Servage Magazine

Programming should be object oriented. This is a message we get from everywhere nowadays. Back ind the old days, PHP scripts were looong series of includes, functions and global variables. Not anymore. And we should be grateful, because the object oriented way of doing things, really has improved our code, and made it easier to understand and extend. However, there are a few scenarios where I miss the cold old call of a global function that does some kind of minimal functionality. Convenience functions. But is the usage of convenience functions still legitimate today? Is it OK to define a random function somewhere global, and just use it here and ...

Have your ever needed some finance data, for example stock quotes, for one of your projects? If yes, you have probably noticed how difficult it is to get to real APIs with a nice interface and reliable results at a low cost, or even free. Personally I'm a bit surprised that information like current stock quotes is a premium product you should pay for. I find that information represents such a basic part of our world today, it should be available everywhere, for free. I have the same opinion about weather data, by the way, but I can take that on another day. Now, If you don't want to spend big ...

Only a few years ago most computer applications were based on a single system. Especially for consumers. You would purchase a software license, install a program, and run it on that particular computer. The files would the stored locally, and you only worked with that software and those files on that machine. Then backups became popular, and people started distributing their software on extra drives, maybe had copies of files on their desktop and laptop computer, and in later years even uploading files to cloud services. I earlier mentioned Dropbox as a brilliant service for that type of service, where you can keep your files in sync between multiple computers. ...

During the past months I've been trying to research what new TV's to buy. Moving from a place that only served analogue cable broadcasts to a new area with both digital cable (DVB-C) and digital terrestrial (DVB-T) broadcasts, I faced some decisions to be make. First of all I needed a new TV, because my old 32 inch LCD model didn't have a digital tuner. Deciding between DVB-C and DVB-T for the new TV wasn't an issue, because most modern TV's I was looking at actually have both. Finally, I decided to go with DVB-C, because the local cable provider had a better offer than the local terrestrial provider. So, ...

It's not easy being a web designer nowadays. You get a lot of competition from other designers, agencies, and even kids making websites as a hobby for their parents' friends' or relatives' companies. As a traditional web developer who can create everything from the initial concept to the final product, it's hard to keep up with agencies that employ specialists. This is, however, not meant to be a petty-call for web designers ;-) Actually I just want to give struggling designers another perspective, another opportunity. Instead of approaching customers directly, trying to sell whole projects, or rely on customers coming to you: Try selling your design projects online. There are ...

There is a problem with basic PHP sessions. Specifically it's about the situation of having SSL and non-SSL pages that need to share session-information, while still being a secure session. PHP itself solves this problem somewhat simple, and insufficiently, in my opinion. There are multiple security-aspects to consider, when working with sessions, and you are able to maintain secure sessions with the default PHP functionality. But when you want to share session-data between SSL and non-SSL requests, you run into a problem. The problem The session is identified with a session ID stored in a cookie in the user's browser. Critical session data, such as the user ID of the currently logged in ...

Happy New Year! I wish you a great 2011, and hope to see you around on the blog. 2010 has provided a few great thing to the world of technology, and like any curious developer I'm excited to see what's coming in 2011. This post is nothing but a nice greeting, and encouragement to provide ideas and suggestions for future topics. My own interests are web development and innovative services/hardware, but I am happy to hear your tips on cool stuff. Random trivia: The 1st of January is one of the busiest days for take-aways ;-)