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sam.clark.name

The musings of Sam Clark

Briefly : Kohana PHP core developmentDecember 15 2008

I am both excited and honored to announce that I have been accepted into the Kohana PHP core developers team to help maintain and progress the 2.x branch. The next version release will be Kohana PHP 2.3 in the very near future. The current team is being headed up by Jeremy Bush, along with Geert De Deckere, Jim Auldridge, Rocky Wilkins and myself (currently).

Woody Gilk (Shadowhand) is concentrating on the next major release, Kohana PHP 3.0 that will land sometime in 2009, or as Eddie Izzard joked about Microsoft's release schedule:

"We will release it next week, next month... when it is fucking ready, alright!"

As yet I have not taken ownership of any tickets (sorry about that), but plan to dent trac during this week.

For now the main concern is getting a stable build of Kohana PHP 2.3 ready and tested for mass consumption. But after 2.3 there will be maintenance work and maybe a 2.4 release before 3.0 comes long.

I would like to extend my thanks to Woody for giving me this opportunity.

KDyanamicImage 0.2.3 released on Google CodeNovember 30 2008

This week I quietly released an update to the DynamicImage library module for Kohana. Version 0.2.3 introduces two key new features. Currently the new version is only available from the repository, because I'm still completing performance testing. A built release will be created shortly.

DynamicImage 0.2.3 introduces browser based caching. Previously 0.2.2 introduced server side caching of images, so the process wouldn't have to re-augment an image it had already created. However this did not stop client browsers requesting the same resource repeatedly on page loads and reloads. This introduced some performance issues on a site with many users, as PHP was unnecessarily serving all the images repeatedly.

Now DynamicImage can send a header to the browser instructing it to cache the image resource for a set number of seconds, defaulting to one day presently. This dramatically reduces the load on the web server.

The other new feature in DynamicImage 0.2.3 is clean URL support. Previously, to load an image with the library a number of GET variables had to be submitted. This can cause problems with browsers and nodes caching of resources. Now you can supply clean URLs and encode the settings for augmentation within the filename itself. This negates the need for GET variables within the URL.

Download

And breathe out...November 5 2008

Photo credit BohPhoto.

Today I woke to the news that Americans had decided overwhelmingly to endorse Barack Obama as their next President of the United States of America. I am desperately trying to keep what this means into some sort of perspective. But however I look at it, it is nothing but good news. For a few moments earlier in the year I feared America would be charmed by the lipstick pit bull embodied by Sarah Palin. Thankfully they were not.

Nothing will change immediately and things are not going to be easy. But Barack Obama embodies hope and hope is a powerful thing. Delivering his first address as the next president it is clear that the world, not just America, will reap some benefits from this victory. It was less encouraging to hear the booing coming from the Republican supporters when John McCain graciously accepted defeat. But maybe expecting all of America's prejudices to disappear overnight is a little irresponsible.

The world is partying today just as the galaxy partied at the end of Return of the Jedi. Tomorrow the reality of the situation will begin to creep through the hanging populous. People, there is work to be done. But well done America, some faith h

@media ajax 2008 roundupSeptember 25 2008

It has been over a week since @media ajax 2008 concluded. This years event was certainly smaller and more 'home-brew' than the previous one in November 2007, but I strangely felt this one was more important. A lot of what was talked about last year seemed to be best practice with what we knew about ajax. In the ten months since @media ajax 2007, there has been some fundamental shifts in development for the web.

Unfortunately I missed Brendan Eich giving his Keynote speech, but was informed by other conference members that he is very enthusiastic about the future of Javascript. Brendan Eich created Javascript for Netscape and must be so proud / excited to see his creation growing and developing faster than any other web language around today.

I think the two days talks can be split in to two-and-a-half categories; discussions of Javascript libraries; discussions on where Javascript is going; and Christian Heilman making Javascript accessible (he gets the half category - sorry Christian!). I was meant to attend the follow up to Christian's talk, the Scripting Enabled event last weekend, but unfortunately work and illness struck me down. Needless to say I am feeling quite upset about missing that.

Javascript libraries were covered extensively across the two days. Prototype, jQuery, Low Pro (Dan Webb's personal library) and the new library from the BBC called Glow where all discussed, but I think everyone was in agreement

Briefly : @media ajax 2008September 15 2008

Today @media ajax commences. This year the two day conference is smaller than last year, but the topics are equally as important. In 2007 it felt as though the conference was heralding the end of discussing best practice when building web applications - more of a revision of what we have learned over the last few years. Indeed, even some task forces where disbanded as it appeared we [web developers] had practised exactly what countless speakers had preached.

This leaves little room for this years conference one could think. But of course there is lots going on in the world of rich internet applications and services. Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) have been talked about previously, including at this years @media in a presentation by Steve Faulkner. But with the recent release of Firefox 3, Safari 4 Dev Preview and Google's Chrome, it seems the age of the web applicaiton has dawned. Eager not to make the same mistakes of past, developers are quickly trying to ensure that accessibility concerns are at the forefront of the web application consideration and execution.

With all of this in mind, it is clear that this years @media ajax is going to, in part at least, begin to tackle the rather mirky area of accessible rich internet applications - not the standard itself, but how to implement best practice.

More to follow later this