Gabriel Harper's Blog

I use a lot of different software in my job, but there are five software tools in particular that I can do nearly all of my Web development with. The best part is they are allcompletely free applications. You can download and install everything you need to be up and coding in under 30 minutes.

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Displaying remote data in your custom Firefox toolbar makes a lot of neat things possible. If your Firefox add-on needs to fetch some data from another URL, it can be done easily with XMLHttpRequest.

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What is XMLHttpRequest? The XMLHttpRequest object enables client-server requests in JavaScript. If you’re writing Ajax enabled scripts, fetching remote data in a Firefox extension, or pulling data from another URL in any JavaScript app then XMLHttpRequest is needed.

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The question is asked time and time again, and not always clear even to those who are working with Ajax! The term Ajax is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It was coined in 2005 by Jesse James Garrett. Ajax is not a specific programming language or technology. Ajax is a Web development technique. Ajax brings dynamic data interactivity to Web pages. For example, a Web client sorts a column of data, and the data is automatically changed with live server data without reloading the entire page.

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I’ve developed a strange habit over the years of obsessively pressing “CTRL-A, CTRL-C” whenever I’m typing – be it MS Word or Wordpress. My own little personal “undo”. Well, I’ve had this problem with my mouse lately where it loves to register a double click when clicked once. For some reason this makes Firefox upset, and as I’m typing in a textarea (such as this one), it will occassionally turn the textarea completely white. The only way to recover is to refresh the page, and in most cases I lose whatever I was typing. Ironically enough, as I was wrapping up this post, guess what happened? I lost everything. Strange habits can be useful.

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This post contains slides and details of the PHP presentation I did for the MESDA Webmasters Group (MaineWUG) in May 2004.

Learn why PHP is one of the most popular web programming languages today. From evaluating the basics of a PHP web page to discussing multi-tier applications in PHP, we will cover topics of interest for both the beginner and the professional.

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