Friday, July 14, 2006

TestDrive
I created a new sub domain for learning and testing new [Web] technologies. I will add some examples of using various Web-related technologies there.
http://testdrive.kelman-all.com/

I'm starting to educate myself with an unusual strength :) I fell behind once again.

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JavaScript - version 1.7 is about to be released
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/New_in_JavaScript_1.7

The cool feature of JavaScript is that it allows to check if a function is defined and create your own version otherwise, adding it to a prototype of an object. For example, JavaScript's String object lacks trim() method. http://www.developingskills.com/ds.php?article=jstrim&page=1 shows how to fix it.

Yesterday I found a cool library which implements new 1.6 -1.7 methods of arrays in a similar manner: when your browser's JavaScript will become 1.6 and then 1.7 your code won't break, but will automatically use built in methods instead of custom ones.
http://4umi.com/web/javascript/array.htm

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AJAX - it's a pleasure! It's a coming way of making really interactive Web applications which communicate with a server without page reloading. There are plenty of books on this issue (and I bought almost all of them) but one really stands apart: Ajax Design Patterns by Michael Mahemoff
His site is http://ajaxpatterns.org/.

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PHP. Version 5 is a full-fledged OOP language with a lot of convenient and powerful libraries developed for it. You normally can do anything you can do in ASP.NET, for example, but in a much easier and more flexible way. I was surprised when I started to work with PHP on how much better, bigger, and more convenient is its standard library and common user-developed libraries than ones used in ASP. Open Source rules!

I'm going to learn and pass Zend PHP Certification http://www.zend.com/store/zend_php_certification

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Design Patterns
It's a cool thing, if you learn it with an excellent Head First Design Patterns (thank you, Andrew, for pointing me to it) written by by Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman

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MySQL 5.1 and PostgreSQL - I need to jump into that.

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.NET
I still need to get heavily involved into ASP.NET and C# development. While I like C#, I think that ASP.NET approach suffers greatly from usual Microsoft's design flaw: it's too big, it's too predefined, so when you develop a real application you spend more time on finding workarounds for built-in events and other features which work the way they were designed, but not the way your application's business logic dictates.