Programming

My link exchange network, StaticAds, is now up and running. I’m looking for people who want to act as testers and use the system in the future when all bugs have been corrected. Register in StaticAds.

test and test and test.

I was surfing the swedish internet when I noticed that a blog service, Blogwalk, had been suspended by the owner and that he had released the source under GPL. I decided to try to run the service.

UPDATE: released, see blogg:anser. However, the service is by no means stable yet. Christian writes about blogwalk here.

A lot of confusion was caused by the fact that he had hard-coded the paths for all files into the code. This caused a lot of trouble, as well as the fact that there was a quite smart caching algo and that the server returned “not modified” headers, which I didn’t realise until it nearly drove me mad! But generally speaking, I must say that the code is very well-written and easy to understan. Thanks Christian!

HTML_QuickForm - this is the package I’ve been looking for for the latest week :) It automates form management in PHP in a very nice manner. I’ve already tested a couple of third-party classes and they either contain bugs (and the project I intend to use it in is critical) or they don’t have the functions I need. I will test it (in particular, I was looking for such a package since I have a big project going on with lots of forms) and update this post with some experiences.

UPDATE: so, here comes some input.

QuickForm is easy to use and has all the functions I expected it to have. One possible bug/problem I found was that you can’t set the default value for a <select> using SetDefaults(…). Neither using indexes or the actual values works :( Other than that, everything is great: forms are constructed with a few lines of PHP, new validation rules are easy to add (one small disappointment was that it is impossible to provide a custom error message from within a validation rule), the form can be “frozen” and shown to the user. Another important thing is that the documentation is reasonably good for such a project (I never had to look at the source code, just dig deeeeep into the help file sometimes :) ).

I like the PEAR packages. Now that I’m pretty sure they work I think it’s worth to take the time to examine some of them. Particularly, these look nice to me: a progress bar, AJAX library (you can’t have enough of them! ;) )