Journal - Technology blog

I’ve recently been looking at an open source replacement for Dreamweaver and stumbled across an IDE called Aptana which focuses on front end development. Heres the introductory blurb from the Aptana site:

The Aptana IDE is a free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused editor and development environment for building Ajax applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code.

You will certainly notice that there are some very handy features on there, such as javascript and css debugging on the fly, which cuts out those frustrating minutes waisted by simple spelling mistakes. The software is strongly related to the Eclipse platform, and as such you can take advantage of the plugins which are on offer, at work i have installed the subversion plugin enabling me to edit & commit from within one program, excellent!

It’s not all perfect though, you have to remember as with everything these days, it’s beta software, yes there will be bugs, yes there will be some things you don’t like, but features are being worked on and if you interested check out the development blog and forums. One feature i’m certainly looking forward to will be php syntax highlighting support. Give it a try you might be pleasantly surprised…

I’ve finally found the time to add some substance to the portfolio section, it’s certainly not the finished article, but it’s a lot better than what it was (an empty page ). In the update I’ve added a very small sample of some of the work i have done at Complinet (more coming soon), plus some freelance projects. As soon as i get a free minute i also plan to post up a few icons I’ve been working on, complete with .psd files of course. Head over to the portfolio section for a quick look.

Incredibly interestingly the newly updated (and very nice I might add) W3C markup validation service has opted to use the mootools javascript framework for it’s fancy effects. Personally I find this incredibly insightful that the consortium has disregarded the competition (JQuery, Prototype etc) and go with mootools. In a strange coincidence mootools is also used on this site, great minds obviously think alike

I’m currently working very hard in my spare time to get the whole site fully up and operational (am i sounding like a star trek engineer?), and i’m disgusted with myself that you have to see it half finished. Absolutely disgusted. But i’ll get over it. In the mean time you can of course contact me, or read a little bit about me, just promise to come back a see the site in all it’s glory when it’s finished…

I came accross an excellent method for returning to the root of your folders with php, which is really useful when you are including the same file in many places. Below is a code snippet of an implementation:

    <?php include ($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/includes/file.php"); ?>

MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer. It allows you to write powerful, flexible, and cross-browser code with its elegant, well documented, and coherent API…