Archive for December, 2009
8 Netbeans tips to speed up development
Netbeans is a great editor, below some tips to get the best out of it.
Use the shortkey for “Last Edit Location” default: CTRL+Q
Often I’m editing file and browse to another location inside the file. To go back to where I was Last Edit Location is a nice feature, it replaces the use of ctrl-z + ctrl-y to go to the previous location without changing anything. By htting the key multiple times all edit locations will be traveled.
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IDE roundup, 10 reasons why every PHP developer should try Netbeans
- Eclipse PDT / Aptana with PHP Plugin
- Zend Studio 6
- Zend Studio 7
- Notepad++
- NuSphere PHPED
Using the BitLy API to shorten urls
I was asked to place Twitter messages with product links when new products were added to a webshop. I’ve used my own Twitter class for posting the first test Tweet then I went looking for a shorten url a service to shorten the product links.
There are many url shorten services available on the internet, one of these services is Bitly.
The reasons why I’ve chosen Bitly:
– Urls don’t expire after a period of time.
– Bitly provides a click url summary (although Google Analytics can be used for this instead)
– Urls are short in length so i could use the remaining Tweet length for a small product description.
– And more important, they provide an easy to use API.
– Authentication does not require a password, we can use our API key instead.
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Creating XML files with DOM Document
As a first blog post I would like to have some attention for the fact that a lot of programmers are using functions and classes for doing exactly the same as what can be accomplished by using default PHP extensions.
XML files are very common nowadays and every developer needs to deal with them one day. Most of the scripts and classes used to generate XML files string use concatenation and echo to buildup XML files. Although this is a very short and quick method for simple XML files the same approach is often used with more complex XML files with namespaces. The code then often becomes bloated, unreadable and slow, so why not use the PHP 5 DOM API instead (or if you travelled from the past and still use PHP 4 try DOM XML). A quick example of the PHP 5 DOM API usage below.
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