I've been pecking a way at this online chat program that I started as an excuse to learn some JavaScript and enhance my PHP skills (as well as get around a certain corporate firewall). It's coming along nicely. Tonight I added a RSS feed for it so that users can monitor the most recent conversation without having to be constantly logged in. I've been trying to figure out a good way to manage the deployment of the web application. Read the rest of this entry ...
After I wrote this entry, I knew I had forgotten one "gotcha" from my little Remote Scripting experience. I remembered it today. It involves PHP and the annoying aspect of having to declare within a function when you want to use a global variable:
$gSomeVariable = 5;
function somefunc() {
printf("%d", gSomeVariable);
}
function somefunc() {
printf("%d", gSomeVariable);
}
The above will not produce "5". Without explicitly telling PHP that gSomeVariable is a global variable, it will assume it is a local variable and currently undefined.
Do you know how many time this has tripped me up? The correct PHP code is:
$gSomeVariable = 5;
function somefunc() {
global $gSomeVariable;
printf("%d", gSomeVariable);
}
function somefunc() {
global $gSomeVariable;
printf("%d", gSomeVariable);
}
For all the times I made this mistake: AAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!
This is just a quick entry for me to jot down some caveats that I encountered while making a simple instant messaging application for the browser using Asynchronous JavaScript, XML and PHP. Read the rest of this entry ...
In designing a little on-line chat program accessible through a web browser, I came across what was one of the most frustrating problems in my software development career. Read the rest of this entry ...
I've been working on learning JavaScript over the last month or so and I've come to a point where I've started to delve into the hot topic of "Asynchronous JavaScript, DHTML and Server-side Programming", or as some pundits have termed it "Ajax". The 'x' is supposed to stand for XML since one of the primary enablers for this technology is the JavaScript object XMLHttpRequest (though you can use it to return any type of text). Read the rest of this entry ...