I'm creating a social site for teachers (non-programmers) on which teachers can add events, links, exercises, tips, lesson plans, books, etc. Each of these items I want them to be able to add tags to as we do at StackOverflow. However, because they are non-programming users, I thought that space-separated, nonspace tags and camelCase t...
Hi, ZEN Cart seems to be able to do anything I could possibly ever want, but seems a bit bloated (for me) and more importantly - it's design process seems unbearable. I don't want to have reform a default design, I have my website design completed other than the shopping cart related items. I want to be able to add them in, working the ...
I'm making a web page where I want the color of the font to be red in a paragraph but I'm not sure how to do this. I was using FrontPage for building web pages before so this HTML stuff is really new to me. What is the best way to do this? ...
I've been evaluating large key-value stores recently and I keep coming acrosss the term 'read-repair' but have no clue what they are talking about. I think it has something to do with transactions but am not sure. Could someone please explain what it is and how it is different from the way traditional databases work? Maybe provide some ...
Soon I'm going to build an application that needs to be scalable and flexible. Since I'm not a "MySQL" Guru I'm wondering if someone with experience could give me a couple of recommendations for achieving this application I'm going to build. Which database model structure do you think is the best for scalable and flexible sites? ...
I've got a site I'm building here: http://theoew.50webs.com/portfolio_2/ See how when you hover over the menu at the top right, the item becomes taller(20px to 50px). I was wondering if I could do the same thing but have the text move with the list. So when you hovered over the list item, it would enlarge and the text would move to th...
I am the only dev in a very small IT shop and as such I have no one to turn to when it comes to the look of my applications. I am left to my own devices as to what looks good with what and what matches what. This got me wondering, where do other programmers get their color ideas? Am I the only programmer who likes all of his apps i...
I started my college two years ago, and since then I keep hearing "design your classes first". I really ask myself sometimes, should my solution to be a bunch of objects in the first place! Some say that you don't see its benefits because your codebase is very small - university projects. The project size excuse just don't go down my thr...
One of the key properties to designing comprehensible software (and, indeed, designing anything at all) is to develop a good set of abstractions. These days, those abstractions include things like functions, classes, interfaces, recursion, and higher-order functions. But what else is there? How can we further abstract our designs, so tha...
Hi, In the current project I am working on I have come across a piece of code which seems to be overblown. I considered rewriting it to avoid more objects in memory than need be, and had trouble making a decision about whether the performance benefits from refactoring would be worth the time, and whether the current design will impact p...
I'm current a computer science student with a minor in psychology. I have the programming down when it comes to software design, but not so much the design of UI. What are some good books/websites/blogs for learning design principles for user interfaces and/or websites? ...
Obviously, "Hello World" doesn't require a separated, modular front-end and back-end. But any sort of Enterprise-grade project does. Assuming some sort of spectrum between these points, at which stage should an application be (conceptually, or at a design level) multi-layered? When a database, or some external resource is introduced? Wh...
I want to create a "singleton-factory class" to retrieve my specialized objects. It is possible to create such a class and does it give me some performance surplus over a simpler solution like a static factory? Or are there any other solutions? This class would be a key component of a data intensive application dealing with constant dat...
I have a smaller web app that republishes content from one social source to another. Users have, let's say 5 options for how to filter that content. Their prefs are stored in my user DB as 1 or 0 markers. When I do my major "publish" action hourly, what's the best way to break up my code to implement these preferences? To make it more c...
As a software developer, I often need to quickly capture notes about business rule changes or I might want to quickly lay out a diagram. What software tools do you use and personally recommend for such a task? Right now I capture written notes or diagram on paper. And sometimes I though written notes in a Word document. But quick dia...
For fun, I'm playing with a class to easily cache function results. The basic idea is that you can take any function you want though you'd only want to use it for relatively expensive functions and easily wrap it to use relatively inexpensive dictionary lookups for later runs with the same argument. There's really not much to it: pu...
I want a jQuery driven editor that can create the form HTML on the fly, and then generically save it all into a database field. I can handle all the jQuery, but I'm just looking for a structural DB design on how to make a quick, simple, generic form editor. Is saving all the HTML of the form a good idea? Background information: We nee...
Consider the following from CodeIgniter. If I am doing this wrong, then please tell me: <html> <head> <title><?=$title ?></title> </head> <body> <h1><?=$heading; ?></h1> <?php foreach ($query->result() as $row):?> <p> <?=$row->LastName . ', ' . $row->FirstName . ' ' . $row->MiddleName?> </br> <?=$row->...
I'm often confronted with the following situation: I have some data in a table (nested arrays) and need to loop over all items in it. Requirements: The first item should be identified and handled separately. The last item should be identified and handled separately. If similiar items are sorted they should be identified in groups with...
I am pretty alone at my workplace when it comes to thinking about the overall design of the applications we're building. I don't have anybody to discuss the pros and cons with different frameworks, technologies, patterns, layering and so on with. The other programmers either don't care or thinks "the old way" is fine, which it isn't beca...