Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
As a novice web developer I often thought that many site functionality ideas were impossible. Without experience or working knowledge of a variety of web languages even the most basic Javascript animations or ajax features throughout the internet lived in the realm of dark magic and mystery. Now,…
I've always been a big fan of writing my own website frameworks. It's how I learned to code, writing and re-writing a specialized PHP framework in an iterative, agile-like development process. There have been times when I've worked within standard systems (Zend, Code Ignitor, Wordpress, etc) but I…
The last post about PHP form handling (forms with php) focused on the basics - the HTML syntax and simple PHP necessary for an operating form. There were several pieces that I glossed over in the explanation for the setup of that form that I want to go over in more detail now. You can create a form…
Something that I've been working on a lot with both my work and personal web programming is data abstraction. The opportunity to work with several different handmade php frameworks has given me different ideas on what an effective data abstraction system should have. Without formal education,…
In the days of old (PHP 4) web programmers sometimes resorted to small shortcuts in their code. One of these was register_globals, which extracts the global arrays ($_REQUEST, $_POST, etc) into individual variables, allowing a programmer to write $name instead of $_POST['name']. This is an obvious…
Some web development projects don't turn out. The blame falls on both the web developer's and client's shoulders, though most developers will pine about the 'Worst Client Experience Ever'. It doesn't matter if the project is related to a full-time position or a one-time contract... things don't…
A few weeks back a colleague presented me with an interesting question. He works with an Oracle database and PL/SQL (a programming language deeply tied to Oracle) to create website applications. As he wasn't too familiar with HTML and other modern web content trends, he often ran into issues with…
Hello, world.
My name is Jacob Emerick, and I am a web application developer and graphic designer. I also enjoy the outdoors, a good challenge, and learning opportunities.
Though I was born in Camp Pendleton, CA, most of my childhood was spent in a small farming community in Michigan called Port…