Posts Tagged ‘best-practice’

Precepts from our JavaScript dictator

Posted in Miscellaneous on October 30th, 2009 by Thomas – Be the first to comment

Always declare your variables and functions:
Variables which are not declared will be global. This can result in many bugs hard to detect.

Always declare your variables in top of your block:
JavaScript does not have block scope, and it is better to always declare all variables at the top of each function.

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Setting up a Symfony project - the official way, and then some

Posted in Serverside on October 7th, 2009 by Erland – Be the first to comment

After having tried several different ways of installing/setting up Symfony projects, I have settled for what is more or less the official “best practice”, as suggested by the makers of Symfony. For the purpose of clarity, I will use the example c:\demosite in the following explanation. The example is based on an installation on Windows XP, but can be adapted to suit OSX.

  1. Create the project folder c:\demosite
  2. Create the subfolder(s) c:\demosite\lib\vendor
  3. In the vendor folder, do a SVN checkout http://svn.symfony-project.com/branches/1.2/ => c:\demosite\lib\vendor\symfony. You should now have a single symfony folder in your vendor folder
  4. From the project root c:\demosite, run the following command: lib\vendor\symfony\data\bin\symfony generate:project demosite. You may or may not have to prefix this command with php, depending on your setup.
  5. From now on, you can use the command short cut symfony from the project’s root folder.

TIP#1:

Copy the file c:\demosite\lib\vendor\symfony\data\bin\symfony.bat to the project’s root folder, and rename it sf.bat. You now have an even shorter command sf at your disposal. Test it by typing sf -V.

TIP#2:

Change the following in the project’s configuration class:

//c:\demosite\config\ProjectConfiguration.class.php
require_once dirname(__FILE__).'/../lib/vendor/symfony/lib/autoload/sfCoreAutoload.class.php';

TIP#3

If you use SVN to maintain your project, you can use svn:externals to embed the Symfony library in your lib\vendor folder, thus benefiting from the updates to this particular branch.

For more information, visit the official Symfony site

Why Does Clean Markup Matter in Web Design?

Posted in XHTML / JavaScript / CSS on May 6th, 2009 by Erland – Be the first to comment

Because the web is a changing and ever evolving organism, it’s important to build sites that can grow with it and easily ride the current instead of drowning when a new wave approaches.

Clean markup and building with web standards not only helps you do this, but will save you both time and money in the long run.

Why Does Clean Markup Matter in Web Design?

Embedding Flash without messing up the HTML fall back

Posted in XHTML / JavaScript / CSS on April 1st, 2009 by Erland – Be the first to comment

Sometimes we need to insert a 100% Flash into a page. This little snippet shows you how you can achieve it without breaking the normal browser behavior (scrollbars etc) for users viewing the retro HTML fall back.

Prerequisites: jQuery and swfobject 2.

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Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0

Posted in XHTML / JavaScript / CSS on March 27th, 2009 by Chr – Be the first to comment

Here’s a central resource for WCAG 2.0 with lots of practical examples. Techniques for WCAG 2.0

The Javascript Way

Posted in XHTML / JavaScript / CSS on March 26th, 2009 by Anders – Be the first to comment

The Javascript Way is a new site, set up by Tore Darell , Christian Johansen and August Lilleaas. Inspired by The Rails WayThe JavaScript Way aims to share best practises in JavaScript code, design and structure. 

The first submission talks about namespacing and encapsulation.