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The nuts and bolts for
Creative web development

Real Time Chat With NodeJS, Socket.io and ExpressJS

NodeJS gives Krasimir Tsonev ability to write back-end code in one of his favorite languages: JavaScript. It's the perfect technology for building real time applications. In this tutorial, he'll show you how to build a web chat application, using ExpressJS and Socket.io.

May 16, 2013 Author: Lubov Cholakova Rating: Not enough votes

How to Write Testable and Maintainable Code in PHP

Frameworks provide a tool for rapid application development, but often accrue technical debt as rapidly as they allow you to create functionality. Technical debt is created when maintainability isn't a purposeful focus of the developer. Future changes and debugging become costly, due to a lack of unit testing and structure. Here's how to begin structuring your code to achieve testability and maintainability – and save you time.

May 16, 2013 Author: Lubov Cholakova Rating: Not enough votes

HTTP: The Protocol Every Web Developer Must Know Part 2

In his previous article, Pavan Podila covered some of HTTP’s basics, such as the URL scheme, status codes and request/response headers. With that as our foundation, we will look at the finer aspects of HTTP, like connection handling, authentication and HTTP caching. These topics are fairly extensive, but we’ll cover the most important bits.

May 15, 2013 Author: Lubov Cholakova Rating: Not enough votes

Getting Into Ember: Part 4

In his previous tutorial, Rey Bango touched on how to use Ember.Object to define your models and work with datasets. In this section, we’ll look more closely at how Ember uses the Handlebars templating framework to define your app's user interface. Most server-side developers are used to using templates to define markup that will be dynamically filled on the fly. If you've ever used ASP.NET, ColdFusion, PHP or Rails then it's pretty much assured you know what he's talking about.

May 15, 2013 Author: Lubov Cholakova Rating: Not enough votes

A Guide to CSS3 Pseudo-classes

The pseudo-classes are used to target elements without having to add extra classes, attributes or ID; that is why it is called in that way, pseudo-class. Throughout our previous posts, we have covered a few new CSS3 pseudo-classes, including :not, :before and :after, :first-of-type and we also use pseudo-classes in some of our tutorials. And in this post we are going to walk through the other new CSS3 pseudo-classes that have not been covered yet. Let’s take a look.

April 29, 2013 Author: Lubov Cholakova Rating: Not enough votes

Meet the Connect Framework

Newcomers to NodeJS typically find its API difficult to grasp. Luckily, many developers have created frameworks that make it easier to work with Node. Connect is one such framework. It sits on top of Node’s API and draws the line between comfort and control. Think of Connect as a stack of middleware. With every request, Connect filters through the layers of middleware, each having the opportunity to process the HTTP request. When T.J. Holowaychuk announced Connect, he said there were two types of middleware. The first is a filter.

April 24, 2013 Author: Lubov Cholakova Rating: Not enough votes

Repurposing Photoshop For The Web

Like any overzealous teenager aspiring to be a Web designer back in 1999, Dan Rose found himself in an “Electronic Design” class, behind the wheel of one of those old-school aqua iMacs. If you found yourself in a similar situation, chances are you were given Adobe Photoshop as your vehicle for designing the Web. For him, it was version 6.0. No matter which version you had, undoubtedly you know someone who can “trump” you by having adopted an earlier version. Designers take much pride in this, in case you hadn’t noticed.

April 24, 2013 Author: Lubov Cholakova Rating: Not enough votes

Reflection in PHP

Reflection is generally defined as a program’s ability to inspect itself and modify its logic at execution time. In less technical terms, reflection is asking an object to tell you about its properties and methods, and altering those members (even private ones). In this lesson, we’ll dig into how this is accomplished, and when it might prove useful.

April 22, 2013 Author: Lubov Cholakova Rating: Not enough votes

Getting Into Ember.js: Part 3

Rey Bango hopes that you’re starting to see that Ember.js is a powerful, yet opinionated, framework. We’ve only scratched its surface; there’s more to learn before we can build something truly useful! We’ll continue using the Ember Starter Kit. In this portion of the series, we’ll review accessing and managing data within Ember.

April 22, 2013 Author: Lubov Cholakova Rating: Not enough votes

HTTP: The Protocol Every Web Developer Must Know Part 1

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It’s a stateless, application-layer protocol for communicating between distributed systems, and is the foundation of the modern web. As a web developer, we all must have a strong understanding of this protocol. Let’s review this powerful protocol through the lens of a web developer.

April 16, 2013 Author: Lubov Cholakova Rating: Not enough votes