Websites. Software. Consulting

Whiteboard (and Pizza) Friday

By Toby Mason

Added Friday 13/06/2008

Every other Friday the team gets together to discuss all things technical.
We've decided, whether you like it or not, to keep you guys up to date with our discussions. Hopefully you should find something interesting in this lot!

TOAD for MySQL - Link
Seems like we are all in agreement this is very good database admin tool. In fact even I can use it, I've tried already. I can easily make edits to databses (scary I know) and build custom queries and downloads. Trust me its easy.

Eclipse PDT - Eclipse Link or Zend Link
Eclipse is one of the most well used IDEs out there. Believe it or not, the use of Eclipse is a big plus on your CV for lots of employers since it's got backing by some big players and is THE opensource java ide........not that anyones gonna be looking for a job elsewhere of course!! Apparently takes a bit of playing around to set up exactly how you want but once done is great (says Bede).

Internet Explorer 8 - Link
Well the time is approaching and we're gonna have to start testing sites against this soon. Hopefully M$ have done a better job on this one and it might actually render stuff correctly! Jamie - good luck with the testing.

TRAC - Link
TRAC is a project tracking tool, with a built in wiki, ticketing system and interface into subversion. We are going to start using this going forward for all reasonably sized projects.

Is very good for seeing version change stuff - if you click on the timeline and remove wiki changes from the search, you can see the updates to svn. If you click on a revision number it will show you exactly what has changed.......cool stuff!!

JQuery - Link
We are going to start to use this more and more, in place of prototype and scriptaculous.

Zend_View_Helpers - Link
View helpers basically are a set of methods made available to the view, to perform a lot of the most common HTML tasks e.g. adding javascript and css files to the header, outputing the doctype, creating form elements.

Zend has built a load of these and to expand on them, we are going to be building a lot more under our new Framework - basically any reusable UI component should have a view helper. So far we have ones for building a menu system, an extjs grid and jsonresultset (utilised by the extjsgrid helper).



I also bumbled on about SEO for a bit but I will bore you with that in another post some other time. Laters!

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