A gui for enter­ing and view­ing http infor­ma­tion. It pretty straight­for­ward and the doc­u­men­ta­tion on it is min­i­mal (well non exis­tent) how­ever the video takes you through all the main parts and it really is a no brainer as to how you would use it. I can see me using this this year.

Fea­tures:

• HTTP meth­ods: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, OPTIONS, HEAD, CONNECT
• HTTP Basic Authen­ti­ca­tion (with Key­chain integration)
• Cus­tom HTTP request head­ers with pre­pop­u­lated names and val­ues (date for­mat strings and most pop­u­lar User-Agent strings)
• Sup­ports send­ing request bod­ies with POST or PUT
• Fol­low or ignore redirects
• Optional syn­tax high­light­ing (change­able in Preferences)
• Optional text wrap (change­able in Preferences)
• Each HTTP Client win­dow is a doc­u­ment that can be saved as a .http­client file and reopened later

http­client

Its a long story but i man­age a site called Last Thurs­day The site was orig­i­nally formed as some­thing of a break­away from the Ecad­emy and it gained quite a head of steam within a fairly closed com­mu­nity. After a while of look­ing at ways of mon­e­tiz­ing it the orig­i­nal founders bowed out and another Ecad­emy mem­ber took over, changed the name to First Mon­day, spent a lot of money on improve­ments and then attempted to mon­e­tize it but was not suc­cess­ful. At that point the site was going to be closed but a group got together to keep the site going and i took it over to man­age and host it.

The site runs Dru­pal and was orig­i­nally ver­sion 4.7. I then upgrade to 5.2 and over Christ­mas went to ver­sion 6.

The upgrade was pretty straight for­ward but Dru­pal did throw a few wob­blers at me and the site mem­bers which are rem­i­nis­cent of herd­ing cats also threw their usual sets of wob­blers at me.

I have got it sta­ble by now but will need to do some more work on it to really qui­eten it down.

Last­Thurs­day

Ecad­emy

been work­ing for a while on mac dash­board wid­gets. quite an eye opener in terms of mar­ket and opportunity.

using the mac dash­code tool i built a cheat sheet type wid­get with all the main vi com­mands. ini­tially just released it to mac’s down­load site. how­ever when i updated and got rid of the errors and dupli­ca­tion i also switched ana­lyt­ics on and saw quite a spike in vis­its. turns out that sev­eral other site had picked it up and added it to their sites. one of these help­fully puts the down­load stats on line for the devel­oper and i could see that about 300+ had been downloaded.

encour­aged by this i released three more. sed, awk and grep in the same for­mat. and over christ­mas i com­bined sed and awk into one wid­get to save dashboard space.

At the cur­rent moment the down­loads from this site are

• vi 604
• sed 309
• awk 288
• grep 325
• sed+awk 287

the last one was some­thing of a sur­prise as i released i about 18:00 on christ­mas day and the fig­ure had got to that by 22:00 on box­ing day. so quite quick growth.

next i plan to release them as iPhone/iPod applications.

A review of some Ajax frame­works at Dr Dobbs.

The fol­low­ing libraies looked at and compared

• Dojo 0.3.1 (dojo​toolkit​.org).
• Pro­to­type and Scrip­tac­u­lous 1.4 (www​.pro​to​typejs​.org and script​.aculo​.us).
• Direct Web Report­ing 1.0 (geta​head​.org/​dwr).
• Yahoo! User Inter­face Library 0.11.1 (devel​oper​.yahoo​.com/​yui).
• Google Web Toolkit 1.0 (code​.google​.com/​w​e​b​t​o​o​l​kit).

The other day i needed a light­weight http server to run on win­dows. Its a client machine in a clients work­place and i only have local admin access. How­ever i didn’t want to add the IIS server as it would have been a bit notice­able as would Apache. I liked the option of lighthttpd but it doen’t run on win­dows (depart­ment of no sur­prises) and i don’t want to load cygwin and port of lighthttpd is flaky.

Any­way i came across shttpd  which does a good job. This is now a Google project and has been renamed Mon­goose (rolls eyes heav­en­ward) but is still kewl.

“php.MVC imple­ments the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pat­tern, and encour­ages appli­ca­tion design based on the Model 2 par­a­digm. This design model allows the Web page or other con­tents (View) to be mostly sep­a­rated from the inter­nal appli­ca­tion code (Controller/Model), mak­ing it eas­ier for design­ers and pro­gram­mers to focus on their respec­tive areas of expertise.

The frame­work pro­vides a sin­gle entry point Con­troller. The Con­troller is respon­si­ble for allo­cat­ing HTTP requests to the appro­pri­ate Action han­dler (Model) based on con­fig­u­ra­tion mappings.

The Model con­tains the busi­ness logic for the appli­ca­tion. The Con­troller then for­wards the request to the appro­pri­ate View com­po­nent, which is usu­ally imple­mented using a com­bi­na­tion of HTML with PHP tags in the form of tem­plates. The result­ing con­tents are returned to the client browser, or via another pro­to­col such as SMTP.

php.MVC is a PHP port of Jakarta Struts. It cur­rently sup­ports many fea­tures of Struts, includ­ing declar­a­tive appli­ca­tion con­fig­u­ra­tion via the XML digester. For exam­ple, map­pings from the var­i­ous Action busi­ness logic com­po­nents to appro­pri­ate results pages can be spec­i­fied declar­a­tively in the XML con­fig­u­ra­tion file.”

more php.mvc

YAML™ (rhymes with “camel”) is a straight­for­ward machine parsable data seri­al­iza­tion for­mat designed for human read­abil­ity and inter­ac­tion with script­ing lan­guages such as Perl and Python. YAML is opti­mized for data seri­al­iza­tion, con­fig­u­ra­tion set­tings, log files, Inter­net mes­sag­ing and fil­ter­ing. YAML™ is a bal­ance of the fol­low­ing design goals:

• YAML doc­u­ments are very read­able by humans.
• YAML inter­acts well with script­ing languages.
• YAML uses host lan­guages’ native data structures.
• YAML has a con­sis­tent infor­ma­tion model.
• YAML enables stream-based processing.
• YAML is expres­sive and extensible.
• YAML is easy to implement.

more yaml

i was try­ing to keep sev­eral blogs going on dif­fer­ent sub­jects but it is just too much effort and as no one reads them , ulti­mately futile. So i am con­sol­i­dat­ing under howitt​.com. this will cover my own per­sonal blog­ging as well as aranaio, par­lence and phpframeworks.

aranaio was/is my com­pany from when i was con­tract­ing. i am still doing my own devel­op­ment work to explore dif­fer­ent avenues than my full time job give me. most of this is now on mac osx, iPhone and iPod devel­op­ment. small scale works that can be devel­oped and deliv­ered quickly.

par­lence is a longer term devel­op­ment that lets you man­age the text and trans­la­tion of a web­site get­ting closer to com­ple­tion but seems to keep morphing.

phpframe­works dates from my period of being besot­ted with frame­works which lated up to the point of get­ting a job imple­ment­ing sym­fony sites and try­ing to deliver a large project in codeigniter.

upgraded to 2.7 of Word­Press and Blue­print based theme.