Free Software Linux

Despite the idea of "being in Cyberspace" and the power of the Internet to connect us to people all over the world regardless of our location, we often use a browser to find out about people and services close to us. These might be queries such as finding the opening times of a local store, the time of a train or local expertise. Each time we do this it is often necessary to tell the website where we are, typcially by providing a post code, but what if you don't know the postcode? Fortunately browsers and becoming much more clever, and some can even work out where you are.

On the teaching open source mailing list, the following question was recently posted:

• Education

The introduction of the Google App Engine saw a wave of frameworks emerge to facilitate developing applications targeted for it. The Gaelyk framework, one such framework written in Groovy, eases development of lightweight applications that leverage a datastore. And the scalability you can achieve is impressive.

We all know that it is important to write documentation for our code. It is not the most exciting aspect of programming but sadly it is needed for those times when we have to fix or change something six months after writing it and have no recollection of how the code works or maybe of writing it at all. Fortunately there is help at hand, you can document a lot of your PHP code semi-automatically with a handy tool called PhpDocumentor. If you have programmed in Java before and used Javadoc this will be very familiar to you.

Programming a computer is actually quite an intellectually stimulating way to spend time, you also usually end up with something to show for your labour. Getting into programming now though can be very confusing, there are so many computer languages out there, where would you start? An additional problem is that this is not the 1980s anymore, printing out “Hello World” ad infinitum is not going to impress anyone. This is where “Quickly" comes in, a new template based programming system making its first appearance in Ubuntu 9.10. It is designed to be easy and fun and is there to help you from getting an initial program together right through to distributing it.

Namespaces are a way of making sure you have the correct PHP class, constant, or function and that people using your PHP classes can be sure they're using the correct ones. These tips provide guidelines for building your namespaces so that you get the most out of them and PHP.

jQuery is a great JavaScript library, but what about its performance? Is the trade-off between ease of use and a performance hit on the Web page worth it? Is there even a performance hit at all? This article answers your jQuery performance questions and offers some tips to improve its performance in your own applications.

CakePHP is a stable production-ready, rapid-development aid for building Web sites in PHP. Learn how to install and configure CakePHP, the basics of MVC design, how to validate user data in CakePHP, how to use CakePHP helpers, and how to get an application up and running quickly using CakePHP.

Using Non-Blocking I/O (NIO) improves server performance drastically because of its efficient use of system resources (threads). The gain in performance is very noticeable in Ajax applications. It also lets you control system-resource usage on a server under pressure. This article explains how to optimize your server for performance during the handling of both Ajax and regular requests.

This article discusses Crispy, the remote invocation framework. Crispy goal is to provide a single point of entry for remote invocation for a wide number of transports: eg. RMI, EJB, JAX-RPC or XML-RPC. See how it works by using properties to configure a service manager, which is then used to invoke the remote API.

Softmarket Analysis: "Based on the numbers available on the still public jobs we could create a realistic picture of the sofware creation market. We can safely presume that this numbers - at a smaller scale - reflect the  trends in the market. Also we can safely estimate the number of successful Freelancers (at least in percentage). The numbers are very interesting - at least because of the clear trends that are shown and also because it clearly raises a flag for both buyer and freelancer. Most freelancers do not even  get to their first  job. They create accounts, bid on jobs, but never land one successful job.

Learn how Scala's functional nature, which aligns well with Twitter's RESTful nature, and its extremely good XML processing features, makes it easy to build a Scala client library to use Twitter API to query its public timeline of tweets. This article shows you by example, how to use Scala to build the basic framework for a client library for accessing Twitter.

The new QueryPath library, a PHP cousin of the jQuery JavaScript library, offers an efficient API for working with XML, HTML, and HTTP. In this article, Walk through a simple example and build a small script that workes with the Web services API of the popular Twitter microblogging service, to execute a specific search on Twitter's server and print the results as HTML. Such a tool can be added to an existing Web site to show recent Twitter activity on a topic of interest.

This article discusses two important patterns for code structure: composed method and single level of abstraction (SLAP). Applying these principles to your code allows you to find important reusable code assets that remained hidden before, with the further benefit of letting you abstract existing code into harvested frameworks.

In this article you will learn how Aptana makes it easy to develop applications based on PHP and MySQL, and how to deploy them to the cloud. Also explore some of the critical design differences between a cloud application and a traditional N-tier application.