Adventures In Programming

Version 3.1.0 of the PRADO PHP framework has gone into beta. PRADO is a component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications in PHP 5. The beta, as well as support forums and documentation can be found at the official PRADO website.

We are proud to announce the BETA release of PRADO 3.1.0. This is the result of nearly one year of hard work from the PRADO Group and represents a major milestone in the PRADO development. We hereby thank all PRADO developers and supporters. Please note, since this is a beta release, part of the code (especially those related with new features) may not be stable and are subject to change. Be very cautious if you intend to use this release in a production environment.

WHAT’S NEW IN THIS RELEASE
- DB access: added three layers of database support, including PDO-based data access, Active Record and SqlMap.
- Active controls: a list of AJAX-enabled Web controls.
- Web services: added SOAP and JSON services.
- TOutputCache: a control that caches selective parts of rendered HTML pages and can improve performance significantly.
- TShellApplication: the base class for PRADO command line application
- TDbCache: a generic cache module using database as persistent storage
- TDbUserManager: a database-driven user manager module
- TClientScriptLoader: a control for loading JavaScript libraries
- Added five new demos, including chat, currency-converter, soap, sqlmap and time-tracker.
- Many minor feature enhancements and bug fixes.

jQuery

jQuery is a new type of Javascript library. It is not a huge, bloated, framework promising the best in AJAX - nor is just a set of needlessly complex enhancements - jQuery is designed to change the way that you write Javascript.

Top 10 web dev libraries

I decided to make a list of the top libraries that I have come across or that I personally use. Libraries can be a web developers best friend. They are great resources to learn from and can save hours and hours of time. These libraries include JavaScript, Ajax, Colors, PHP, and CSS. These should be in any web developers bookmarks, so go ahead and look through these libraries and bookmark your favorite ones. The list is in no particular order.

The last few contracts I had concentrated on .NET and related technologies, specifically application development. So feeling eager to get back into some web development, I started to have a look around and see what has changed in the last few months. This was one of the things I found. Yahoo! has put together a very nice library of utilities and controls to make the life of the web developer a little easier. You can find more information, downloads and articles on the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library website.

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses. Download the entire library, its documentation and examples from Sourceforge.

The library’s developers blog at the YUI Blog and the YUI Library community exchanges ideas at ydn-javaScript on Yahoo! Groups.

From the PRADO development team:

We are pleased to announce that PRADO version 3.0.1 is formally released!

Version 3.0.1 contains about 10 bug fixes and many small enhancements. It also includes a complete weblog demo which should be a good starting point for PRADO users to develop complex Web applications. A few supporting components are also added in this release.

PRADO v3.0.1 may be downloaded at http://www.pradosoft.com/download/.