Posts Tagged technology
Cherokee vs Apache : An alternative web server
Posted by admin in Development, Product Reviews, Software Reviews, Technology / Hardware, Web Servers, Zend Framework on May 7th, 2010
As I have been developing for the web for over a decade, I have become comfortable with tools and technologies which have helped me get the job done. Some of these technologies I have seen evolve and progress into what are now essential and very powerful solutions. I have established an affinity with many of these tools and without doubt the Apache web server qualifies as such a technology for me.
Using Apache over the years as my main web server, I have produced all types of software solutions for many diverse businesses within many different industries. Apache has served me well and I am an advocate of the old saying ‘If it’s not broken, why fix it’ (within reason). Until recently that is….
Over the past few years in the distant background I have heard mention of Cherokee as being a viable alternative to Apache, with some claiming it offers benefits. These have been whispers registering in the distance, but didn’t sound interesting enough to pursue and invest my time as Apache was doing it’s job well. However recently these whispers became a little louder following a few conversations with a work colleague singing Cherokee’s praises. What caught my attention most from the conversations wasn’t simply that Cherokee was faster, but that Cherokee was much easier to use and quicker to configure. As I don’t like ‘shaving Yaks‘, my approach was that if I start hitting obstacles, I’ll leave it for another day which contains more than 24 hours; after all Apache is working well for me.
My local lightweight development environment consists of a Linux VM (Fedora) which I operate using VirtualBox. I deliberately reduce my VM’s resource allocation such as setting my RAM allocation to 512mb on my VM to encourage good code and to identify memory leaks. I have the other usual stuff setup such as Zend Framework, xdebug, MySQL etc. This was the machine which was going to carry out the test switch from my trusted Apache to Cherokee.
I disabled Apache and installed Cherokee using the supporting well written user guide. Within minutes Cherokee was up and running and there we NO problems! I was expecting some configuration hurdles as per usual, but nothing. My sites were running as if I was on Apache and there were no noticeable differences. I configured the logs to act as the same as Apache and all was set.
As I delved deeper into the setup guide I was pleasantly introduced to Cherokee’s administration interface. This was a pleasant surprise as I’m so used to hard coding configuration information into httpd.conf. This interface presents configuration options for all the usual server settings such as ‘Virtual Servers’, ‘Directory Sources’, ‘Logging’, ‘Security’ etc. The beauty of this is not that it’s simply a little prettier than the command prompt, but it’s quicker to use. You can configure your server settings simply and quickly which are two good properties to have on your side.
Although I was impressed so far, the remaining challenge that Cherokee must live up to for me is it’s speed advantages. In the spirit of keeping things simple and to get a loose overview on performance advantages I thought I’d simply use ‘Zend Controller’ which is bundled with ‘Zend Server CE‘ to test how many requests per second both Apache and Cherokee could handle in turn upon my humble local virtual machine. From these tests I obtained the following results :
Apache Web Server Results
Apache requests per second on local VM
Cherokee Web Server Results
Cherokee requests per second on local VM
As you can imagine I was quite impressed with what the results presented. The results roughly show that Cherokee could handle 2.5 times more requests per second that Apache! That is no small margin!
What does this mean for me going forward? Well the first things that went through my mind understandably were cost and time savings. Potentially this could reduce the need for more hardware. Less hardware means less purchase costs and less maintenance time. Obviously there are other factors to consider before jumping the gun, but Cherokee certainly has my attention now. I will definitely be including Cherokee in my future plans. An exercise well worth the time.
If anyone reading this has done the switch, please feel free to reply to this post with any feedback
Related Link : alobbs.com
Why buy an iPad and where does it fit in to the market place ?
Posted by Craig_Strong in Product Reviews, Tech Headlines, Technology / Hardware on January 30th, 2010
Finally the long awaited iPad has has been released. For quite some time people had speculated what the device was going to be and what it would be capable of. This has been followed by some passionate underlying debates for what it should and needs to be for consumers. Well the device has been released, which has been met predictably by a mixed reception with continued debate. Following such debates, the key point of confusion standing out is people are unsure where an iPad fit’s into their lifestyle. This is the question I am trying answer from my own perspective and lifestyle, suggesting where an iPad would mainly suit me.
iPad doesn't replace PC's or smart phones
Being a Software Developer/IT Manager by profession I have pretty much access to a computer/device of some description most places I visit on a day to day basis. I currently use a ‘G1 Android phone’, have a ‘macbook’ for working on the move, iMac at home, and have a Vista machine at work, not to mention access to several remote linux servers holding my information. I also have an xbox360 which is linked to my media linked to the TV. With all these devices around me where would an iPad fit in and why would I want one?
To understand where an iPad would fit into my lifestyle, I have to look at my daily patterns and highlight where I waste time with a little ‘lean’ thinking. Pretty much most of the day I’m in front of a computer and I clearly don’t see and iPad as a suitable replacement/substitute for what I use these devices for. When relaxing in front of the TV, listening to music via the xbox360 and iMac, I don’t see and iPad offering anything against these devices. I certainly don’t want a 10 inch device to replace my mobile phone unless I was aiming to block out the sun. So what gap is leftwithin my daily lifestyle pattern?
Well looking at my daily patterns I quickly identified somewhere where I am wasting time which could be improved. As part of my day, I regular attend Scrum meetings, meetings with 3rd parties, and am often called for quick consultation from various parts of the business. Most of the time these can be quick meetings lasting no longer than 10-20 minutes. When called for any of these tasks, I find myself picking up my A4 notepad, rushing into a room and writing notes. Most of the time I then type up key points of the meeting on my PC. Sometimes however with interruptions I miss the odd one or two and end up being chased up by others where I have to then play catch up. For me, this is where I see an iPad fitting into my lifestyle.
If I could turn to the iPad rather than an A4 notepad this would mean I could take more information everywhere, makes notes once and most importantly of all for me is to free up my time. An iPad offers 10 hours of battery life and can stay on standby for a month! It is small, lightweight and quick to turn on and off which makes it a perfect fit to replace my A4 notepad replacement. I can make notes and pass it around the room with others to share information such as diagrams, images or notes, as easily as passing around sheets of paper. I have a macbook, but there is no way I could get it to fill this gap like an iPad could, otherwise believe me I would be already doing it. It’s overkill, less mobile, slower to turn on and involves launching full blown software packages. This is enough to say no and the A4 notepad has won every time. On the same note where I would use my macbook and smartphone, an iPad wouldn’t be a replacement for these. My macbook is good at being a macbook and provides me with the ability to have a mobile computer for developing code, running VM’s etc. My smartphone is too much of a compromise with such a small screen. Therefore I’m very glad Apple decided to make the iPad exactly what it is without a full OS trying to compete with the notebook/laptop devices. A purposeful and simple solution to fill an obvious gap in the market.
There are other obvious uses where the iPad would be a benefit and that is on the commute. I used to travel to work by train carrying at least one magazine, a book and a macbook every day. An iPad would have meant I could just carry a macbook with it, reducing the weight and giving me the ability to carry much more reading material. I don’t see the point spending on an ebook reader now when and iPad is just a bit more money for a lot more value in return. I could just pull out at any time to fill the short, but sometimes very long gaps between train journeys. If the train is 10-15 minutes late, I’m not going to boot up a macbook and find a place to sit on a very over crowded platform.
iPad replaces notebooks and ebook readers
Obviously my viewpoint above is selfish to my lifestyle. Who else could use an iPad ? Well looking at my circle of friends and family, unlike me most of them are not tech people. However, they all have computers and laptops and I know this as usually I’m contacted at some point if they run into problems. Looking at their use it tends to be mostly shopping online, social networking, emails and sharing photos. Most of them also seem to be intimidated and frustrated with their computers to various degrees. They look boring and a computer probably reminds them of the office they just left in the day. For these users an iPad could be a good option as it’s cheap ‘ish’, simple, secure and most of all friendly. It’s a device that can sit on the coffee table and be picked up and used anytime just like a magazine. For less tech savvy users this is far more inviting to use and therefore likely to get more use. This is why I’m glad they made it more like an iPhone than a notebook. It makes much more sense for this device to be app based and would be much more attractive to already proficient iPhone users.
I’m sure it won’t be long before we see Google responding with a slate device offering Android, not ChromeOS.
Scrum Teams – Lean, Mean developing machine
Posted by Craig_Strong in Development, Scrum / Agile on January 11th, 2010
In the past few years I have read about Scrum, Agile and watched many a tutorials and short videos on the benefits and how to implement it in the work place. After watching from a far I managed to get my hands dirty and get involved with applying it in the workplace. Over a period of many months, bit by bit we have implemented it into our development environment. I have to say it hasn’t been easy and it’s only possible with support from the business in my opinion. Developers and testers were the first to welcome the change as it empowered them and gives them recognition for their efforts as well as control. The business took longer as the change is drastic and involves them a great deal more in product development. However once involved, the agility and development speed and project transparency becomes something recognisable and desired.
During this implementation a common emphasis raised via many sources is to keep the teams small and focussed. Many comparisons have gone through my mind, including why and how to select certain people and create teams. One of the best comparisons and inspirations to make sense of this is to compare the military structure. The comparison that strikes me is that traditional waterfall teams which consist of large scaled divisions that progress in linear fashions with a great deal of resources and structure. They take a great deal of planning, authorisation and strategy to get momentum. When the momentum has started, it’s difficult to stop and change direction. These can be compared to a military invasion, invading in stages as one large force following months of planning and financial investment all moving towards a strategic location in mass. Scrum teams to me represent a different dimension to this, I see scrum teams as small, more precise well equipped units similar to special forces. Smaller teams which are empowered, focused and take more control over their missions who often find themselves more capable and agile. They can be deployed into many different environments, are quicker to adapt and are in and out of missions quickly, sharply getting maximum results.
When you have the balance in place and the team become used to this way of working, the business will benefit and get results. Results which require less investment over time and able to see the impact and return of having small, specialist teams. After all, we have all seen renditions of the battle of Thermopylae, which is basically a tale of a small force with superior weapons, training and passion taking on the might of an army. Although not a direct comparison I think there are similarities in structure do compare in very distant kind of way. The strategy depends upon the business’s plans and objectives, but ultimately every business wants to get more from it’s resources and wants to be able to be quick to respond to environmental conditions to stay ahead of the game.
Common Misconceptions of PHP
Posted by Craig_Strong in Design Structure, Development, Frameworks, Security, Software Reviews, Zend Framework on January 2nd, 2010
As we have just rolled over to 2010 I thought I would compile a list of 4 common questions often raised against PHP from people within the IT industry (no particular user groups). Each of these 4 statements were mentioned to me within 2009, but stem back many years in some cases. Some of these questions demonstrate plain ignorance in some cases, others just a little confusion as a result of lack of understanding or exposure. Therefore I hope this contributes to clearing up some obvious misconceptions by my provision of some brief answers.
- PHP is not a secure language
- PHP doesn’t have good support for OOP
- PHP is slow
- PHP is an amateur language
Believe it or not this was stated to me by a highly ranked person within the development community. I was very surprised that such a statement was put forward considering PHP is a scripting language and security is not a definitive answer, but an on going process in which every facet of IT must undergo constantly to remain secure. To clarify this is a case of blaming poor workmanship on the tools. Although some tools are better than others, in no way do I believe this statement to be true. PHP can be as strong as the best of them in terms of security and some of the worlds most secure systems including many systems of the financial services industry as an example which hold vast amount of sensitive information can be found to be written using PHP. When using a tool to build something, the end result is that of the craftsman effort, ability, knowledge and experience. Keeping the argument of operating system security out of this which would be hosting PHP, to obtain security you need good, experienced and security aware developers. I personally believe this misconception often raises it’s head because of other languages restrict development to the framework or coding environment and developers within these environments don’t have to confront some areas of security as a result of this. I don’t think it’s good for developers to rely upon security being dealt with away from their application by making it someone or something else’s responsibility. A good craftsman will make it their job to be aware of system security and test their application before release as well as include continuous monitoring and alerting tools to support the application. Obviously there are those which specialise in such areas and their knowledge should be referred to in times of doubt or curiosity via supporting texts and communities. PHP is as secure as the developer’s knowledge and testing/release procedure involved with it as with most other languages.
I’m surprised that some people still think this. Before the release of PHP5 including the Zend 2 Engine, which was 13/07/2004 this would have been true. However please keep up people, we are in 2010 now and OOP support for PHP has been in place for over 5 years! I haven’t written procedural code for years with the exception of the odd testing script and procedure. There are great libraries available as well for those looking to extend OOP ability including such libraries as SPL, PECL, PEAR to name but a few. There are also some very fast moving and powerful frameworks available fully supporting OOP including such Frameworks as Zend Framework, Symfony, CakePHP, Codeigniter. These are also become very popular and demand for such frameworks from the workplace is rapidly increasing (see my other post).
Yes believe it or not I have heard people claim this. PHP is pretty damn fast as a scripting language written in C. If people say PHP is slow, I don’t believe the have looked at the problem or debugged their code well enough. There are so many factors that influence speed such as the OS, memory, debug code, logging scripts, the implemented code, other applications on the server etc. If your PHP code is running slow, debug it and find the problem. It’s likely that the problem could sit with any of the above or it could be badly written code. There are good debug tools out there such as Xdebug which could save you some time finding the problem. Remember PHP is so versatile you can even extend it in C. If you are doing something very complex in PHP and by taking it down a layer might reduce some of the functions taking some time, you have the option to write an extension if needed. I personally have never had to do this, but have seen it done for a workplace specific extension and it worked perfectly and very quickly.
With full OOP support and factoring in that it’s one of if not the most widespread scripting language and as mentioned briefly in point 1 above, you can find PHP in almost all industries. Now I am not one to suggest the best technology is the most widespread (no names mentioned). However if PHP was a amateur language why is it so popular in so many professional industries which demand professional results. You can write pretty much anything you want using PHP and it can be as simple and complex as you want it to be. I have used Java quite a bit in the past and often find myself using the same code design texts to reference my PHP objects as my Java objects. I even apply the same design pattern sources for both languages. An example is the built in observer pattern interface in Java, (java.util.Observer) PHP also has this (SplObserver). Again I feel that stating that PHP is amateur is missing the point that PHP it’s a tool for the job. If amateurs use PHP you might get amateur results by the same token if professionals use it you get professional results, which is obviously the same as any other language.
Overall I think some of the questions or statements raised above are raised as a result of lack of understanding. As with most things in life some people scratch the surface of an area of interest and call themselves experts. The same experts make such judgements which create barriers for others. This could reading a text titled ‘Learn PHP in 24 hrs’ then calling oneself an experienced programmer or taking your driving test after a couple of lessons in a controlled environment and calling oneself an experienced driver confident enough to race with the likes of ‘Jenson Button’ and expect to win. Personally I have been using PHP for over a decade now and I am still learning new things everyday, particularly through exposure of different implementations. The language is moving fast with PHP6 arriving soon as well as many new and exciting related projects becoming available such as the array of frameworks which provide common interfaces to integrate with many different technologies. I would encourage anyone to look under the bonnet and get to know PHP in more depth and hopefully you will see the true power and capabilities of it.
Woopra raises the bar for web statistics/analytics
Posted by Craig_Strong in Software Reviews on August 30th, 2009
I have been meaning to write a review on Woopra for some time, but wanted to try out Woopra for a while first to ensure I got more of an in depth experience whilst looking through the web statistics. It’s not easy for any stats package to get much attention with the likes of Google Analytics (which I currently use) to contend with, especially since most web statistics packages require the user to embed tracking code into sites which can impact page load times and is another stepping stone for integration. However I started to hear rumours there was a new kid in town by the name of Woopra and decided to give it a chance. I proceeded to set it up on this blog and another e-commerce site for a varied user base.
Live Statistics
One thing which stood out straight away using Woopra over other analytics packages was the ability to view live statistics from actual users on the site. I have to say I was a little pessimistic about this feature, having used similar features in the past. I was expecting, inaccurate details, delays and it being riddled with bot visits which would dilute the overall detail. To my surprise it was quite the opposite. I accessed the site from several locations using various devices, browsers and OS’s, then tracked my movements through the sites. Each time, it managed to detect my exact entry point to the site, the referrer I used (including the search engine search term) as well as my exact OS and browser. As soon as I started using this feature my mind was full of ideas where this feature could be a benefit to a website. My first reaction was that I could use Woopra to quickly identify bottlenecks in a system. By watching the flow of users through a site live, I could see any issues on a granular level. This could be very beneficial if you have changed a stage in a process, for example introduced or altered a stage in the checkout process. This feature will allow you to identify such areas quickly on a per user bases and could even be integrated with customer support to get more detail from the user allowing you to offer a better service at a time of need. You can offer a very proactive approach to usability and navigation by using such a feature.
Analytics Reporting
Looking through the quality of the statistics Woopra gathered through the live user tools as well as the historic analytic reports I was very impressed by the level of detail offered by Woopra. I did not see any evidence of bot contamination in my visit stats. I compared some of the analytical data Woopra had collected over a given time period with Google Analytics. I noticed that there were concerning differences in the details. To cross check both these I examined the actual access logs on the server to quickly identify which system was more accurate for example, by looking at the number of unique agents, visits and referrers. To my surprise the analytics seemed to favour Woopra in some cases although not all. There were areas of concern I noticed in Woopra particularly relating to the source by IP of the visitors. Although IP by Country seemed fine, I wasn’t confident that the IP to City locations were accurate and hence this affected some features which heavily integrated such data. Woopra had confirmed though the IP database being used in the beta program was being replaced and the current solution was temporary included due to financial constraints :
“We’re working up upgrading the IP address system. To save money, we went with an older, free version.” (twitter.com/woopra)
There were some differences where Google Analytics offered some data that Woopra doesn’t. However what I must say is where Woopra offered the same information as Google Analytics, I personally think Woopra presents the data in a more concise, detailed and purposeful manner. I started to find I had more interaction with the statistics offered on Woopra which allowed me to see some of the collected data in new ways. The level of detail shown particularly around referring domains and search terms in Woopra is excellent. You can instantly see a visual representation on a search phrase with the graphical detail helping you identify patterns and trends quickly. However there are areas which I didn’t test in much detail and that was based around PPC campaigns and such. It would be interesting to see what dedicated SEO specialists think of Woopra where PPC is heavily integrated into analytical campaigns.
Desktop Application & User Interaction
Analytics aside I was also very impressed with the desktop application to which I was using to retrieve statistics from my sites. The application is fast, well designed and offers a broad range of tools and filters which you can use to customise and extract data with. Since I have installed Woopra on my desktop I have actually found it to be quite addictive. It’s so accessible and easy to interact with I found myself constantly switching back and forth to find out more information.
Customer Feedback
As I have been testing Woopra out as part of the Beta program, I have been tweeting some of my finds on twitter. What impressed me was Woopra’s dedication to respond. I can confidently say that pretty much every tweet I mentioned, I had a direct response from @woopra with a constructive answer. This to me shows great product support and commitment by Woopra to make a strong product even stronger. This feedback and interaction process could really help Woopra get into a good market position quickly and I’m sure will also help the product develop into something the users really want.
Overall
To conclude this review, I was overall very impressed with Woopra. I would highly recommend anyone using or considering web statistic packages trying this out! The only issue I have left before fully committing to this package relates to the fact that this product is in beta and the final package price to my knowledge has not yet been released. Hopefully by spreading the word this could help reduce the price as I certainly want to carry on using Woopra. Watch this space, I think Woopra is going to be around for a good while!
Please feel free to add your comments to this post, I appreciate all feedback.
To find out more visit : http://www.woopra.com/
You can also follow Woopra on twitter at http://twitter.com/woopra
Apple’s Safari 4 beta. Is it as good as they claim?
Posted by Craig_Strong in Web Browsers on February 26th, 2009
With my recent launch of this blog I wanted my first official post to be something of substance. After pondering for a while, I was handed a golden nugget with the recent release of Safari 4 Beta. With Apple claiming that Safari 4 has 150 new features, I thought I would investigate further. Was this going to be a compiled list of over stated achievements which so many before them have claimed to have solved?
I downloaded the Safari 4 Beta version on both Mac OSX and MS Vista to give them a run through. Almost from the first moment I started using the browser I was impressed. The clear and concise interface being unobtrusive, gave way to a well thought out structure which allows a user to get on with what’s most important, surfing the web. It didn’t stop there though, after being gently seduced by Apple’s obvious attention to detail with their efforts combine style and functionality which include such features as the new ‘Top Sites’ 3D menu and the iTunes style “Cover Flow” history browser. Although impressed at this point I was impressed at the interface level, I thought and hoped that this wasn’t a mask to hide a lack of improvements under the hood.
Innovative way to view browsing history
Scrolling through the list of 150 improvements and new features within Safari 4 beta, it’s without doubt that Apple are planning for Safari 4 to raise the bar. Some of these features are quite impressive including ARIA support, improved CSS effects, HTML 5 Offline Support, improved international/cultural compatibility as well as feature rich development tools to name just a few. However amongst all these new features there was one that I had to test straight away for myself and that was that Safari 4 was ACID 3 compliant. Could this be true? With so many other browsers stepping up to the plate and failing after making this claim, I wondered if Safari 4 was going to be the next victim of false claim. Well any doubts I had were instantly quashed when I seen for my very own eyes, Safari 4 has indeed passed the ACID 3 test.
Safari 4 Beta Passed ACID 3 Test
I then proceeded onto start reading about the ‘Blazing Performance‘ benchmarks. These claims display information suggesting that Safari 4 is much quicker that the incredibly fast ‘WebKit‘ based cousin Chrome 1.0 at rendering HTML and Javascript, not to mention a white wash on performance over Internet Explorer 7 & 8 as well as my beloved Firefox 3 browser. Now as I was using Safari 4, I had noticed that the browser was rendering pages extremely quick. Without proper benchmarking techniques involving stable, fair testing environments how could I satisfy my curiosity to test Apple’s Safari 4 speed claims. Now this is when it struck me, I could use the ‘slickspeed‘ test aimed at testing the response times of various well known javascript frameworks. Although this is by no means an accurate benchmarking suite, I presume that although the figures maybe out somewhat, the patterns of results should be relative to the browsers javascript engine speed. So with this new arsenal I set out one by one to prove or disprove that Safari 4 could be faster than the competition.
To carry out this test I minimised the amount applications running on my computer and tested each browser one by one to get the following results.
(Mac OSX - 2 Ghz Dual Core, MacBook, 2GB Ram)
| MooTools 1.2 | JQuery 1.2.6 | Prototype 1.6.0.2 | YUI 2.5.2 Selector beta | Dojo 1.1.1 | Total (ms) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Safari 4 beta | 73 | 52 | 251 | 189 | 19 | 584 |
| Opera 9.63 | 222 | 198 | 278 | 526 | 128 | 1352 |
| Firefox 3.06 | 231 | 230 | 274 | 516 | 162 | 1413 |
| Total | 526 | 480 | 803 | 1231 | 309 | - |
(Windows Vista Business - AMD Athalon 64 X2 Dual Core 4000+ 2.11GHz 4GB Ram)
| MooTools 1.2 | JQuery 1.2.6 | Prototype 1.6.0.2 | YUI 2.5.2 Selector beta | Dojo 1.1.1 | Total (ms) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Safari 4 beta | 58 | 52 | 210 | 185 | 6 | 511 |
| Opera 10 Alpha | 125 | 104 | 199 | 337 | 45 | 810 |
| Chrome 1.0.154.48 | 78 | 70 | 374 | 306 | 82 | 910 |
| FF3 3.0.6 | 137 | 153 | 269 | 360 | 104 | 1023 |
| Opera 9.51 | 182 | 147 | 187 | 419 | 94 | 1029 |
| IE8 6001.18372 | 529 | 336 | 1763 | 1062 | 77 | 3767 |
| IE 7.0.6001.18000 | 599 | 417 | 2083 | 1417 | 690 | 5206 |
| Total | 1708 | 1279 | 5085 | 4086 | 1098 | - |
The test I used can be found at http://mootools.net/slickspeed/.
Wow! These results are impressive. Not only is Safari 4 showing it’s speed, but Dojo really stood out as well. I must point out however IE8, reported a great deal of errors when accessing Dojo elements and seemed to be the only browser to do so. Now before getting too carried away my firefox does contain some additional plugins which no doubt could have slowed the engine down a little, although I had made efforts to keep it slim. However even with that in mind, there is a clear pattern from these results that Safari 4 is pretty damn fast! In the name of “who is the fastest browser in the west”, Safari 4 certainly is proving to be a threat. With the immense speed claims from Apple regarding Safari 4 as well as the convincing evidence, what else appeals to me that is included in Safari 4 Beta?
Being a native Firefox user for many years and with all the effort I have taken configuring firefox to provide a development haven which include such plugins as firebug, firephp, developer tools, urlparams and so on, could Safari development tools offer me anything I haven’t already got? Well interestingly the answer was Yes! Not only do the development tools offer a very graphical representation of load times and file sizes ‘Resources’, but the development tools now include a javascript debugger which is something I often use in firebug. Not only this but Safari 4 includes ‘tools for managing offline databases’. Now I haven’t used the database feature as of yet, but this sounds very interesting and something I am definitely going to investigate.
After looking through the immense list of features and claims the big question is, can Safari 4 do to me what no browser has done to me in the past few years and entice me away from Firefox? Well I actually think Yes and No. My development environment in Firefox is setup so well, where I use Zend_Debug to log to firephp and I am quite used to several small, but useful plugins making life easier and more productive such as ‘urlparams ‘. I can’t see a complete alternative yet fully within Safari 4. However if I manage to figure out a way in which I can throw log messages to the error console in Safari 4 which might already be possible, Safari 4 could win me over. In cases where I simply wish to browse the web I do actually think I might start using Safari 4 and see how it holds up, where I shall keep Firefox for development. All in all though, Safari 4 beta looks promising and Apple have certainly raised the bar in the main stream browser market. If I were one of the competition I would certainly be paying close attention to this release.
Please note this is by no means an official test or official comparison and should not be considered a stable foundation for browser quality or representation. This is simply a self test carried out for personal interest and is no way a reflection of the quality or performance of any of the selected software’s integrity.
Welcome to c6s.co.uk
Posted by Craig_Strong in Personal on February 23rd, 2009
I have finally managed to get enough time together to start this blog, which I something I have intended to do for quite some time. The reason why I have eagerly anticipated this is because I often find myself taking notes off-line regarding my personal experiences whilst developing, as well as posting and reading other related issues across the web. The common problem with doing this of course is that I can’t access these notes from other locations and the notes are confined to just myself. So this site should provide me with a resource where I can record development notes and experiences and share these with like-minded readers, who no doubt can provide valuable comments to my forthcoming mistakes and presumptions.
If reading my notes are anything to go by, I’ll be trying to focus the posts on development issues that I experience which will hopefully include examples of problems I have solved whilst developing. These will be based around the technologies I use on a regular basis.
Within my normal working ethic, I try to encourage those around me to speak up and voice an opinion and question my work. In my experience good communication leads to better development which helps everyone learn from their mistakes. So if my posts raise concern or you feel I’ve completely lost the plot, please don’t hesitate to comment as I’ll appreciate the feedback.
Thank you for visiting.
