Frameworks…

We at Nu Order Webs use a few different methods of creating sites – normally depending on the amount of specific customisation that is needed. Often if a simple CMS site is needed we will either use Joomla or Wordpress, but quite often a client will require something really specific that cannot currently be done using open source software. That is where a framework comes in! Our Framework of choice is CakePHP, we find it’s strong typing and ease of data passing a huge benefit when it comes to rapidly creating applications, not to mention the huge prototyping benefits given from using bake.

However looking at the current market, there are a lot more job offers asking for the Zend Framework. Now personally I have never got on with the Zend framework, I think it is overly simple and doesnt actually seem to provide any “Automagic” features, and surely the whole point of a framework is that it prevents you having to write an excessive amount of code?

Sure they have a fantastic “library” of pre-written code for web services, but one of the benefits of cakePHP is that you can simply import these and instantiate them as you would with any other object. For instance on a previous project we simply used the Zend libraries for google picasa to import a photo album from the users picasa account in roughly about 30 lines of code.

So I would say – don’t always follow the crowd, sure Zend has the backing of the creators of PHP but as an MVC framework designed for RAD – I would suggest that possibly there are better choices out there – especially when it comes to code generation!

Just a quick update

Have lately been inundated with projects from small quick E-Commerce sits through to large scale Accommodation search sites – we are intending to update our portfolio section on the site as soon as these latest projects are finished as it needs a bit of a revamp.

Just another day in the life of a web developer eh? Too much work, caffeine and not enough sleep, time

CSS Sprites – Why they are cool and A tool to make it easier

I’ve been experimenting with CSS sprites as of late, I’m half way through this project now so there seems little point in introducing them at this point. Basically speaking a CSS Sprite is a bunch of images amalgamated into a single image that you then use CSS and the :hover etc functions associated to links to move different parts of that image into view (Tabs would be an ideal example of this).

e.g.:

Anyway I found this very cool site that explains a lot more about it and it provides a cool tool to help you merge your own CSS sprites.

http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/

Web Developer Toolbar comes to Chrome at last!

I know, I know – I have not updated this thing in a while, to be honest it is mainly because I have been doing less and less developement in my main job as of late and more trying to sure up the internal infrastructure to somewhere near safe.

But here is a quality update for you – The Web Developer Toolbar has finally come to Chrome, so if you are like me – love Chrome, and tiring of Firefox’s slowdowns, memory leaks, random Crashes and its complete inability to handle multiple flash videos – AND – you are a webdeveloper – I guess now is the time to switch.

I hope this helps!

Inserting non web safe fonts into pages

It has been a bit of a pain to do this until recently, sIFR was the main way of doing it which basically used flash to render the font – however I have recently come across this which just uses Javascript to do it and no flash – take a look and see what you think:

http://wiki.github.com/sorccu/cufon/about