Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

I’ve mentioned this before, but I have an awesome “Rails-like” core PHP library that can be used by anyone who does a project with me. It speeds up development by bringing to PHP all the benefits of Rails and none of the deployment drawbacks.
One killer feature is the ActiveRecord implementation. This is something I wrote [...]

I don’t want to drive this topic into the ground because as I’ve said before, PHP and Ruby come from completely different directions, but here’s what I miss when I’m writing in PHP:
* Buggy static method inheritance – this is well noted in the PHP community
* Buggy class reflection – also well noted
* Symbols like [...]

I'll probably get in trouble for calling Flash cancerous.

.NET has the best documentation you are going to find in any platform. It's commercial and presumably a bunch of people were paid actual money to make sure the documentation was correct and complete. For the most part, I find that to be true. In some cases it can't compete with a community-driven doc site like PHP has. Then again, a lot of the user comments for PHP address shortcomings in PHP itself. You don't have that problem with .NET.

PHP pretty much runs the Internet. You can't argue with that kind of success, really.

Find out if your project has the tell-tale signs of disaster.

I’m building PrestoScript in Ruby and the more I get into it, the less I am in anyone’s framework but my own. Why is that? Is there a certain class of problems that are frameworkless? I’ve been thinking lately that generalized frameworks could be a farce. I always explain to clients that Ruby on Rails [...]

I was working on a PHP app today. Just a plain old, nothing fancy, queries-right-in-the-code, edit-it-live-on-the-server PHP app. And you know what? I got shit done.

I’ve been talking with more clients lately about Joomla. The Content Management System (CMS) is not dead, oh no, not dead at all. I’m not sure how PHP’s Joomla compares with a CMS like DotNetNuke, but my suspicion is that Joomla is far more widely used and probably has more modules and plugins too simply [...]

Today I was working with trying to map MIME types to file extensions. You can probably guess that the meaning of file extensions overlaps. The MIME type system was an attempt to fix that by providing more specific information about the data format. Unfortunately we couldn’t get that right either.