Okay, so there are a seem­ingly end­less sup­ply of javascript frame­works for you to develop with, so which one is right for you?

Maybe a bet­ter way to go about this sub­ject is how I arrived at my cho­sen frame­work. I used to be all about Mootools by default, maybe it was the name, maybe the fact I like beef, maybe that I really dug their web site. I even­tu­ally (after spo­rad­i­cally test­ing dif­fer­ent frame­works) arrived at JQuery as my default. So what made me choose JQuery over the count­less oth­ers? Plain and sim­ple it was the com­mu­nity sup­port. Hav­ing a great frame­work or script is all well and good, but when you have a great user base out there that shares their inno­va­tions and dis­cov­er­ies then it makes it all the bet­ter. It prob­a­bly didn’t hurt that in my employ­ment we write in .NET tech­nol­ogy and in that tech­nol­ogy Microsoft decided that it would embrace JQuery as it’s default frame­work for Javascript going for­ward, so for me that’s a Win/Win. I pro­gram in .NET at work but do a lot of PHP stuff in my off­time, so a frame­work that appeals to both androg­y­nously really perked up my senses.

So what is your pre­ferred frame­work, and why?

Okay, so I've posted before about MAMP, XAMPP and the alter­na­tives but now I'm going to dig a bit deeper into tricks and tips. Bear in mind that I'm writ­ing this on how I do my devel­op­ment and your soft­ware choices and the like may be some­what dif­fer­ent than mine.

Local­host: XAMPP
Lan­guage: PHP
Data­base: Sequel Pro
Edi­tor: Coda
OS: Snow Leop­ard

I usu­ally set up my sites in the Default ~/Sites folder on my Mac, just to keep things in one area mainly and for this demo we'll be using stardup.com (a domain I own and have never really done any­thing with due to time restraints).

I found this tuto­r­ial online a while back by Arron Wolf and it was a really good way to keep my log­i­cal file struc­ture instead of dup­ing direc­to­ries back and forth from XAMPP's native htdocs folder. This is not super intense a process even though some peo­ple may shy away from Com­mand Line. Fol­low along with the instruc­tions on that site if you want to get it set up for your lat­est project. Go ahead, I'll wait…

…Okay great, you're back! Now let's begin with one really dead easy trick to keep your con­fig­u­ra­tion files work­ing on both sides, with­out hav­ing to change them every time you com­mit many site changes.

This can be done in any other pro­gram­ming lan­guage, how­ever the if/else syn­tax changes a bit. I've also begun tak­ing this a lit­tle fur­ther, includ­ing other bits in my code like $header and $footer stuff that will help me visu­ally deter­mine which one I may be look­ing at (as I'm often too lazy to look at the address bar).

So my next tip is related to run­ning a light­weight ver­sion of XAMPP (because you really don't need all of the fea­tures for local devel­op­ment). I write a very sim­ple Apple­script that launches XAMPP with options, and then placed it in my Sys­tem Pref­er­ences > Accounts > My Account > Login Items

Now I know a lot of the more hard­core pro­gram­mers are prob­a­bly won­der­ing why I have to do the username/pass with admin­is­tra­tor priv­i­leges twice, the answer is because I know only as much Apple­script as I need to, and noth­ing more.

Just wanted to sort of res­ur­rect an older post about Get­ting Things Done. I've recently started using a new app to help with time man­age­ment and it's sort of become a replace­ment for the GTDTid­dly­WIki. The Hit List by Potion Fac­tory has really acted well as an orga­ni­za­tion list as well as a really handy built in timer. The big wins for me are the straight for­ward key­board short­cuts and easy to nav­i­gate inter­face. I was lucky enough to have received this in the MacHeist 3 Bun­dle but didn't real­ize just how use­ful I would find it in the long run.

Just a quick note/update for Mac users.

When I'm devel­op­ing a Web site some­times I will take my ini­tial devel­op­ment local and run a local server. Obvi­ously for projects already online or projects that do not require full data­base inte­gra­tion I do not need to run one all of the time. This is where MAMP comes into play, or if you run Win­dows WAMP* would be your flavor.

What exactly do these terms mean? The M and W stand for your work­ing plat­form by way of Mac­in­tosh or Win­dows and the AMP stands for Apache, MySQL and PHP. These sim­ple apps can start and stop the full suite of host­ing tools at a moments notice with­out you hav­ing to muck around in your sys­tem and install all sorts of tools that require more in depth con­fig­u­ra­tion. I've found that over­all this can speed up pro­gram­ming and test­ing because you will not need to con­stantly upload files to an FTP server and check them that way, instead you would just save and refresh your browser.

And it would be sort of open-source blas­phemy if I didn't men­tion XAMPP mainly used for Linux, but also con­tain­ing fla­vors of Mac OS X, Win­dows and even Solaris.

All of these soft­ware pack­ages are free, or have a free (lite) ver­sion avail­able for you to use in your pro­gram­ming endeav­ors so have at it!

*Win­dows & WAMP makes the assump­tion that you are devel­op­ing a PHP/MySQL Web site and not a .NET Solution

Update: I have moved from MAMP to XAMPP for local devel­op­ment, it's a lit­tle more flex­i­ble for my usage.

Most peo­ple uti­lize a CMS or Weblog soft­ware that auto­mat­i­cally han­dles url rewrites, but what if you have a sim­ple web­site that doesn't need quite the same treatment?

I came up with a quick down and dirty lit­tle trick to help over­come such an instance and I think you may find this useful.

Fire up your favorite text edi­tor and open up cre­ate a .htac­cess file (or mod­ify the file that may be sit­ting in your root direc­tory) and paste these lines in. Feel free to tweak them a bit to suit your needs, maybe you'll even find a bet­ter use for this method.

And that's it! Pretty URL's on the easy.