Beyond Coding

Alex Gorbatchev has recently updated his SyntaxHighlighter. The brand new version 2.0 has added lots of goodies (including css themes!) and fixed some potential problems people were having.

SyntaxHighlighter Plus is now updated too, to use the new 2.0 engine.

Head over to the release post for download links and more information.

Please note that this is a beta release. Please report bugs and issues in the comments section.

Thanks!

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A lot of you probably already know about this, but if you ever want to do multiple file uploads in Firefox then this Firefox Add On / Extension is for you:

dragdropupload

This Add-On lets you drag a bunch of files from your computer and drop them on a standard file input upload box. If the web site has been built a particular way to allow for multiple upload boxes generated dynamically (such as Gmail), dragging a bunch of files onto the single upload box will automatically generate a whole heap of individual upload boxes. Very neat! :)

This is mega handy when you want to send a whole bunch of pictures to someone via Gmail.

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Latest release: v1.2.3

Initially I was going to wait for my Layerful Framework (a transparent layering framework for Kohana) to mature before releasing its bundled modules. However, since this Authlite module can be used independently to Layerful, I am releasing it now.

What is Authlite

Authlite is a user authentication module for Kohana.

What’s the difference between Authlite and Auth?

Kohana comes with an official Auth module which does exactly what was described in the last paragraph, so why another module then?

It is because Authlite offers greater flexibilty. Please read the features outlined below to find more.

Features

• Legacy database compatibility
• Configurable database columns
• Multiple instances of Authlite
• Does not enforce user roles
• Auth-like syntax and usage
• Lightweight

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Please check the GitHub repository for the latest release.

If you don’t already know, endless scroll (or infinite scrolling) is a popular technique among web 2.0 sites such as Google Reader and Live Image Search, where instead of paging through items using the traditional pagination technique, the page just keeps loading with new items attached to the end.

I have developed a jQuery plugin to easily achieve this.

Requirement: jQuery 1.2+

The plugin is tested with jQuery 1.2.6, 1.3 and 1.4.

There are a few options to customise the behaviour of this plugin:

• bottomPixels (integer) – the number of pixels from the bottom of the page that triggers the event
• fireOnce (boolean) – only fire once until the execution of the current event is completed
• fireDelay (integer) – delay the subsequent firing, in milliseconds. 0 or false to disable delay.
• loader (string) – HTML loader
• data (string) – plain HTML data
• insertAfter (string) – jQuery selector syntax: where to put the loader as well as the plain HTML data
• callback (function) – callback function, accepets one argument: fire sequence (the number of times the event triggered during the current page session)
• resetCounter (function) – resets the fire sequence counter if the function returns true, this function could also perform hook actions since it is applied at the start of the event

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Merry Christmas to all our readers! We hope you have a safe and fun time. You’ve no doubt worked hard all year so enjoy the holiday season and we look forward to brining you some great content in business and tech in 2009… :)

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Just to be clear, this is NOT a fanboyism post nor do I encourage the debate between which language is superior. My personal belief is to use the appropriate tool for appropriate projects.

PHP Pros

• Widely available libraries (including PEAR and PECL)
• An absolutely outstanding online manual
• Relatively easy to learn (can hack together some code without deep understanding of the language)
• Widely used (easy to find clients, etc)
• Most if not all control panels have PHP integration
• Development packages (XAMPP, WAMP, MAMP, LAMP, etc)
• C style syntax (easier transition for people with C/C++/Java background)
• Powerful array feature (Ruby’s equivalent to PHP’s associative array is Hash, which is not interchangeable with array)
• PhpDoc is better than RDoc (this might be because I am too used to PhpDoc)

Ruby Pros

• Fully object oriented
• Rake (Ruby’s Make)
• RubyGem (Ruby’s apt/yum)
• Code blocks
• ‘Ghost’ classes
• Modules (aka namespace/package, PHP 5.3 will have namespace too, but with much uglier syntax)
• lambda functions (PHP 5.3 will have this too, but not as powerful)
• Children-aware parent classes (‘inherited’ hook)
• Multi-inheritance through Mixins (PHP is single-inheritance)
• Ruby 1.9 is unicode friendly (PHP 6 will be)
• For what I do, Ruby on Rails > all PHP frameworks combined
• Regular Expression built into the language core

I am pretty sure there’s heaps of pros for both PHP and Ruby missing from the list, but at least it gives you a rough idea on what to look for if you are not very familiar with them.

Please share your experience with us too (and I will update this post accordingly). :)

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