with the very same responsibilities just as in the off-line world? What if they do not get all the above questions answered and a firm understanding of what will be involved before they jump online? They end up not becoming successful while wasting a lot of their hard earned money.

Having a Web site for commercial gain is not simply a bunch of pictures and code that make a pretty presentation. It is serious business and needs to be run as such if you plan to succeed. You need to know the basics of running a business from accounting, to operational policies, to tax and legal issues. You need to be prepared to plan how your marketing program will adjust to this evolving technology both on and off-line based on data and trends; how you will adjust as well.

Do you want to have your very own successful online enterprise that you worked hard at, built to be successful and are proud of based on sound business practices and proven principles? Or do you prefer to throw money at the hype that negates the need for any serious efforts? The choice is yours to make - not the developer or promotion touting Fast!, Cheap!, Easy!. Remember to use your common sense - if it sounds too good to be true when it comes to becoming successful online, it is!

About the Author:

Judith Kallos is an authoritative and good-humored Technology Muse
who has played @ http://www.TheIStudio.com for over a decade. Check out her popular Technology Cheat Sheets @: http://www.LearnAndThrive.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Judith_Kallos [http://ezinearticles.com/?Warning:-The-Truth-About-Having-a-Web-Site!&id=37101 ]http://EzineArticles.com/?Warning:-The-Truth-About-Having-a-Web-Site!&id=37101

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-09-13T02:07:00.000-07:00

Web Hosting Php Mysql - Guide
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Lee_Brooker]Lee Brooker

Put web hosting php mysql together and you have yourself a dynamic website! Getting web hosting, php, MySQL opens the door for your business to develop in areas that your never thought possible.

Standard web hosting is fine when nothing much needs to happen to your site. Adding PHP enables you to create or use existing opt in forms or maybe a membership software package you may have purchased. You know the ones I mean. With username and password verification and all that technical stuff!

Having PHP and MySQL is the standard and most popular choice for most webmasters and website developers.

This may sound pretty obvious, but web hosting PHP MySQL do not all come as standard in hosting packages! One may not come with the other. But not only this, you must also be aware or the different versions of PHP and SQL. MySQL is a vendor for the SQL as is Ms Windows and Oracle.

Check and double check everything before committing yourself to any web hosting PHP MySQL set up. Like I said before this may seem a little obvious, but you will be amazed at the amount of people that actually over look not only the compatibility of web hosting PHP and MySQL but make the mistake in automatically thinking that they are all going to work together.

If your web hosting PHP MySQL is all in one then its safe to assume they all work together! Its when you are putting a bespoke hosting package together that the importance of making sure you kow your SQL and PHP versions.

If I any doubt at all, do not hesitate to email the company that you are considering purchasing your web hosting PHP and MySQL from. Its not good practice to think inferior of yourself and refrain from asking the simplest question regarding this type of service. Its complicated if its an unchartered area of your online business knowledge.

Not asking about web hosting PHP MySQL questions will result in many headaches and frustration not to mention valuable lost time!

Find Out More About The VodaHost Experience Here http://hubpages.com/hub/reliable_web_hosting_service

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lee_Brooker http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Hosting-Php-Mysql---Guide&id=645344

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-09-12T00:03:00.000-07:00

Consuming RSS Feeds With ColdFusionBy [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Benjamin_Cortese]Benjamin Cortese
ColdFusion doesn't seem to get the respect it deserves amongst the dedicated Java or .NET or even PHP development circles, but having worked in all of those environments, I'd like to state for the record, that completing a large scale development project AHEAD of schedule, keeping your Business Managers and Projects Managers happy, and let's not forget the most important of all... THE CLIENT...Well, that's priceless. Well worth any investment made towards ColdFusion.
Web services, RSS, XML, SOAP to name several, are all welcomed friends to the ColdFusion web development language. This article will focus on the likes of RSS and XML.
Definition:
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. Consumers of RSS content use special browsers called aggregators to watch for new content in dozens or even hundreds of web feeds. The initials "RSS" are variously used to refer to the following standards:
Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel".
That's the Wikipedia definition for an RSS feed. What's not mentioned is that developers are able to take advantage of the content provided by these RSS feeds to display current and changing data on their websites, which adds value to the website and hopefully bring return visitors for more of the information that you provide.
Consuming an RSS feed in ColdFusion can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. There are several ways or more, to do this in ColdFusion. Parsing through array elements and defining the parent elements to children and testing for grandchildren elements, and recursive behaviors etc. But this article is not for the experienced ColdFusion developer. This article is for someone who might like to see some of the "ease of operation" of ColdFusion and how it relates to a popular web practice known as RSS.
We'll look at a fun and popular feed from RollingStone Magazine. Located here http://www.rollingstone.com/rssxml/album_reviews.xml as of the time of this article.
It's a feed that I have implemented on several of my websites. Now it's important to note that you should select feeds that are relevant to your website, I have several music based websites and thus having an "Album Review" feed was appropriate. Ok, so now what do we do with this feed you ask? Well, basically there are only 3 steps to consuming and parsing an XML/RSS feed.
1. Read the Feed in
2. Loop through the elements of the feed
3. Display the feed
Am I simplifying things a bit? Not really, the purpose here is to show how ColdFusion can do much of the 'heavy lifting' as it pertains to application development making many day to day programming tasks much less tedious.
Here's an example:
In ColdFusion we read the feed in like this.
< url="< /cfhttp >
< album_reviews_xml="XMLParse(cfhttp.FileContent)">
What this does is utilize the CFHTTP tag in ColdFusion which has many many uses, in this case it performs the request for the XML document on the server.
The second line defines a variable called "album_reviews_xml" and gives it the value of the http response. Using the built in function "XMLParse()" in ColdFusion takes the http response and delivers it to your browser in XML format or as an XML Object for you OOP guys.
If you would like to have ColdFusion show you a 'pretty' presentation of the XML you can simply add a cfdump statement to your document and you will see a nicely rendered and easy to read xml structure.
The next step is parsing or looping through the elements of the XML Object.
You do that like this:
<>
< index="x" from="1" to="#ArrayLen(album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item)#">
Title: #album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item[x].title.xmlText#
Link: < href="#album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item[x].link.xmlText#">click here< /a >
Description:#album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item[x].description.xmlText#
< /cfloop >
< /cfoutput >
This loop as shown, iterates through all of the elements of the document and displays the most common items in an RSS feed which are the TITLE, LINK and DESCRIPTION. Some feeds aren't formed entirely to standard and may have other elements designs, and of course this is not all of the data that you can get from an RSS feed, again it's just the most common and standard elements returned through RSS. But if the document provided by the RSS feed generator is to standard and well formed, you will see these 3 elements in most every RSS feed.
As you can see displaying an RSS feed in ColdFusion is easy and provides real time up to date information that you can provide to your visitors on your website.
You can apply style sheets and html formatting to your feeds and present the information in a pleasant looking way that visitors will enjoy reading.
An example where I use these feeds can be seen in action here http://www.news-junkie.net/. This is a personal site that I had developed a while ago that is a simple news aggregation website with a number of different topics. I found it fun to develop and good practice working with xml and ColdFusion. The information is constantly updated and visitors to my site see fresh new articles everyday, and all I have to do now that it is built, is keep the domain name active and maybe switch around a few of my affiliate links which hopefully provide a little income to pay for the hosting of the site.
Thanks for reading and Happy Coding!
Ben Cortese is a developer and business analyst for the financial industry and enjoys developing personal websites. View some of them at [http://www.inetsite.net/]http://www.blogger.com/www.InetSite.net
Copyright 2007. Article can be reprinted as long as author credits are given and content remains unchanged and intact.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Benjamin_Cortese http://EzineArticles.com/?Consuming-RSS-Feeds-With-ColdFusion&id=403246

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-09-04T02:19:00.000-07:00

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-09-03T05:47:00.001-07:00

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-09-01T03:20:00.000-07:00

Free PHP Web Hosting - Where To Find The Best Free PHP Web Site Hosting
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Karin_I_Manning]Karin I Manning

There are many benefits to a free PHP web hosting service. This article will reveal everything you need to know about php web hosting and the essentials of the best web site hosting service.

PHP was initially developed in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. He created it as a tool to help website designers. What he developed was the ability to allow users to place macros in static html pages and codes. However, it wasn't till 1997 that it became a fully-fledged programming language.

Nowadays this tool is used with Apache in millions of websites worldwide and its popularity is ever on the increase.

How this application works is that it allows users to create dynamic applications and web pages. It allows website developers to insert several states into an easy simple tag. It has numerous multimedia capabilities and is also able to be used with audio streaming.

There are a large number of free hosting companies that offer it. It is often less expensive when compared with other hosting options and it can actually support numerous databases including MySQL and Oracle, just to name a few.

However, there are considerable disadvantages when using a free alternative.

The response may be very slow which could mean they are hosting more domains than they are really capable of managing. This may make it extremely difficult for website visitors to fully access and read your websites.

Another disadvantage is that generally speaking the customer service and tech support is very poor.

Banner ads are also a frequent eyesore on these websites and are a great distraction to your visitors who you are trying to promote or sell to.

While it is proving more and more popular I would recommend that you stay away from a free web hosting service and considerable a reliable but very inexpensive paid service. Some of these services only cost a few dollars a month. However, the difference to your bottom line is truly immeasurable.

For the latest information about the best web hosting options check out the website below today!

Copyright 2007. We've had enough of crook webhosting companies charging the earth and not delivering. For this reason we reviewed a range of web hosting companies that promise the best value for money and superior service. However, NOT all web hosting packages are created equal. Nor do they live up to their claims. Learn the shocking truth about webhosts at my [http://best-web-hosting-services-review.blogspot.com/]web hosting review site by visiting http://best-web-hosting-services-review.blogspot.com now!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Karin_I_Manning http://EzineArticles.com/?Free-PHP-Web-Hosting---Where-To-Find-The-Best-Free-PHP-Web-Site-Hosting&id=670470

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-30T02:10:00.000-07:00

Web Development Process-Development Life Cycle
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Nik_Chauhan]Nik Chauhan

Web Development process can also be classified into different development life cycle steps just like traditional software development process. Basically Web development is process of designing a website for World Wide Web using various programming and designing technology.

Web development includes six processes:

Analysis:

Study and analyze the exact requirements. This can be through emails, questionnaires, interactive sessions, etc. Analysis must cover all aspects including the existing web system as well as audience.

Specification and documentation:

Create system functionality document which perceive all the requirements of the client with all the minute details. It will create better understanding about the system to be developed. Also mention all the future requirements as well as all the costing details.

Design:

This process includes designing a small prototype or small working model. It covers activities directed towards the architecture of the system and function flow diagrams including detailed specification of the system. In this process there can be lot many suggestions from the customer and those changes should be noted down and should discussed and before moving onto the next phase.

Development:

Development phase transforms the detailed design and specification into actual product through various hard code programs. It includes the integration of source code, database files and content into a single module or product.

Testing and Deployment:

It includes testing the product or modules of the product through various testing process like load testing, cross-browser compatibility testing, resolution testing and integration testing. It also includes the validation of pages through w3c consortium. The finished product is deployed and functions are carried out through the system, which the system is supposed to do.

Marketing and Maintenance:

Marketing is a process which involves preparation of Meta tags, optimizing pages from various factors, submitting the website to different search engine. Maintenance is the important step of the whole process. It includes frequent updating of the web site to keep it fresh. Various bug fixes and errors will be done during maintenance phase.

The above mentioned all the steps are not fixed for web development process. It may vary according to the company’s policy and strategy. [http://www.corporatesitesolutions.com]Web Development.
Source: [http://www.corporatesitesolutions.com]www.corporatesitesolutions.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nik_Chauhan http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Development-Process-Development-Life-Cycle&id=344293

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-29T03:50:00.000-07:00

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-27T00:08:00.000-07:00

Web Development Tricks and Techniques
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Sean_R_Mize]Sean R Mize

In the recent past many industries have flourished as a result of internet life style becoming en vogue. One of these industries is the industry of web development. Web development means the work of constructing web sites. There are a number of freelancers and other web developers who are making a more than decent living through web development. The reasons are obvious. There has been a lot of increase in the number of web sites which are existing on the web today. The number of web sites is still increasing now.

Never before was the number of web sites on the internet as big as it is today. The competition has increased and as a result people need state of the art kind of web sites for their businesses. Success in the online business is dependent on the web traffic flow a web site gets. To ensure this flow, those web developers are preferred who can help you in promoting your web site by designing it properly. Web development is a full fledge industry now. It has its own rules of the game.

Being a web developer means you need to know everything about the current technology which is being employed to construct web sites these days. You need to be clear about the importance of promoting a web site. The web site designs which help a web site in promoting it are feasible these days. The use of media streaming and such other features is also important. The most important tack is that you need to know the latest technologies being used in the web development industry these days. You also need to assess the need of your client before you design the web site for your client. Paying attention towards these tricks will help you in being a successful web developer.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: [http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/ezwebdevelopment.html]Secrets of Article Promotion

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1574 articles in print and 11 published ebooks.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_R_Mize http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Development-Tricks-and-Techniques&id=666611

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-25T05:21:00.000-07:00

3 Reasons Why PHP Message Boards Rock
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Matthew_Keegan]Matthew Keegan

If you are web designer, chances are you include forums on at least some of the sites you manage. If you haven't explored PHPBB2 you are missing out as this type of message board offers to designers a forum that is well supported, easy to manage, and above all else: free! Let's see why PHPBB2 is a hit with so many web designers.

Compared to some web designers, I am relatively new to the business. I created my first forum with MSN groups in 2002 then, six months later, I made the move over to EZBoard. Sure, it did not have all the bells and whistles of vBulletin and other corporate developed boards, but it did the trick for me. That is, until EZBoard was hacked and my livelihood nearly disappeared in moments some two years later!

In search of something different, I considered the move to vBulletin, but I was quite frankly not wanting to shell out license and upgrade fees on a regular basis. At the time of the EZBoard incident, I was running six forums, so I knew that I would eventually have about that many when I completed my transition away from EZBoard.

So, why PHPBB2? For three reasons:

1. It is free. Yes, absolutely! Since it is "open source" code, developed by the developers, it is offered as a free download to whosoever will. Believe me that is a big appeal and, apparently, many designers around the world feel the same way as over 200,000 people are members of their support forum.

2. It can be used across platforms. Whether you work in Windows or Linux, IIS or Apache PHPBB2 is usable and fully functionable.

3. Highly modifiable. Open Source extensibility is evident with the incorporation of PHP, HTML, CSS, and MySQL into the forum.

For the novice, PHPBB2 does take some getting used to especially since you are responsible for installing, maintaining, backing up, upgrading, and modifying your own forum. For your benefit you can access onsite Flash tutorials which are a great way to walk your way through the installation process too. As with any software it is vulnerable to outside attacks, so take care to make sure you regularly back up your forums and familiarize yourself with the security procedures.

In all, PHP message boards really do rock and at a price that cannot possibly be beat!

Matt runs two PHPBB2 sites at http://www.aviationemploymentboard.net and http://www.corporateflyer.net

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Matthew_Keegan http://EzineArticles.com/?3-Reasons-Why-PHP-Message-Boards-Rock&id=58185

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-24T00:23:00.000-07:00

Web Development - An Overview
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Munish_Dev]Munish Dev

A web page may be created for personal or professional purposes. Technology has made web development a convenient process. In fact the benefits of technology vis-à-vis the web are meant for both developers and users. The increased usage of the web and the growing number of websites are an indication of this. And what sets the web apart from other technologies such as the television and radio is the space it gives to the user. Everyone can have a web site of their own, but not everyone can, for instance, have a show on television.

The mix of personal and professional web spaces is interesting to track. In the initial days of the web, the purpose was purely idea-sharing at an academic level. In about two years, the web was opened up as a public place and you started seeing a mix of personal and professional sites. In the next stage of its growth, the web was filled with everyone’s personal sites. Everyone had a web page up and ready with personal photographs, ‘about me’ etc. And then came the boom of companies on the web, and business on the web grew like never before. The web became an inimitable marketplace for people to buy and sell all kinds of products and services.

In the lifecycle of website creation, the development team evaluates and, if necessary, revises ideas storyboarded by the design team. Web development is a specialized area of work which involves an understanding, even if not knowledge, of all other related processes. It can be said that the development team is directly responsible for the creation of a finished website. Evaluation is not just a technical procedure, and involves some degree of subjectivity also. Developers do not just mechanically use rules to create webpage. Individual web developers would bring their own style to the work, and the final product would be influenced in that way.

Web development is carried out with the use of languages such as HTML, XML, Flash, Perl, CSS etc. Like languages we use in our day to day life, each of these languages used for web development has their own respective logics. A web developer must be well-versed in the use of one or more of these languages. The lay person has a very simplistic understanding of what web development involves. The development stage of a website is in fact a long-drawn process often requiring rework and multiple revisions. Both creation and maintenance of a web space is known as web development.

As mentioned earlier technology is now geared towards making it easier for a common person to develop a web page. There are, now, many tools available to help a person develop a website and make the web development process easier to an extent. The very fact that there are websites taking care of the complete development side of website creation for users, speaks volumes for the complexities involved in web development. A lot of the complexities of web development arise from the fact that a web developer must possess the ability to troubleshoot serious technical problems.

Asynchronous JavaScript And XML (AJAX) is a web development technique used to create interactive web applications. Even though the phenomena itself has been around on the web for about a decade, the term AJAX was recently attributed to this technique which is often misunderstood as being to be a technology. AJAX is very relevant in present day web surfing. There are times when you need your website to seem more responsive. But at the same time to continually process small amounts of data requested by the user you cannot afford for the whole web site to be reloaded. AJAX allows this activity to go on behind the scenes which accentuates the sense of interactivity on the web without affecting the speed of the web site. Filling up forms on websites, and other such activities become particularly easy because of this technique.

The technicalities can be avoided, but any company doing business online must have a good understanding of web development. These companies looking for a resounding web presence must be aware of issues like browser compatibility, accessibility, and web standards. Web standards in particular have been put in place to ensure that websites meet their fundamental purpose if communicating with a user.

In the field of web development ‘web development India’ is the new mantra of success. Global companies are recognizing the path-breaking working being carried out by web developers in India. Companies from across the world are partnering with Indian firms because of the cost-effective, superior quality services on offer. Web development professionals in India with their expertise are attractive key global players towards India. Touted as an industry that will see phenomenal growth in the next couple of years, web development India is surely going to be the way of the future.

Munish Dev Rathee working as an SEO cum Content Writer for an [http://www.namahatechnologies.com/]Web development India
Firm

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Munish_Dev http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Development---An-Overview&id=436932

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-23T01:16:00.000-07:00

Offshore Software Development - How to Select Projects That Will Succeed
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Mandli_Sathyanarayan]Mandli Sathyanarayan

One of the key decisions a company needs to make in off-shoring software development is which projects to offshore. You cannot simply offshore “maintenance” projects, because your staff in the U.S. wants to work on new product development. This issue must be carefully thought through and here are time tested and proven guidelines:

1. Business objective: It may sound simple but make sure you clearly define your objectives for offshore outsourcing. Are you going offshore for cost only, for cost and skills, do you wish to use local expertise to develop or customize products for that part of the world? Each of these can lead you to a different list of potential projects.

2. Adequate resource pool offshore: This issue is not always obvious; but depending on the technologies you employ, you need to ascertain if there is a large enough resource pool. Competition for the right resources in countries like India is intense; if you are in a narrow niche and you need to invest significant training dollars to get the staff up to speed, you need to think through how you can retain your staff. Industry has experienced many instances where one company invested in training key staff, only to find that 6 months later a competitor offered enough incentives for the recently trained staff to leave the first company. A mid-sized company who experienced this is evaluating if they should bring the project back to U.S.

3. ROI: A small software company recently considered off-shoring; the proposal was to offshore the equivalent of four to six developers. The financial analysis indicated that at this level, the overhead needed to establish and manage an offshore effort was significant and the cost savings after considering all associated costs didn’t exist. The company decided against outsourcing. This example points to another criterion for determining whether a project makes sense for offshore -- return on investment. After all, one of the most common reasons for off-shoring is to reduce cost.

4. Deliverables and level of interface with the U.S. team: Can you define clearly what the offshore team needs to do? The more you can do this, the better your chances of success. What is the level of interface? How much interaction does the offshore team need to do with the U.S. team? If you need to provide ongoing (read: some times daily) management guidance, it will take significant management effort make it successful or worse yet, it may not succeed at all.

5. Specialized equipment or tools: If your development environment involves specialized tools and equipment, it can impact financial feasibility and schedules; you need to think through the time it will take to create the necessary environment offshore.

6. Transfer of Information and Training: How long does it take, at what cost and whether you have personnel available to devote to this, in addition to doing their own current tasks?

7. Cultural fit (Contextual knowledge necessary); is it possible to train offshore personnel within a reasonable time frame? For example, projects that deal with user interfaces are harder to transfer because of the need to understand the cultural issues in the U.S.

8. Attracting and retaining offshore talent: If you are doing new development or you are in a hot technology area, this will work in your favour. If you are considering dated or proprietary technology with limited market appeal and/or sustaining effort, this will work against you.

For a free download of Sath’s e-book “6 Key Steps to achieving success in global Outsourcing”,
"click Here" http://www.offshoringsuccess.com/web_log.php

M. M. “Sath” Sathyanarayan is President of Global Development Consulting, Inc., an advisory firm focused on global outsourcing. Sath is a pioneer and an internationally recognized expert; he led HP/Tandem’s entry into global outsourcing beginning in early 90s, was CEO of 24by7 Corporation and now consultant, author and trainer. He is author of the book, “Offshore Development and Technical Support: Proven Strategies and Tactics for Success”, a must read for anyone involved in global outsourcing.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mandli_Sathyanarayan http://EzineArticles.com/?Offshore-Software-Development---How-to-Select-Projects-That-Will-Succeed&id=618279

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-22T00:15:00.000-07:00

How to Install WordPress Using Fantastico
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Shawn_DesRochers]Shawn DesRochers

Using Fantastico to install WordPress

Using Fantastico to install your WordPress Blog is one of the easiest methods and probably the quickest ways of setting up a blog. Fantastico will install the WordPress software and create the database and the configuration file for you.

How to use Fantastico to install WordPress?

Login to your web hosting control panel, and in this tutorial we'll assume your using cPanel.

It can usually be accessed by the default method. http://your-domain.com/cpanel

1) Login to your control panel "cPanel"

2) Click on the Fantastico icon or look for the Blue Smiley Face icon.

3) Select WordPress from the list on the right.

4) Click New Installation.

5) Select the domain name you want WordPress installed on.

If you have more than one domain hosted on your account, be sure to select the domain you want your WordPress Blog installed in.

6) Decide if you want WordPress installed in the root or a sub-directory.

Example: if you want it in the root directory leave it blank. If you wish to install it in a sub-directory make up the directory name you want it installed in like "blog or wordpress".

7) Next enter an Admin username and password, but be sure to write them down as you will use this information to enter your WordPress Admin Panel.

8) Now enter your Admin nickname that you will go by when posting articles.

9) Enter your admin email address that you wish to use to be notified of comments etc.

10) Enter your Site name

11) Enter your Blog Description

12) You can also set up your email configuration; usually the default settings are ok as most host support PHP Mail or SMTP support throuth the PHP.INI Settings.

13) Click Install WordPress.

Once installed, you can choose to have the details of the setup mailed to your email address for safe keeping. This is highly recommended in case you forget your admin login and password.

You're done! You now have WordPress installed on your domain.

To access your blog if you installed it in a sub-directory. http://www.your-domain.com/sub-directory-name

To manage your WordPress Blog you would login using the following. http://www.your-domain.com/sub-directory name/wp-admin/

If you installed it in the root directory you would use the default method of accessing your WordPress Blog. http://www.your-domain.com

And you're WordPress Admin Panel http://www.your-domain.com/wp-admin/

Enjoy your new WordPress Blog!

About the Author:

Shawn DesRochers is the CEO of a successful SEO & Web Design Support Forum [http://www.Invision-Graphics.com]http://www.Invision-Graphics.com. He also helps administrate one of the most popular Blogger support forums online at http://www.bloggertalk.net where bloggers can get answers to their current questions. If you need blog hosting we recommend [http://www.visionthishosting.com]VisionThisHosting.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Shawn_DesRochers http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Install-WordPress-Using-Fantastico&id=683606

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-21T02:28:00.000-07:00

Choosing a Computer for Freelance Graphic Design
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jonathon_Hardcastle]Jonathon Hardcastle

For many years, when a freelance graphic designer chose a new computer, Macintosh was the automatic choice. Macintosh computers provided the memory, processing speed and storage necessary for large design files. Most graphic design firms and printing companies used only Macintosh computers. Today, that trend continues but PCs are making inroads in what used to be territory exclusive to Macintosh. Therefore, the decision on what computer to purchase is not as clear cut as it once was for graphic designers.

Hardware is the first consideration of most freelance designers. While PCs have been proven to rival Macs in terms of processing speed, some people claim that Macs still process large graphic files more efficiently. Also, Macintosh computers have a better maintenance record than most PCs. However, when a hardware problem does arise a Mac can cost more to repair.

Software is where the Macintosh shines compared to the PC. All the major graphic design applications are available for both platforms and run with similar speed. However, the Macintosh operating system has historically been much more stable than the Windows operating system and much easier for the end user to troubleshoot. Additionally, Macintosh computers are far less susceptible to viruses, adware and spyware than PCs, which are notorious for their security flaws.

There are considerations beyond the hardware and software that a freelance designer needs to consider. For example, Macintosh computers typically cost more than PCs. However, once a PC is equipped with the appropriate memory, processor and graphics card to efficiently process graphic files, the cost is fairly similar. If a designer decides to switch platforms any graphic design software already owned must be repurchased under a new license which leads many designers to stick with one platform.

Aesthetics are often a consideration of many designers. Macintosh computers are designed to look sleek and creative while PCs are typically more standard looking. However, some of Macintosh's most originally designed computers are not suitable for graphic design work, leaving a designer with the standard CPU tower, monitor and peripherals, though perhaps in interesting colors.

Finally, careful consideration must be given to interactions with outside vendors and clients. Many printing companies and graphic design firms still have a strong pro-Macintosh bias and may reject native files created with PC software. However, if you are submitting EPS, TIFF or PDF files, the difference in platform will be negligible.

Jonathon Hardcastle writes articles on many topics including [http://1st-computers.net/]Computers, [http://fortheloveofscience.com/]Science, and [http://theeducationstop.net/]Education

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jonathon_Hardcastle http://EzineArticles.com/?Choosing-a-Computer-for-Freelance-Graphic-Design&id=286662

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-19T23:32:00.000-07:00

Web Site Development Process - The Life-cycle Steps
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Benny_Alexander]Benny Alexander

A system development process can follow a number of standard or company specific frameworks, methodologies, modeling tools and languages. Software development life cycle normally comes with some standards which can fulfill the needs of any development team. Like software, web sites can also be developed with certain methods with some changes and additions with the existing software development process. Let us see the steps involve in any web site development.

1. Analysis:

Once a customer is started discussing his requirements, the team gets into it, towards the preliminary requirement analysis. As the web site is going to be a part of a system, It needs a complete analysis as, how the web site or the web based application is going to help the present system and how the site is going to help the business. Moreover the analysis should cover all the aspects especially on how the web site is going to join the existing system. The first important thing is finding the targeted audience. Then, All the present hardware, software, people and data should be considered during the time of analysis. For example, if a company XYZ corp is in need of a web site to have its human resource details online, the analysis team may try to utilize the existing data about the employees from the present database. The analysis should be done in the way, that it may not be too time consuming or with very less informative. The team should be able to come up with the complete cost-benefit analysis and as the plan for the project will be an output of analysis, it should be realistic. To achieve this the analyst should consult the designers, developers and testers to come up with a realistic plan.

Input: Interviews with the clients, Mails and supporting docs by the client, Discussions Notes, Online chat, recorded telephone conversations,Model sites/applications etc.,

Output: 1. Work plan, 2. Cost involved, 3. Team requirements, 4. Hardware-software requirements, 5. Supporting documents and 6. the approval

2. Specification Building:

Preliminary specifications are drawn up by covering up each and every element of the requirement. For example if the product is a web site then the modules of the site including general layout, site navigation and dynamic parts of the site should be included in the spec. Larger projects will require further levels of consultation to assess additional business and technical requirements. After reviewing and approving the preliminary document, a written proposal is prepared, outlining the scope of the project including responsibilities, timelines and costs.

Input: Reports from the analysis team

Output: Complete requirement specifications to the individuals and the customer/customer's representative

3. Design and development:

After building the specification, work on the web site is scheduled upon receipt of the signed proposal, a deposit, and any written content materials and graphics you wish to include. Here normally the layouts and navigation will be designed as a prototype.

Some customers may be interested only in a full functional prototype. In this case we may need to show them the interactivity of the application or site. But in most of the cases customer may be interested in viewing two or three design with all images and navigation.

There can be a lot of suggestions and changes from the customer side, and all the changes should be freezed before moving into the next phase. The revisions could be redisplayed via the web for the customer to view.

As needed, customer comments, feedback and approvals can be communicated by e-mail, fax and telephone.

Throughout the design phase the team should develop test plans and procedures for quality assurance. It is necessary to obtain client approval on design and project plans.

In parallel the Database team will sit and understand the requirements and develop the database with all the data structures and sample data will also be prepared.

Input: Requirement specification

Output: Site design with templates, Images and prototype

4. Content writing:

This phase is necessary mainly for the web sites. There are professional content developers who can write industry specific and relevant content for the site. Content writers to add their text can utilize the design templates. The grammatical and spelling check should be over in this phase.

Input: Designed template

Output: Site with formatted content

5. Coding:

Now its programmers turn to add his code without disturbing the design. Unlike traditional design the developer must know the interface and the code should not disturb the look and feel of the site or application. So the developer should understand the design and navigation. If the site is dynamic then the code should utilize the template. The developer may need to interact with the designer, in order to understand the design. The designer may need to develop some graphic buttons when ever the developer is in need, especially while using some form buttons. If a team of developers is working they should use a CVS to control their sources. Coding team should generate necessary testing plans as well as technical documentation. For example Java users can use JavaDoc to develop their documents to understand their code flow. The end-user documentation can also be prepared by the coding team, which can be used by a technical writer who can understand them, writes helps and manuals later.

Input: The site with forms and the requirement specification

Output: Database driven functions with the site, Coding documents

6. Testing:

Unlike software, web based applications need intensive testing, as the applications will always function as a multi-user system with bandwidth limitations. Some of the testing which should be done are, Integration testing, Stress testing, Scalablity testing, load testing, resolution testing and cross-browser compatibility testing. Both automated testing and manual testing should be done without fail. For example its needed to test fast loading graphics and to calculate their loading time, as they are very important for any web site. There are certain testing tools as well as some online testing tools which can help the testers to test their applications. For example ASP developers can use Microsoft's Web Application Test Tool to test the ASP applications, which is a free tool available from the Microsoft site to download.

After doing all the testing a live testing is necessary for web sites and web based applications. After uploading the site there should be a complete testing(E.g.. Links test)

Input: The site, Requirement specifications, supporting documents, technical specifications and technical documents

Output: Completed application/site, testing reports, error logs, frequent interaction with the developers and designers

7. Promotion:

This phase is applicable only for web sites. Promotion needs preparation of meta tags, constant analysis and submitting the URL to the search engines and directories. There is a details article in this site on site promotion, click here to read it. The site promotion is normally an ongoing process as the strategies of search engine may change quite often. Submitting a site URLs once in 2 months can be an ideal submission policy. If the customer is willing, then paid click and paid submissions can also be done with additional cost.

Input: Site with content, Client mails mentioning the competitors

Output: Site submission with necessary meta tag preparation

8. Maintenance and Updating:

Web sites will need quite frequent updations to keep them very fresh. In that case we need to do analysis again, and all the other life cycle steps will repeat. Bug fixes can be done during the time of maintenance. Once your web site is operational, ongoing promotion, technical maintenance, content management & updating, site visit activity reports, staff training and mentoring is needed on a regular basis depend on the complexity of your web site and the needs within your organization.

Input: Site/Application, content/functions to be updated, re-Analysis reports

Output: Updated application, supporting documents to other life cycle steps and teams.

The above-mentioned steps alone are not strict to web application or web site development. Some steps may not applicable for certain tasks. Its depend on the cost and time involved and the necessity. Sometimes if it is a intranet site, then there will be no site promotion. But even if you are a small development firm, if you adopt certain planning along with this web engineering steps in mind, it will definitely reflects in the Quality of the outcome.

See the flowchart "How we do web development in Macronimous?"[PDF format]

Macronimous is a specialised international web development agency, with a difference. We realise that Web development agency is a terminology that has been recently misrepresented and aim to differentiate ourselves from the others. http://www.macronimous.com/resources/web_development_life_cycle.asp

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Benny_Alexander http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Site-Development-Process---The-Life-cycle-Steps&id=61636

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-18T02:35:00.000-07:00

Web Application Development India
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Rashmi_Shrma]Rashmi Shrma

In the field of web development, developers understand your business needs and requirements, study your enterprise and offer a range of web application solutions from which you can select what suits your organization the best. Developers focus on solutions regarding your business queries instead of focusing only on the technical aspect of the problems. Reach towards the consultants who give you the provision of cost effective yet sound solutions. Several organizations which require application based development.

Steps to a successful web application development process:

Understanding the nature of enterprise- While the developers take the responsibility of working with the firm and planning the procedure of development, they go through the objectives of the organization and understand their working phenomenon. This criteria is taken into account in order to study the nature of the company so that there is nothing misunderstood about the firm itself.

Preparing a plan- After enough of studies about the nature and objectives, the turn is of planning. Probably the most difficult part, planning requires sheer knowledge, experience and future site in the planners. Which format suits the text, which kind of language would be most suitable, which graphics comply the content, how long would it take.......... These are few questions that often come into the mind while planning.

Work according to planning- When the plan is prepared fully, the time is to get it working. The programmers start working on coding, testing and publishing data, and phase is then represented in the form of a master document that is processed by the development team, which is submitted for approval. Developers have the technical hand in the formation of website and hence working according to what was planned can be useful and the project can be finished on time.

Result testing- This step represents the testing of what we have done, in this the technicians check the bugs and discrepancies which could have caused trouble for the site. The network issues are also resolved so that there are no failures. [http://www.dimensionindia.com]Dimension India offers variety of services like [http://www.dimensionindia.com/outsource-website-services/professional-designing.php]Professional website designing and website development services, [http://www.dimensionindia.com/outsource-website-services/web-application-development.php]web application development, ecommerce website development, web design India, offshore website design.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rashmi_Shrma http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Application-Development-India&id=671219

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-17T04:03:00.000-07:00

Website Development on Your Own Terms
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Scott_Lindsay]Scott Lindsay

The early days of web development saw a relatively small handful of ‘experts’ and had them seeking to find ways to make a website do what their client wanted them to do. There was very little standardized methods to make website development an easy process and each site may have been designed with customized programming that may have been totally incompatible with any other site.

When the number of programmers raised from a few hundred to more than 30,000 it became much clearer that there needed to be some cohesive way to simplify things. This process led to new partnerships and development applications that have become the standards of the day.

As new developments are unveiled they are field tested by programmers and implemented once it is clear that the methodology is workable.

In many cases these new development programs can be refined and repackaged into a form based method that allows non-tech customers to develop a website that is as functional as any other site and at a fraction of the cost.

Certainly this was not possible in 1995, but through the trial and error of more than ten years the best features have risen to the top and the have proven very useful to both programmers as well as online business.

With so many programs available to developers today it is becoming much easier to upgrade features and enhance website productivity.

Many programmers are very interested in making site developments self-directed by their customers. The reason is simply the sheer numbers of new sites that are being developed. If at least a portion of the site can be managed by the customer there are two benefits, 1) less need for one on one development for the programmer and, 2) more direct control by the website owner.

When the business owner has the capability of managing the functions of the website the faster the clarity of vision can be realized. This is largely viewed as one of the predominate features of self-directed programming on website developments.

The cost effective nature of self-directed site development has caused many to wonder why they didn’t look into this solution before. Many new start-up ecommerce sites have discovered this method to be the quickest way to provide their potential customers with the full benefit of their services.

The future of web development has a lot to do with the expectations of website owners and the demands of the consuming public. It is a safe assumption that as new technologies are required there will be programmers who can assist in its development and then work to refine the function so that ecommerce can implement the technology in a self-directed user-friendly format.

Scott Lindsay is a web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of HighPowerSites and many other web projects. HighPowerSites is the easiest do-it-yourself website builder on the web. No programming or design skill required. Get your own website online in just 5 minutes with HighPowerSites.com at: http://www.highpowersites.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Scott_Lindsay http://EzineArticles.com/?Website-Development-on-Your-Own-Terms&id=335947

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-16T02:00:00.000-07:00

The Benefits Of Using Php Shopping Cart
By David B

The aspiring small-scale entrepreneur wanting to go global and
online from a small regional business would invariably need a
website the website needs to be functional, accessible and
attractive so as to encourage the potential customers. The
php-shopping cart is the need of the hour - regardless of
whether the potential customer wants to add, update or delete
from the list. The php cart should ideally be familiar to the
potential customers.on the internet considering that the
customer would opt for a familiar option rather than striving to
learn a new system. The more effective php cart needs to have a
textual message on each page which could be an intimation to the
user as to the number of items present in the php shopping cart
and on clicking on the message the customer would gain access to
the number and details of items in the php shopping cart.

Creating A Php Shopping Cart

The creation of a php-shopping cart is surprisingly simple and
when done with precision it could translate into a highly
effective and universally accepted php-shopping cart. The
details of the stocks are predictably stored in the database and
the only information required from the patient which would in
turn need to be stored is none other than the id of each product
that has been added to the php shopping cart. The php-shopping
cart is accessible and there are a variety of ways of reaching
it - the most popular being the clicking on a link or by
clicking on the 'add to cart' option on the product page. In the
event of the php-shopping cart being arrived at using the link
on the product page - 'add to cart' - the need of the hour is
undoubtedly to update the products in the php-shopping cart
before the display of a new product range.

It is not uncommon for the php-shopping cart to have more than
one of a kind of any particular product, which could be
compiled, and it is not advisable to list the number of products
of a particular kind in the php-shopping cart. There is a
commonality between the links to 'delete' or 'add' a product to
the php-shopping cart. The customer could well have the option
of updating the products in the php shopping cart - manually!
The php shopping cart is seldom empty and if it is an
appropriate message needs to be flashed to the effect. This is
one aspect of the php-shopping cart, which can scarcely be
negotiated

The Traits Of A Php Shopping Cart

The traits of a successful PHP shopping cart is predominantly
that of - having the requisite information sent to cart. The
php-shopping cart has the ability to locate and execute a high
compliance php-shopping cart. The php-shopping cart has the
inherent ability to call an external php file to say the least.
The most popular of the options available is none other than the
ability to pay by 'pay pal' the php-shopping cart then is a boon
when used judiciously and history when ignored!

About the Author: You can visit http://www.webcart.net David
can be reached by phone: 323-933-9291

Source: http://www.isnare.com

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-14T04:58:00.000-07:00

ASP vs. PHP
By Halstatt Pires

When building web sites, ASP and PHP are very popular
languages. Here’s my opinion on whether ASP or PHP is best

ASP v. PHP

Both ASP and PHP are languages used to build Dynamic Web sites
that can interact with Databases and exchange information. ASP
(Active Server Pages) is from Microsoft and is used with IIS
(Internet Information Server) that runs on Microsoft Servers.
PHP (Personal Home Pages) is from Rasmus Lerdorf, who originally
designed this parsing language which was later modified by
different people. It runs on Unix and Linux servers and it also
has an NT server version.

There are a lot of differences between ASP and PHP.

Cost

To run ASP programs one needs IIS installed on a Windows
platform server, which is not free. PHP programs run on Linux,
which is free. Even the connectivity of the database is
expensive in the case of ASP as MS-SQL is a product of Microsoft
that needs to be purchased. PHP generally uses MySQL, which is
freely available.

Speed

If we compare the speed of ASP and PHP then PHP has an upper
hand. PHP code runs faster than ASP. ASP is built on COM based
architecture, which is an overhead for the server whereas PHP
code runs in its own memory space.

Platform Compatibility

PHP programs can run on various platforms like Linux, Unix,
Windows and Solaris whereas ASP is mainly associated with
Windows platforms. However, ASP can run on a Linux platform with
ASP-Apache installed on the server.

Additional Costs

Many of the tools used in PHP are free of cost and since PHP is
open source a lot of code can be found in open source forums.
PHP has inbuilt features like ftp, email from a web page or even
encryption mechanisms but in ASP such features are not built in
and some additional components are required. Therefore an
additional cost is incurred for such components.

Base Language

PHP is based on C++ language and the syntax used in PHP is
quite similar to C/C++. C/C++ is still considered the best
programming language by many programmers and people who love
this language would surely feel more comfortable with the syntax
of PHP. ASP on the other hand has a more Visual Basic kind of
syntax that again is closely related to only Microsoft products.
So, it depends on a person-to-person which language he or she is
comfortable

Database Connectivity

PHP, being extremely flexible, can connect to various
databases, the most popular being MySQL. ASP mainly uses MS-SQL.

Conclusion

Both languages have their advantages specific to users. Some
would argue that both the languages have their own importance
and depending on the user's requirements the language and the
platform can be chosen. If we talk about developing a discussion
board then ASP is equally capable but many feel the best
discussion boards are developed in PHP. If a user is looking for
some e-commerce application development then many would call ASP
the ideal choice. This does not mean that PHP cannot provide
e-commerce solutions, only that many people choose ASP.

From my perspective, PHP is an all around better choice than
ASP.

About the Author: Halstatt Pires is with the Internet marketing
firm - http://www.marketingtitan.com - a San Diego Internet
marketing and advertising company offering automated web site
systems - http://www.businesscreatorpro.com - for e-commerce
solutions.

Source: http://www.isnare.com

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-13T23:05:00.000-07:00

For Automated Sites - Php And Mysql Are A Perfect Match
By Halstatt Pires

You’ve decided to automate your web site. Now what? Here are
some ideas to help you choose how to automate your site.

A bit of programming is going to be necessary if you want to
automate a site. There are many types of programs that can be
used to automate a web site including JavaScript, PHP, Perl,
ASP, Java and more. So, which do you use? For many, it is a
personal choice.

I prefer PHP for programming. PHP is a particularly useful
programming language because it allows for advanced programming
and is easy to integrate with web pages. Another plus of PHP is
that the language interfaces very well with MySQL, a popular
type of online database.

Yet another plus of PHP is that it is Open Source Code. The
actual code that is PHP is available to the public for free,
while the source code for products such as ASP are not. Because
PHP is open source, there is a large community of PHP
programmers that help each other with code. This means PHP
programmers can rely on each other by using reusable pieces of
code called functions and classes rather than constantly
reinventing the wheel. This can dramatically cut down on
production time.

Overall, PHP is flexible, cheaper than many alternatives, and
built around a community. PHP and MySQL are excellent choice for
webmasters looking to automate their web sites.

What Can PHP and MySQL do for me? Just about anything you can
think of. That is the beauty of custom programming. A few ideas
of what you can do with a PHP and MySQL driven site include:

1. E-commerce
2. User Polls
3. Keyword Tracking
4. Set User Preferences
5. Manage Password Protected Member's Areas
6. Lead Follow Up
7. Customer Relations
8. Content Management
9. Email Newsletters
10. Accounting
11. Invoicing
12. Scheduled Updates

The list is limited only by your imagination. Once you have
decided to go with a PHP and MySQL site, you can either get a
custom program created, use a prepackaged version or a
combination of both. Many PHP and MySQL programs that come
prepackaged are easy to customize and can save you a lot of time
and money over starting from the ground up.

About the Author: Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing
consultant with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet
marketing firm in San Diego offering automated web site systems
through http://www.businesscreatorpro.com.

Source: http://www.isnare.com

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-11T04:01:00.001-07:00

Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers

2007-08-10T02:21:00.000-07:00

Website Development For Search Engines Part 1
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Mark_Andrew_Jones]Mark Andrew Jones

Creating an online presence is big business nowadays and unfortunately the same mistakes are still being made by web developers, or rather overlooked when it comes to getting a website online.

It does not matter if the business is small or large (We have built websites for multinational corporations and smaller mum and dad businesses) some things must be adhered to:

Do not assume that your web developer or web designer will do the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for you.

Search Engine optimization is an integral part of the web development process and should not be overlooked or “tacked on at the end, if we have budget”.

It is imperative that you include the cost of search engine optimization in the budget when costing your website.

Search Engine Optimization is important.

Business owners think that they can get a website built place it online and then sit back and sales and traffic roll in, their only worry will be keeping up wth the orders being placed, right? Wrong.

So what is SEO and why is it important?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the art of developing your website with search engines in mind. If your website is not Search Engine friendly then the chances of your website getting properly indexed by a search are not good.

If a search engine cannot index your website then the chances of your website appearing in the search engines results when someone enters a keyword to do with your website are very slim indeed. No results is equal to no traffic.

So what are some of the good things you and your web developer can do to optimize your website for search engines?

Part 1) Title tags, Meta tags and why should I use the <> tag in the body of my website.

1) HTML title tag
Place a meaningful title inside the title tag, do not stuff it with keywords but by the same token having a phrase which is to do with your website certainly does not hurt.

As an example, we used “Software development and Web Design”, our Gold Coast Web Design company does both of these things so why not put it in the title. Also, “Software development” and “Web Design” are two key phrases which people will certainly search on.

2) HTML Description and Keywords meta tags
These two tags are not as important as they once were but are still not to be overlooked.

Place a description of what your website will be about and what it will do inside the HTML escription meta tag. Again do not overstuff your description with keywords or key phrases s the content in the description should have “some” relevance to the information contained in the body of the page. If it is not relevant, some search engines smell something fishy and may blacklist your website or decide not to index the site. Remember, search engines are doing you a favor by indexing your website and adding it to their catalogue. Do not expect it!

The HTML Keywords meta tag is used to contain keywords or key phrases which are relevant to your website.

For example, if you have an Australian, Gold Coast Software and web design business, use keywords like “Web design, Gold Coast, Australia, web application development”. Again, obey the same rules for the Keywords meta tag as you would for the Description meta tag; Do not overstuff keywords but by the same token do use it.

3) We all know that “Content is king” but what about optimization?

Search engines place more emphasis on keywords surrounded by the <> tag.

For those people who are not familiar with the <> tag, it is a standard way of emphasizing text on a webpage (Heading 1). Up until the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) displaying a word surrounded by the <> tag meant it would appear huge on the page. As such it was reserved for headings, headings are important (Search engines recognize this) and use the <> tag as well as the other heading tags (<><> etc) to rate keywords in a page.

So, in a nutshell, place important keywords inside the <> tag; e.g. <>Gold Coast, Software Development. If your keywords and heading are appearing too large, don’t worry, a little bit of CSS can reduce that size but still give emphasis to your keywords.

Coming up in part 2) More information about how you can optimize the body of your website for SEO. The dangers of using PHP session IDs in the querystring and are database driven websites a good thing when it comes to SEO.

Mark Jones is a Senior Analyst Programmer for Gold Coast Web Design Company http://e-evolution.net and http://www.customfranchisesoftware.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mark_Andrew_Jones http://EzineArticles.com/?Website-Development-For-Search-Engines-Part-1&id=666199

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