October 3rd, 2009
I feel the need to declare that polymorphism is really cool.
In programming, polymorphism is a concept that says that different objects of the same group can intelligently decide which version of the programming code to run depending on exactly which object you’re working with. A classic example is different types vehicles. Let’s say you have a collection of vehicles of different types — a car, a motorcycle, and a moped. Each of these can be described in programming as objects that contain information about themselves and different operations the programmer can do on them.
Now, if you decide that in your programming that all objects that are classified as Vehicle have a horn() operation. With polymorphism, your programming is able to select the correct horn() operation without knowing in advance what type of Vehicle it is actually looking at.
Essentially, your user could select what Vehicles to stuff into a collection of Vehicles while your programming is running, and it will stuff those Vehicles in there and then still call the correct horn() operation when the user asks for it without having any idea of what type of Vehicle it is actually looking at. And I find that cool.
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September 28th, 2009
So, if you’ve ever purchased anything on eBay, I’m sure you are familiar with their wonderful brainchild called PayPal. A completely digital way of exchanging money, no banks involved. A perfect dream right? More like a security nightmare, as history as proved. But I will give them credit for getting on the ball in recent days.
Regardless, if you operate a business with an online presence, PayPal has a number of unique features which the average business owner will find useful. As we all know, processing credit cards is something that is almost required for any organization operating in the 21st century. You can’t get by without it. So, when my fraternity came to me to inquire about coming up with an online way to make payments – PayPal was my recommendation. Little did I know that integration with PayPal is a little harder than the sticker price. Read the rest of this entry »
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June 19th, 2009
One of the latest trends in website development is that of the Model-View-Controller (or MVC) design ideology. For those individuals reading who are unfamiliar with MVC, allow me to give you the rough sketch of what it is. The idea comes from the concept of three distinct tasks of an Application:
- Read or Write Information from a data source.
- Process that information in some way.
- Display the processed information.
Those three tasks are at the heart of nearly every application on the market. We’re all a bunch of data manipulators! Just when you thought that your checking account had some greater significance, right? These three tasks make up the three parts of MVC. The Model is a representation and a means of communicating with your data source. The Controller is what processes your information for you. And finally, the View is what displays your information in a friendly format.
I first had the pleasure of being exposed to this via my position with the University of Georgia’s EITS. However, if you want a shining example of an artfully designed MVC Framework, the best example I’ve seen is Ruby on Rails. While Rails may singlehandedly be responsible for giving Ruby a jump into the spotlight of web development, it is not without its problems. Rails is, for example, very resource heavy if not implemented exactly right.
So, in light of my love for the ease of developing for Rails and my frustration with the fact that finding a web host who adequately supports it I have started work on developing an MVC framework that brings some of the things I love about Rails into the PHP arena. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Development, mvc, php, wmvc
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