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Now for the REST of the story


What is REST?
When boiled down, REST is an architectural style that defines a set of constraints. These constrains describe what HTTP and the World Wide Web are based on. These constraints can be defined as follows (list and image below used from A Brief Introduction to REST):

Give every “thing” (resources) an ID
Link things together
Use [...]

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What is a mashup?


I have recently have been hearing the term mashup thrown around a lot. To not be left behind, I looked up the Wikipedia entry on mashups. According to the article a mashup is a web application hybrid. By including content or functionality offered through third party services (typically through web services), making a new application [...]

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Developers Plight


Refactoring in older systems is rarely just a technical issue. Most of the time a developer has to navigate organization and political issues as well.
Let’s say you are given small project that is low priority project to fix a bug in an existing application. The project is expected to have a quick turn around and [...]

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Who needs REST?


I have been reading a bunch of online articles about REST (REpresentational State Transfer) which was first discussed in Roy Thomas Fielding’s Dissertation ‘Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architecture’. Though in this body of work Fielding never argues that either REST or HTTP constituted a sufficient basis for a web services architecture, [...]

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PHP, Query Object Pattern


This continues the discussion of Martin Fowler’s Object Query pattern from the book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. The previous discussion about the Metadata mapper pattern talked about how to map domain objects to database results.
These discussion are really a brief overview of Microsoft’s Repository Factory and how they use Fowler’s patterns with [...]

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PHP, Data Access Metadata Mapper


In thinking about the post I made a couple of days ago about PHP and the idea of using a Data Access Layer it had inspired me to do some reading. So I have been digging through Martain Fowler’s book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (pictured to the left). Three patterns I have been [...]

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Useful PHP Releated Links


Recommended PHP reading list
A list of recommended reading material on PHP is compiled from a variety of online sources by Web application developers in IBM’s Global Production Services organization.
Five common PHP design patterns
Design patterns are just for Java architects — at least that’s what you may have been led to believe. In fact, design patterns [...]

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Why object oriented?


I just read an article from ‘Communications of the ACM’ Magazine. The article discusses the relationship between symmetry in geometry and that of the object oriented paradigm. The articles main point was that when symmetry breaks patterns emerge. It put forward that object oriented design patterns are the breaking of symmetry in object “class based” [...]

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PHP, Data Access Layer


In reading about PHP data access one thing that I notice is a lot of example that explain reading and writing to a database have the mysql_connect() function and write/execute SQL statement directly in the page code. Coming from an enterprise architecture background this makes me cringe. It really reminds me of my early days [...]

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SEO Test, Google Keyword Tools


Fortunately for me, I am currently working for a web publishing company that has an in house search engine optimization (SEO) researcher who likes to talk about the craft. I had a conversation with him today on how to use Google AdWords Keyword Tools.
He explained to me the term ‘long tail’, which describes using keywords [...]

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