Wednesday, September 16, 2015

jQuery Star Flashing Effect

A tutorial about creating stars flashing effect by using jQuery and very easy to use.


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Getting Started With HealthKit: Part 2

The Ultimate Guide to Landing Page Builders for Startups

In a world that moves this fast, ideas must be prototyped, tested and launched in as little time as possible. Gone are the days when companies and individuals could afford to spend months designing a page only to find out that buyers weren’t even interested in the product it featured. Reaching product-market fit, or the […]

Continue reading %The Ultimate Guide to Landing Page Builders for Startups%


by Laura Busche via SitePoint

Build a Superfast PHP Server in Minutes with Icicle

Event-based programming is a strange topic for PHP developers. In a language as procedural; events are little more than function calls. Nothing happens between events, and all meaningful code is still blocking.

Languages like JavaScript show us what PHP could be like if event loops were at the center. Some folks have taken these insights and coded them into event loops and HTTP servers. Today we’re going to create an HTTP server, in PHP. We’ll connect it to Apache to serve static files quickly. Everything else will pass through our PHP HTTP server, based on Icicle.

Icicles illustration

You can find the example code at http://ift.tt/1LgVnKK

Continue reading %Build a Superfast PHP Server in Minutes with Icicle%


by Christopher Pitt via SitePoint

The Full Stack Overflow Developer

This article is part of a web development series from Microsoft. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

In a few talks and interviews I lamented about a phenomenon in our market that’s always been around, but seems to be rampant by now: the one of the Full Stack Overflow developer. Prompted by Stephen Hay on Twitter, I shall now talk a bit about what this means.

Cut-Copy-Paste

Full Stack Overflow developers work almost entirely by copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow instead of understanding what they are doing. Instead of researching a topic, they go there first to ask a question hoping people will just give them the result.

[author_more]

In many cases, this works out. It is amazing what you can achieve by pasting things you don’t understand, that people who know what they are doing put out there.

I am not having a go at Stack Overflow here. It is an incredible resource and it is hard to create a community like this and not drown in spam and mediocrity (trust me, I am an admin on several technical Facebook groups).

We had that problem for a long time. I challenge anyone learning PHP to not simply copy the code examples in the notes. For years, code reference sites have given us answers we wanted, but didn’t need. Heck, even Matt’s Script Archive is probably the source for many a spam mailer as people used formmail.pl without knowing what it does.

I am, however, worried about how rampant this behaviour is today. Of course, it is understandable:

  • Creating something is more fun than reading up on how to create something.
  • Using something that works immediately, even if you don’t know how it does it, feels better than encountering the frustration of not being able to fix something.
  • You feel like you cheated the system – shortcuts are fun, and makes you feel like you’re cleverer than all those chumps who spend all this time learning.
  • Our job is mainstream and there is a massive need for developers. The speed of how we are asked to deliver has massively increased. People want results quicker, rather than cleaner.

We, as a community, are partly to blame for breeding this kind of developer:

  • When we answer questions, we tend to give the solution instead of analysing what the person really needs. This is much more work, so we tend to avoid it.
  • Posting the "one true solution" and winning a thread on Stack Overflow feels great – even if we have no plan whatsoever to come back to it later if it turns out not to be such a good idea any longer as the environment changed.
  • Getting recognition, Karma and upvotes for giving the solution is much easier than getting it for being the person who asks the right questions to get to the source of the problem.
  • It is easy to lose patience with getting the same questions over and over again and a "just use jQuery" is easy to paste.

So what? Why is it a problem if people are faster and more effective in releasing products?

Of course, you can call me a grumpy old so-and-so now and tell me that the concept of learning the basics in software is an outdated concept. The complexity of today’s products makes it almost impossible to know everything and in other, highly successful environments using lots of packages and libraries is par for the course. Fine, although we seem to be understanding that software as a whole might be more broken than we care to admit, and this might be one of the causes.

There are several problems with Full Stack Overflow development:

Continue reading %The Full Stack Overflow Developer%


by Christian Heilmann via SitePoint

Scanning a QR Code with Cordova

A barcode is a machine readable image that encapsulates some data about the object to which it’s attached to. A Quick Response Code (QR Code) is a popular type of barcode for mobile use due to its fast readability and greater storage capacity compared to ordinary barcodes.

In this tutorial I will create a Cordova app which can scan QR Codes and store data obtained from decoding the QR Codes. To scan the barcode I will use the BarcodeScanner Cordova plugin.

Continue reading %Scanning a QR Code with Cordova%


by Narayan Prusty via SitePoint

This Week's HTML5 and Browser Technology News (Issue 206)


Read this e-mail on the Web
HTML 5 Weekly
Issue 206 — September 16, 2015
Christian Heilmann
The ‘template’ element lets you define ‘inert’ content in HTML that won’t be rendered or executed by the browser but that you can then bring into the DOM later. It works almost everywhere except IE and Edge.


Modernizr
Some 2 years since the last major release, Modernizr 3, a JS library that lets you detect the availability of numerous next-gen Web technologies, brings a lot of things up to date and over 100 new types of ‘detect’ have been added.


Jonathan Watt
Mozilla has been working on a Microsoft-led proposal called Directory Upload for allowing full directory uploads from the browser. Learn more here including why they haven’t adopted Chrome’s approach.


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Smashing Magazine
Heydon Pickering demonstrates using frames defined in SVG along with CSS defined transitions to produce striking and efficient cel-style animations.


The Polymer Summit 2015
Paul Irish demonstrates how the Chrome DevTools can help you understand where time is spent in your app and effective means of profiling your performance.


YouTube
Google provides details on what they are doing to progress WebRTC and related internal developments - they also cover details on the recently announced Alliance for Open Media, an effort to create royalty-free video codecs.


W3C
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is an increasingly useful and supported format for specifying vector and mixed vector/raster graphics. Tons of examples and code buried within.


Little Workshop
A well produced dungeon crawler game. Loads fast, good graphics, a great example of what HTML5 and WebGL can do when used elegantly. Must be good as I’m not into dungeon crawlers and it stole 20 minutes..


O'Reilly Media
Fluent is an annual JavaScript and Web Platform conference (which I chair) based on San Francisco. We’re looking for more great speakers for 2016’s event.


In brief

Curated by Peter Cooper and published by Cooper Press.
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