Have Your PHP Cake – Core Reasons For Using the CakePHP Framework

By Michael Dorf

For PHP developers, the question of which framework is ideal can pose a variety of opportunities. While many developers have traditionally built PHP apps with only the use of libraries, structuring their applications according to best practices and their own learning, there are distinct advantages to using a framework such as CakePHP. Rather than trying to identify a pattern that works ideally to scale PHP applications, CakePHP provides an integrated model view controller system that can separate the business logic of your app from the database and presentation.

By employing a PHP framework, you can scale development across a team or variety of developers for easier deployment. Chances are you are utilizing an informal Model-View-Controller (MVC) model even if you don’t fully realize you are relying upon MVC as the framework behind your development. There are strong structural advantages for considering CakePHP as your application foundation, since it provides a framework to upgrade, build and extend development in new directions.

One impressive features of CakePHP is its Object Relational Mapping (ORM) framework, which allows you to streamline SQL queries by presenting tables as classes. As a means of truly moving PHP towards a full object-oriented language, these relations can streamline database queries while making the entire development process more efficient. While classes can be challenging to work with in standard PHP, they are much easier to work with in CakePHP since applications have “core” and “app” directories where you can properly configure inheritance for each class. Issues with class inheritance are easy to understand since you can extend classes in a way that fits your development goals.

Core security and CRUD features are integrated within CakePHP from the outset, allowing you to secure the user submission process in less time. By automatically producing a scaffold for your CRUD activities you can begin customizing the forms and options based upon your requirements. Rather than trying to implement ad-hoc systems for updating or securing your application, Cake takes care of the leg work so you can dive right into your core business logic. Developers can further benefit from updates in web security standards which are quickly baked into CakePHP updates so you can keep your app secure from emerging trends on the web in less time.

Streamlining the development process is a core part of why working with CakePHP as your application framework can vastly improve the speed of deployment for your app. Rather than investing considerable time in configuring your Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) setup, CakePHP has an automated configuration process through the “configuration” folder which auto-detects preferred settings. You can immediately jump into building your application and can further accelerate the process with extensive reusable code from plugins and components in the CakePHP library. For example, AJAX classes are fully integrated into the framework out-of-the-box, making the creation of dynamic forms and context-specific content a breeze.

With the impressive array of plugins, additional libraries, and components from the CakeForge open source developer repository, you can find nearly every major common feature available for your CakePHP based web application. By utilizing CakePHP, you automatically benefit from the up-to-date security standards, modular application structure, and scalable foundation that will serve your web site for years to come.

LearnComputer! (http://learncomputer.com) provides instructor-led PHP training courses for individuals, small businesses, and corporations. Please see our PHP training catalog for complete details!

Back to Basic – CSS

By Wan Woo

Cascading Style Sheets-CSS in short-is the most hottest word in web page design world, it basically give you creative control over the layout and design of your web pages, by using CSS, you can dress up your text with eye-catching headings, drop caps, and borders, just like the those you see in magazines or newspapers.

What’s more, you can also create columns and banners, highlight those text links of your choice as well as arrange images with precision.

If you’ve used styles in word processing programs like Microsoft Word or page layout programs like Adobe, CSS is nothing alien to you. A style is simply a set of rules instruct the computer how to format a particular portion of a web page. A style sheet is a set of these styles.

CSS works well with HTML, but you don’t confuse with HTML, CSS is not HTML, it’s a different language altogether. In short, CSS works hand-in-hand with the web browser to make HTML look great.

If you are old enough to surfed the web before 1995, then you will aware those website without CSS, as web designers were limited to the layout and styling options of HTML. HTML still forms the foundation of all pages on the World Wide Web, but it’s simply not a design tool. Sure, HTML provides basic formatting options for text, images, tables, and other web page elements, and patient, meticulous webmasters can make pages look pretty good using only HTML. But the result is often sluggish web pages laden with clunky code.

So with CSS, the benefits are obvious:-

1. Style sheets offer far more formatting choices than HTML. With CSS, you can format paragraphs as they appear in a magazine or newspaper (the first line indented and no space between each paragraph, for example) and control the leading (the space between lines of type in a paragraph).
2. When you use CSS to add a background image to a page, you get to decide whether and how it tiles (repeats). HTML can’t even begin to do that.
3. Even better, CSS styles take up much less space than HTML’s formatting options, such as the much-hated tag. You can usually trim a lot of kilobytes from text-heavy web pages using CSS. As a result, your pages look great and load faster.
4. Style sheets also make updating your site easier. You can collect all of your styles into a single external style sheet that’s linked to every page in your site. In short, you can completely change the appearance of a site just by editing a single style sheet.

Software for CSS

To create web pages made up of HTML and CSS, you only require a basic text editor like Notepad for Windows or Text Edit for Mac. But of course, there are other better programs written solely for web pages design. So some of the commonly used free or paid programs are: -

1. jEdit (Windows, Mac, Linux) – This free, Java-based text editor works on almost any computer and includes many features that you’d find in commercial text editors, like syntax highlighting for CSS.
2. HTML-Kit (Windows). This powerful HTML/XHTML editor includes lots of useful features like the ability to preview a web page directly in the program (so you don’t have to switch back and forth between browser and editor), shortcuts for adding HTML tags, and a lot more. By the way, this is also free.
3. skEdit (Mac) – This is the most expensive web page editor I even find. However, this program come with complete FTP/SFTP, code hints, and other useful features.
4. Coda (Mac) – This is a full-featured web development toolkit. It includes a text editor, page preview, FTP/SFTP, and graphic CSS-creating tools for creating CSS.

In Summary, whether you are programmers or internet surfers, CSS is definitely change the ways you design and read any of the web pages now and future. Hence, it is always good for you to know the basic understanding of CSS.

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Is Instructor Led PHP Training Worth the Buck?

By Michael Dorf

As you step back and evaluate the most effective ways to train your teams in PHP, it is important to consider the potential return on investment from instruction. While traditional seminars, classes or training sessions offer distinct advantages, today instructor led PHP training competes against videos courses, distance education, tutorials and certification tracks that offer their own unique approach. When considering these alternatives, however, it is important to consider the TRUE effectiveness of unfocused training given the strong benefits of instructor led training.

In order to document these advantages let’s review a potential case where a new employee (with a background in.NET) needs to get up-to-speed with PHP. Working with a certified, professional PHP instructor he can ask questions from his own vantage point, linking his existing training to accelerate PHP learning. With a video or distance course he is forced to constantly pause the instruction, desperately looking up terms and trying to relate it to his own knowledge. As a result, the upfront money saved by trying to scale media based training actually holds your firm back in terms of learning potential, slowing your path toward implementation of cutting edge PHP techniques throughout your organization. To fully appreciate the value of professional, instructor PHP training, it is important to fully realize the benefits from in-person education.

Responsive Training

One major advantage of instructor led training is the ability to ask questions in real time and get hands on answers. With recorded videos or tutorials, students are left to understand the answers for themselves, potentially complicating the learning process significantly. By contrast, an instructor led course can take on a path more useful to the audience. If multiple students are being challenged by a particular syntax or class, the instructor can make sure to focus on understanding the concept until he or she moves on. Building on expansive learning with a core set of knowledge if crucial for quality coding standards – meeting and exceeding these requirements should be a core principle of helping you to realize a strong return on your PHP investment.

Timely Insights

Another important advantage of in-person PHP training is timely benefits from the latest technology. While taking a course on PHP 5 is likely to introduce a number of important concepts, only a real time course can focus on the very latest developments in Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP), allowing students to learn about emerging frameworks, new developments from Zend, as well as keeping students up-to-date with new trends. In this way, understanding how to optimize your PHP application for cloud hosting can be integrated into a course that may not be offered by an antiquated distance learning curriculum. Professional instructor led training gives personal attention to emerging technology that impacts PHP coding in practice.

Practical, Professional Advice

The difference between PHP theory and coding practice can be large. An instructor led PHP training course can focus on how to implement PHP in a working environment, independent of the actual syntax.

With insights into agile development, group dynamics, unit testing and project updates, instructor training can provide a road-map to deliver a solid return on investment over the life of your PHP development team.

LearnComputer! (learncomputer.com) provides instructor led PHP training courses for individuals, small businesses, and corporations. Please see our computer training catalog for complete details!