The WebSocket protocol has applications beyond plain vanilla web development.  I will explain how the protocol works, how to implement your own server and share some insights I had along the way. Before we get down and dirty, I will explain what I’ve been doing with it.

Immer mehr Web-Seiten binden die Gefällt-Mir-Buttons von Facebook, Google+ und Twitter ein; auch bei heise online stand das auf der Todo-Liste. Allerdings werden durch diese Buttons schon beim Laden der Seite – also ganz ohne dass der Anwender etwas dazu tut – Daten an die Betreiber der Netzwerkplattformen übertragen. Die enthalten neben der URL der aktuellen Seite unter anderem eine Kennung, die zumindest bei dort angemeldeten Nutzern direkt mit einer Person verknüpft ist. Facebook & Co können also komplette Surfprofile ihrer Nutzer erstellen; Details dazu erklärt der Artikel Das Like-Problem. Da dies mit unseren Vorstellungen von Datenschutz und Privatspäre nicht vereinbar ist, hat heise online eine zweistufige Lösung entworfen, die nur mit Zustimmung der Anwender Daten übermittelt.

All of the below use only a single HTML element. Any kind of CSS goes, as long as it's supported in at least one browser.

Let me tell you a secret. I don't fix databases. I fix applications.

Companies hire me to "fix the database" because they think it's the source of their performance and downtime problems. This is very rarely the case. Failure to scale is almost always the result of poor management decisions — often a series of them. In fact, these anti-scaling decisions are so often repeated that they have become anti-patterns.

I did a little talk about these anti-patterns at the last MySQL Conference and Expo. Go watch it and then come on back. Now that you've seen the five-minute version (and hopefully laughed at it), you're ready for some less sarcastic detail which explains how to recognize these anti-patterns and how to avoid them.

Facebook has released the getBalance API call as an incentive to game developers who use Facebook Credits as their exclusive premium in-game currency. The call lets developers determine the Facebook Credits balance of any of their users. This allows them to identify high rollers with a large balance of Credits and dynamically price virtual goods to increase purchase probability or profit margin, improving monetization.

All of these sliding box animations work on the same basic idea. There is a div tag (.boxgrid in my css) that essentially acts as a window where two other items of your choosing “peek” through.

For years, one of the telltale signs of not getting it has been using Flash as a substitute for the Web. By delivering Flash over HTTP and extending browsers to run it, it's easy to overlook the fact that Flash is a competitor to the Web, not a proprietary part of it. (Being a competitor isn't a bad thing, but it is what it is.) Flash sites are dying, partly thanks to Apple, but a new bad practice is emerging.

Except it's not new. It's as if a bunch of people got together and decided that the problem with Flash sites is the technology, not the use of it. Everything I used to hate about Flash is back, this time in the form of JavaScript. Like Flash sites, there is a new breed of web apps that don't feel quite right. Maybe it's because they scroll like a supertanker. Maybe it's because the back button doesn't work right. Maybe it's because the browser tells you it's done, but you don't see any content. (I'm looking at you, Twitter.)

Few days back I had connected labs.9lessons application to twitter API via OAuth (open protocal secure authorization). In this post I want to explain how to store twitter oauth_token and secret values in to database and how to update status with your own web application.

Startups in stealth mode need one piece of advice.
Just Stop.
As in stop being in stealth mode. Stop asking for advice. Stop doing your start-up. You're not ready.
You're a naive-bullshiter.

Quora has taken the tech and entrepreneurial world by storm, providing a system that works so fluidly that it is sometimes hard to see what the big fuss is all about. This slick tool is powered, not only by an intelligent crowd of askers and answerers, but by a well-crafted backend created by co-founders who honed their skills at Facebook.

In this blog post I will delve into the snippets of information available on Quora and look at Quora from a technical perspective. What technical decisions have they made? What does their architecture look like? What languages and frameworks do they use? How do they make that search bar respond so quickly?

What I’ll be showing you is how to have perfect working web forms with stunning visuals to produce the desired form for you every time!

I’ll be taking you through the core principles, and making your web forms stand out from the rest! At the end of it all you can see many examples of stunning web forms across the net.

The men’s lifestyle publication Thrillist has rolled out a new site design. Thrillist’s design team put its 12 million-user website under the microscope for nearly a year before unveiling the new look.

A complete redesign can be high stakes for a large site. Digg 4 earlier this year showed what can go wrong in the rollout of a new user experience (in Digg’s case, a noisy uproar and traffic dive). Twitter, on the other hand, this year launched a redesign that enhanced user experience with few snags.

Mashable got a sneak peek at Thrillist’s new design, along with the scoop on what the inside of a massive art project looks like. Read on for the anatomy of this full web makeover.

One challenge at yesterday’s CTF was a seemingly-impossible SQL injection worth 300 points. The point of the challenge was to submit a password to a PHP script that would be hashed with MD5 before being used in a query. At first glance, the challenge looked impossible. Here’s the code that was running on the game server:

One of my first icon projects for Campaign Monitor was to create a set of Apple iOS icons for our mobile web application. These are the icons that show up when you bookmark our mobile site to the ‘home screen’ on your Apple device. Now, with all of the iOS devices floating around out there, you can do things the easy way by creating one large icon which is then scaled down for that particular device, or you can do it properly by creating a pixel-perfect icon for each device. For the iPod Touch/iPhone 2.5/3G/3GS, the icon size is a miserly 57 pixels square. For the iPad, it’s 72 pixels square, and for the newer iPhone4, it’s a whopping 114 pixels square.

You’ve been depressed for like a year now, I know. All the hardcore Objective-C developers have been having a hay-day writing apps for the iPhone. You might have even tried reading a tutorial or two about developing for the iPhone, but its C—or a form of it—and it’s really hard to learn.

Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 3: Make mobile Web applications work offline with HTML 5
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 2: Unlock local storage for mobile Web applications with HTML 5
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 5: Develop new visual UI features in HTML 5
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 4: Using Web Workers to speed up your mobile Web applications
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 1: Combine HTML 5, geolocation APIs, and Web services to create mobile mashups

Welcome to another edition of Guru Speak. I believe that one of the hallmarks of a good writer is the ability to mold a complex topic into something both palatable and interesting. These are the characteristics I strive for in Guru Speak, and I hope you consider my efforts to be a success. Please be sure to let me know what issues tend to trouble you the most or in what areas you would like to expand your knowledge and understanding. I am happy to cater to my readers.

This edition's topic is storing sessions in a database.

I joined Etsy back in February and knew immediately that there would be no shortage of technical challenges. Many of our job postings for Engineering positions describe the company as a place “where the word ‘millions’ is used frequently and in many contexts”. I got a taste of that within my first weeks on the job. We are in the process of redesigning a few of the major sections around etsy.com. Every item being sold on the site can have up to five photos posted with it. When a seller uploads a new photo, it’s resized automatically into six different sizes that are displayed throughout the site. As we redesigned some pages we realized we would need to replace a few of the existing image sizes.

XPath is used to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document.

XPath is a major element in W3C's XSLT standard - and XQuery and XPointer are both built on XPath expressions.

It doesn’t account for database-specific syntax, but can allow for the process of switching databases and platforms to be fairly painless, simply by switching the connection string in many instances.

This tutorial isn’t meant to be a complete how-to on SQL. It’s written primarily for people currently using the mysql or mysqli extension to help them make the jump to the more portable and powerful PDO.

PHP makes it easy to write scripts that access databases, enabling you to create dynamic web pages that incorporate database content. PHP includes several specialized database-access interfaces that take the form of separate sets of functions for each database system. There is one set for MySQL, another for InterBase, another for PostgreSQL, and so forth. However, having a different set of functions for each database makes PHP scripts non-portable at the lexical (source code) level. For example, the function for issuing an SQL statement is named mysql_query(), ibase_query(), or pg_exec(), depending on whether you are using MySQL, InterBase, or PostgreSQL.

Best HTML5 and CSS3 tutorials - June 2010

The Web Design Ledger is a publication written by web designers for web designers. The primary purpose of this site is to act as a platform for sharing web design related knowledge and resources. Topics range from design inspiration to tips and tutorials and everything in between.

iPad web apps are websites that are optimized for the multi-touch device. This page is constantly updated with the best iPad web apps available. Is there a great web app that we missed? Please contact us and let us know.

About a month ago or so, Amy and I release a little (literally, it’s about 5k) HTML5 iPad App for looking up time zones. I don’t mean select-box wasteland like all other time zone sites (who likes select boxes anyway?!), I mean a nicely polished, touch-enabled UI that works offline, too.

I have spent a few weeks putting together a basic web site which uses Facebook connect as authentication.
Required Features
Check if user is already logged in to Facebook, if so, retrieve the fb_uid, name, profile pic
Return a list of friends which have also connected to this application

There are several ways to backup MySQL data. In this article we’ll look at how to backup your databases using different methods, we will also learn how to achieve an automatic backup solution to make the process easier. Starting with the mysqldump utility that comes with MySQL, we will review several examples using mysqldump, including the backup of your database to a file, another server, and even a compressed gzip file and send it to your email.

Die Flickr API kann von anderen Entwicklern zu nicht kommerziellen Zwecken verwendet werden. Eine kommerzielle Nutzung ist nach vorheriger Absprache möglich.

After so many shoddy sites, pop-up windows and forced registrations, the truth is that if people don't find your website easy to use, they won't come back. Worse, they'll tell their friends just how clueless you are.

The answer is, of course, to design everything around the needs of your users. We've known this for years, but there's still resistance to even the most basic usability testing.

This Web site is IBM's premier technical resource for software developers, providing a wide range of tools, code, and education on AIX and UNIX®, Information Management, Lotus®, Rational®, Tivoli®, WebSphere®, and Workplace, as well as on open standards technology such as Java™ technologies, Linux®, SOA and Web services, XML, and more.

Conferences about the Web, Web2.0, Design and Development all over the world

I've compiled a small list of some useful code snippets which might help you when writing your PHP scripts...

All content from FOWA London 2008

Tim Bray gives amazing advice on what techies can do when times get tough.

I've come across several posts this year (and last) about MVC/MVP and patterns in general. I'm sick of MVC/MVP. I'm sick of the Pattern Police - everything must be a pattern - hmph!

The Model-View-Controller (MVC) Design Pattern is much heralded as the "Right Way" to build web applications. Although MVC is undoubtedly a valuable and useful way to architect such systems, I believe it goes far deeper than MVC alone.

Roll back the clock by two years. That’s before AJAX, before Web 2.0, before Rails. Where were we then? Well pondering whether MVC was really such a good idea after all. Continuing from there…

SimplePie is a very fast and easy-to-use class, written in PHP, that puts the ‘simple’ back into ‘really simple syndication’. Flexible enough to suit beginners and veterans alike, SimplePie is focused on speed, ease of use, compatibility and standards compliance.

The Spry framework for Ajax is a JavaScript library that provides easy-to-use yet powerful Ajax functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to take the complexity out of Ajax and allow designers to easily create Web 2.0 pages.

Hi, my name is Andy Powell. I'm a RIA developer located in the metro Atlanta, GA area. I am currently employed by Universal Mind. I get to build really cool applications with tools like Adobe Flex, Adobe ColdFusion, Adobe Spry, Hibernate, Spring, & other cool technologies.

Create easily your own ajax loader icon : Select the type of indicator you want Enter the background code color you want (tick "Transparent background" if you don't want one Enter the foreground code color you want Press "Generate it"

.net problems... thoughts on c#... programming stuff... notes... Usability... best practices...

Tiffany B. Brown - a web log about web development and internet culture with frequent detours into other stuff.

Successful web development requires certain essential tools. One of the best tools available for web development and testing is the Mozilla Firefox web browser.