VS Code

Found My New Text Editor for Code and It’s from Microsoft!

Technology

A Look Back at Text Editors

When I started writing “code” there was not a plethora of text editors that there are today. It started with Adobe Dreamweaver for me. Back then Dreamweaver was owned by Macromedia for those that remember, and I was even part of Macromedia User Group, learning to use Flash too. Later on it was Coda and Text Wrangler for me.

Text Editors of the Future

Then I wanted to use what all the cool kids were using Sublime Text, Brackets and or Atom. Loved the look of Sublime Text but was too frugal to want to pay for a text editor. At first I was big fan of Brackets because of its integration with Adobe Photoshop and because the first release of Atom was little slow for me. But for the last year or so I have been using Atom as performance has improved. Although now and then I finding it crashing particular on my older Macbook Pro.

Many different types of text editors mean that there are several different types of programmers. JavaScript, VisualBASIC and C++ programming are a few of the computer languages one can become schooled in; or one may become schooled in any number or combination. Many of these languages have their own specialized editors or IDE, think of Eclipse – boring!

The New Text Editor from the Future

But lately on the twitter, I have been reading and seeing about a new text editor called Visual Studio Code. And all I can think of is, “Isn’t that from Microsoft?” and “Is it just for VBScript?” – you may have had these same thoughts or not. But man, was I blown away by the first tutorial I watched with a built-in debugger that had call stacks, variables and breakpoints all right there to use. And for someone who’s biggest problem language is JavaScript this is a huge help.

Bravo Microsoft! Well done sir, keep up the good work. For now I am switching to Visual Studio Code and see how this goes.

How did PHP Become Popular?

How did PHP become Popular?

PHP

History of PHP

PHP (it originally was an abbreviation of for Personal Home Page) was first written by Rasmus Lerdorf. These were Perl scripts to track users of his Web pages. On communication and suggestions from other people he rewrote it as a scripting language and added support for forms. As its popularity grew, a core group of developers created an API for it and turned it into PHP3. Presently we have version 5. (PHP5) and its growth is likely to continue.

Plus Points of PHP

PHP will run on all platform, including most UNIX, Windows(95/98/NT/2000) and Macs. As this uses the same code base, all scripts will run identically on all the platforms.
PHP is similar to C. So anyone who has experience with a C-style language will easily learn PHP. In C-style languages, we can also include Javascript and Java.

PHP is extendible. This allows programmers two ways of extending PHP to do some special processing, either by writing an extension module and compiling it into the executable or by creating an executable that can be loaded using PHP’s dynamic loading mechanism.

PHP currently will load into Apache, IIS, AOLServer, Roxen, and THTTPD. Alternatively, it can be run as a CGI module. Lots of database interfaces. PHP currently will work with MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Informix, PostgreSQL and many others. These are binary level interfaces, and ODBC is also provided for those situations where the database is not supported.

If a PHP user wants to interface to the particular library, then it is easy to write an interface for it, and many have done so and contributed to the main PHP source repository. So you can find modules for graphics routines, PDF files, Flash movies, Cybercash, calendars, XML, IMAP, POP and a host of others. If the library you need is not supported, you can either write one yourself or employ your favorite programmer to do it.

The PHP Extension and Add-on Repository. Similar to the CPAN network for Perl, although still in its infancy, the idea of PEAR is to provide a set of PHP scripts that would be installed by default with the PHP installation Fast.

PHP has normally used an Apache module and this makes it very fast. It is entirely written in C and is quite small, so loads and executes quickly with small memory footprint. PHP is Open Source. Therefore programmers are not dependent on a particular manufacturer to fix things that don’t work.

What are the main disadvantages of PHP

A scripting language has advantages and disadvantages. PHP also has some disadvantages. Some are direct disadvantages and some are indirect regarding functionality. PHP’s main drawback is Error Handling. PHP has a very poor ability in this regard, but even this disadvantage can be overcome using a feasible advantage solution.

Welcome To The World Of CSS Web Design

Welcome To The World Of CSS Web Design

CSS

Improved with the help of CSS

Although CSS was first introduced in the mid-1990s, it did not become a mainstream tool for web designers and masters until more recent years. This is unfortunate because there are millions of poorly designed websites cluttering the internet that could be easily improved with the help of CSS.

So what exactly is CSS?

CSS is an acronym that stands for Cascading Style Sheets. The term Cascading Style Sheets implies two things. First off, the style sheets are cascading. This means that multiple style sheets can be used for a single web page. Additionally, the term “cascading” also refers to the way a style is determined in the event that more than one rule matches a single element. The second thing that is implied by the name Cascading Style Sheets is that the purpose of CSS is to style web pages. Whereas the purpose of HTML (or XHTML) is to define the structure of a web page, the purpose of CSS is to define the presentation.

Different browsers

The reason that so many web pages have broken layouts in different browsers is that they try to use HTML to control the structure and presentation of the page. The most common abuse of HTML is attempting to use tables as a presentation method. Although you may be able to achieve the look you want in a single browser, your web page will look broken and distorted in many other browsers. The only time that tables should be used is to hold a set of data (such as the results of a scientific experiment). If you do have a legitimate use for tables on your web page, you can even use CSS to style your table and make it more attractive.

Conclusion

By taking the time to learn CSS, you will be able to create a web page that looks much more consistent across a variety of browsers.

Favorite Text Editors for Code

UX Design

PHP MySQL Database Scripts

Writing code day in and day out can become overwhelming and tedious at times.  That’s why I change up my text editors from time to time when writing code, it breaks up the monotony and keeps me on my toes. And some text editors are better for writing specific type of programming language. Below is a list of some my favorite text editors: