It seems that the larger url trimming services are gaining a lot of ground these days, and are churning over huge amounts of urls. This also feeds them a ton of data on what people are interested on the web, which will benefit these trimming services at some point in the future. We’re feeding their databases with enourmous amounts of information on what everyone on the web is talking about.

But, what about ourselves? How does keeping all of my trimmed url analytics on some other companies servers benefit me? How can I boost my own brand recognition if I were to create my own personal url trimming application?

Those were the exact goals in the creation of my own url trimming app: http://entr.in/ger/

I wanted to accomplish the same things that bit.ly or tr.im were doing, but to also keep my brand http://derekentringer.com intact with all of the Trimmed URL’s that I was pushing out onto the web. Why would I push another companies brand recognition with all of the interesting articles and videos that I was sharing when using a smaller url? Why wouldn’t any Twitter or Facebook user want their own trimmed url? I believe that using your own custom url trimming service can benefit both your brand recognition, as well your own internal link tracking and social media monitoring initiatives.

Now, I don’t think that using tr.im or bit.ly is a bad thing, but, if you remember very recently, tr.im almost went offline right along with all of its data.

Protect your own data, boost your brand awareness, and get your own url trimming service.

If you’re looking for you own url trimming application, hit me up in the contact area. I’m sure we can work something out to fit your needs.

Note: If you decide to trim a url with entr.in/ger/, it will work, but you will not be able to track the link analytics. This is my own personal url trimming application.

After doing some research on live broadcasting events using streaming video, I happened to come across a beta Adobe product called Stratus which builds upon Adobe’s RTMP. Not to confuse RTMP (Real Time Media Protocol) with RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol), RTMFP is a new communication protocol built by Adobe that will let users connect and communicate using P2P between multiple clients running a Flash or Adobe AIR application.

Stratus as defined by Adobe…

Stratus is a hosted rendezvous service that aids in establishing communications between Flash Players or Adobe AIR endpoints using RTMFP. Flash Player endpoints must stay connected to the server during the entire time of communications. Unlike Flash Media Server, Stratus does not stream video or support media relay, shared objects, or scripting. Stratus is being made available as a beta service through Adobe Labs to allow our developer community to begin building applications using RTMFP.

…which basically states that Stratus can be used in combination with Flash Media Server to allow for developers to easily connect a small amount of users (at the moment) directly instead of through the Flash Media Server using peer-to-peer technology.

Flash Media Server is built to support client to server communication. Stratus breaks free of that structure and allows client to client communication. This is a great starting point for Flash and P2P application development.

Unfortunately, this system was not intended to create an infinitely scalable MMORPG, although, there are some variables within the Stratus environment that will allow you to push the user limit over the default of 5.

Adobe’s first iteration of RTMFP is really only a taste of what is to come, and is only a glimpse into the Flash world of P2P.

Here are some tutorial resources I’ve put together. Feel free to leave any that you have also found helpful in learning how to effectively use Stratus.

Stratus Home Page
Get A Stratus Developer Key
Adobe Labs Stratus FAQ
Adobe Labs Stratus Sample Application w/source
Tutorial and Downloadable Files from Influxis.com
Stratus Application Using PHP/MySQL
Stratus, Python, and File Sharing
Stratus Basics

Start using version control

Version control is like a big UNDO button for your coding. You can go back to your previous code revisions and can compare/rollback to specific code areas anytime you see necessary. It will keep track of all your changes and will empower you to track your development changes across your work/team. Also, in a distributed development team, version control helps prevent overwriting of code by team members and keeps all the members code up to date.

Subversion (SVN) is one of the most popular open source version control system. If you’re on windows platform, you can try TortoiseSVN, a client for SVN.

Use Object Oriented Programming when useful

Not surprisingly, object oriented programming is focused around objects. While the idea of objects may be foreign to you in coding terms, understanding what objects are and why we use them shouldn’t take long. In short, our non-programming world is comprised of objects. Computers, fish, clouds, people, and cars are all objects. Objects have properties like color, size, name, and speed. Objects can also be comprised of other objects: cars have doors; doors have handles; handles have plastic levers; so on and so forth. Objects are everywhere around us. For this reason, many programmers find object oriented programming relatively easy to understand.

In my opinion any OOP language should have:

• Abstract data types and information hiding
• Inheritance
• Polymorphism

This can all be done using PHP classes:

<?php
class Something {
    //classes are usually named starting with a cap letter
    var $x;
    function setX($v) {
        // methods start in lowercase then use lowercase to separate
        // words in the method name example getValueOfArea()
        $this-&gt;x=$v;
    }
    function getX() {
    	return $this-&gt;x;
    }
}
?>

Of course you can use your own nomenclature but having a standardized one is useful.

Use coding standards

To develop anything programatically is difficult enough, this is why all programmers must work in an organised and systematic way. It is not obvious but the coding style you employ plays an important role in achieving this goal.

The idea is very simple: consistent code is much easier to maintain.

So, here are several reasons why to use coding specifications:

• Multi-developer projects require coding standards. Your peer programmers have to understand the code you produce. A coding standard acts as the blueprint for all the team to decipher the code.
• Even if you develop alone it’s advised to adhere to standards, because it really pays off when you revise your code after a time.
• Simplicity and clarity achieved by consistent coding saves you from common mistakes.
• Code becomes extensible and reusable. You don’t have to worry if people working on your current application would understand some reusable feature recycled from the previous project.
• It just looks professional!

Document your code

So, why do we really need to document our code? Answer to this question may differ from programmer to programmer, but I strongly feel it helps in debugging, reverse engineering, re-engineering, testing and giving the code a neat look. Moreover, it’s a step towards standardization of coding methodology. When you document your code using coding standards, you can then use tools such as phpDocumentor to create professional documentation from your existing php source code.

Use php frameworks

Frameworks provide structure, and speed development. Some popular PHP frameworks such as Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Symfony, and Kohana follow the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, which itself is a strong advocate of good coding practice. They also usually come with a number of helpful libraries to make your life easier as a web developer.

Re-use code and libraries

Don’t re-invent the wheel. This is the basic concept that should be followed, even though it may seem slightly lazy at times. It actually means that you should not spend much time on solving a problem that has already been solved, in an efficient way, by other programmers. Using already available resources will save you time in your development process.

If you do end up having to create your solution from scratch, give back to the community and share what you’ve accomplished. This is the best part about an open source development community.

Professionally test your code

PHPUnit and SimpleTest are the two most widely used Unit testing suites for PHP. To make code testing viable, good tool support is needed. This is where PHPUnit comes into play. It is a member of the xUnit family of testing frameworks and provides both a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyse their results. SimpleTest is an open source unit test framework for the PHP programming language and was created by Marcus Baker. The test structure is similar to JUnit/PHPUnit. SimpleTest supports mock objects and can be used to automate the regression testing of web applications with a scriptable HTTP Client that can parse HTML pages and simulate things like clicking on links and submittings forms.

Use an IDE

An IDE provides a one-stop shop for your coding work. An IDE contains an editor in which you can edit the code, debug the code, view your code in a browser (often embedded), and check in and out of source code control. To support that functionality, an IDE has a set of features you don’t find in a basic editor, such as Notepad or Vim. Again, you can extend editors to do a lot of these things, but IDEs have all this functionality in one tidy package and they’re typically pre-configured.

Here are a few well put together and widely used IDE’s.

• Eclipse
• Komodo
• PHP Designer
• PhpED
• PHPEdit
• Zend Studio

With so many excellent IDE options out there, some of which are even free, there’s really no reason not to give one a try, particularly if you’re a professional.

“Since bringing Flex to market, we’ve seen strong uptake among PHP developers, and we’re pleased to be collaborating with Zend and the PHP community to deliver deeper integration and increased productivity,” said David Wadhwani, General Manager, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “The collaboration with Zend furthers Adobe’s commitment to open technology initiatives. Together, we will enable developers using Flex and Zend Framework to rapidly deliver highly engaging applications to both the browser and the desktop.” – David Wadhwani, General Manager, Platform Business Unit at Adobe.

This is really exciting, as a PHP/Flex developer, and it’s going to open even more opportunities for developing and integrating with the two code bases.

Read more here.

iSalient has been recently featured within PHPMagazine.net with a short review of some the features available.

The article is available here.

More information on how I was involved in the creation of iSalient is available in the portfolio section of this site.

From the article:

“iSalient has an AJAX interface to create and customize your survey on the fly, intuitive and very easy to use powered by prototype and scriptaculous. There is many options available to create survey general, look and feel, number of response, start and end date, language, status … and more advanced options such for restricted surveys, navigation … etc. Questions are easy to create, simply by choosing from the different options available in the drop down menu (18 options available), you can create from simple true false questions to advanced option with sliders, then you can add conditions and your survey is ready to go.”

Doing some recent research within the area of AJAX led me to a spin-off of the Ajax era of web application development called Comet. Using Comet, developers have the ability to stream data to and from the browser, instead of communication done thru series of call backs between the browser and the server. Seems like a slick idea, but if you have not used JSON before (basically a Java based XML language) you are in for a slight learning curve. Lingr.com is a great example of an easy use of Comet in the development of a web based chat room website, and is really quite slick. Meebo.com is also another good example. A good starting tutorial is also available here.