Top 10 PHP Management Tips

In previous article I spoke about performance, this time I will talk about management, and I admit it can be hard to do both at the same time. However it is possible and if you are writing large scale applications such as yahoo or facebook you will need to be quiet organised, however larger you grow more difficult it becomes but that is another story. So!

1. Get a good IDE! That is the most important; IDE like NetBeans with PHP support is the best thing since slice of bread. It allows you to comment well, gives you instant documentation.
2. Comment, Comment and Comment! I have to admit I forget to do it, but this is crucial for complicated code especially.
3. Declare your variables well, I mean well! Don’t write $acs = “this gets variable acs” write something like $stringAcs = (string)”this gets variable acs” , this tells a programmer that this is a string and will always be one, and by saying (string) php doesn’t have to do any guessing it will just simply use that value as a string do the same for (int) and (array) , etc.
4. During Development separate everything in to different folders and files, label them, and stamp them and comment them! When it comes to production pack them all in to 1 file. Also make sure that file only contains classes and methods you need.
5. Back up , one of the things you have to do like a habit, is that after each day of work before you go home just zip the files up and back them up to external hard drive, being even more safe back them up to 2 different hard drives.
6. Use a good architecture and separate your presentation from your logic, there is nothing worst then not knowing where is what.
7. Implement plug-in architecture, things that you won’t use for a very long time but you might use for a year or so, just use as a plugin. It is easy this way, as every time you need to update certain module you just simply update it and upload 1 file, and you don’t need to re-upload entire framework.
8. Keep a bug log! If there is more then 1 person in the team especially, make sure that any bugs that come through in the emails make sure they are noted. When they are fixed this issue probably won’t be raised, however you always get some people who might mention it, so keep records.
9. When writing classes make sure that you are using similar style across all classes, so if you want to create a object at the end. Don’t call one class as $TextBox->ToString() and another class such as $CheckBox->ToCompliled() keep it all similar! Apply same class interface through out!
10. I cant get this stressed enough, keep good documentation, and make sure that your team knows how to program in your organisation, train any new staff, as no one is perfect and they will have some dirty habits. It takes time to chage their ways but in the end everyone will benefit.

These are tips from my experience, and I have applied most of them in my organisations and I have to say by doing this you end up with same really nice code and you do make some amazing progress.

Top 10 PHP Performance Tips

Right I will be quick and straight to the point, after developing a massive website that was purely written in PHP and had MySQL back end this is what we have discovered.

1. Don’t Use PHP Magic, __get , __set any of this, forget about it, don’t even bother.
2. Open 1 and I repeat only 1 MySQL connection per page request, and make it global, PHP closes the connection for you at the end however it is a good practice to close it at the end as well.
3. Don’t use include_once, just use include
4. If you have written any kind of framework for your website, for development break them in to different files, however when it comes to production just put everything in to one file. Less includes the better.
5. Don’t use call_user_func unless you really have as it is very expensive
6. Don’t use eval unless you have to as once again it is very expensive
7. When call MySQL try to do batch inserts where you can using ; delimiter.
8. Research APC (Alternative PHP Cache), ensure you understand it, and use it across the site and cache anything you can, with in reason. It is one of the things that facebook has contributed to the community, and it has great support from people like Rasmus.
9. Try and avoid loops and complicated functions. Seriously write simple code, you can go crazy with loops when you are using something for hard core processing for website management but when it comes to the general user everything must be light and scalable.
10. If one the most common things that people always say use ‘ instead of “ so write  ‘error’.$something.’ Occurred’ , instead of “error $something occurred”, this is obvious one however I still prefer the other way as you can write it like this “ error {$something} has occurred” it just simply looks good, I know it is en-efficient but I don’t care.

These are just minor few things, but APC is the the best thing you can do for performance improvement, yes you can write DLL files that make things quicker, but being realistic you will not need to do that unless you doing mass user or content management. In which case you can write C# or C++ application

Microsoft ASP.NET vs PHP (Open Source) Aftermath

After I have stopped using PHP for few years and started using just ASP.NET. I must admit I was astonished by the power of the language, the use, the ease and just beauty of it. For many years I kept using it. But somehow, I came back to PHP a few months ago, I have gone through hundreds of sites, gone through hundreds of code examples and generally I wanted to see what happened in the technology and how PHP has grown over the years. PHP 5.2 was a major release in PHP so I wanted to compare PHP 5.2 with ASP.NET 2.0. I want to put all bias away and just focus on facts.  Lets begin.

History

PHP – Developed  by Rasmus Ledorf in 1996, originally called Personal Home Page. Was written to solve simple Web Development problems, library was written in C. It has read html, and looked for comment tags such as <!--  --> ,  it has built virtual variables and looked for commands and then execute everything in C mode and just outputted html back. To be honest not much has changed, just that a lot more people contributed to this technology. Such as a Group of students from university have called Rasmus and have asked if they can help in building better debugger and interpretation engine to speeds things up. By version 3 a few people have been involved, however Rasmus was still doing a lot of rewriting and was still leading the project.  

Main idea of PHP was too solve a wide problem, to be able to write web based applications quickly and dirt free. So people wouldn’t have to write their own C libraries.

• http://www.php.net
• http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3298.html (Good to know)
• http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail58.html (outdated)
• http://talks.php.net  (Slides from presentations that Rasmus has done) – Really good
  

ASP.NET – Research began in 1997, main idea was to find the way to write clean code where the logical layer would be separated from the presentation layer. It wasn’t until January 5, 2002 language was released. It came together with windows 2003 server .NET Framework 1.1 . Original name for ASP.NET was XSP. There is no clear reason for its name.

http://www.asp.net

Popularity

(This graph was provided to you using compete.com)

This graph shows the amount of hits php.net and asp.net are getting. What we most not forget is that PHP.NET also contains documentation for their code, where ASP.NET contains tutorials, open source projects, news, etc.

PHP - There is no doubt that PHP is the most popular language on the web, one thing that you must consider is that PHP has been around for much longer. It had more time to test, debug, and grow. It is open source and hundreds of programmers all around the world are contributing to PHP network, to places like PECL, and PEAR. This has attracted a lot of developers, who could write their own functions and then add them to sites like PECL and PEAR where they would then be reviewed and if they are liked then later on it would be added to PHP platform at the next release. This way PHP has grown, over the years.

ASP.NET - This language has got a massive edge, because development team had a lot more time to research and think of the things they can do. They had more time to come up with IDE (Runtime Environment), one other thing that they had was a budget for research and development. ASP.NET simply had more time to plan their technology, to see what tools and features would be good to use, what language should they choose and offer to programmers who are going to use it. It was a very smart move to go with Java syntax, as it is clean and is very robust. They wanted to target different markets, Visual Basic Programmers, and more serious programmers with C#.

Scalability

PHP – this language has a share nothing culture, and each page runs as a separate entity to the whole thing. Which means that there is no problem with scalability as at all, as long as you have enough hardware, and code is written more or less well it will run fine with hundreds of visits a day. When it comes to more serious large scale websites such as facebook.com, and yahoo.com. Then you need good PHP framework that was developed within your company or that you have used from open sources. Also you need load balancing, with a good database at the backend we will talk about this later on.

ASP.NET – This language is a bit different, it does share some resources. It also has application pool, which shares memory, number of requests, etc. This was improved greatly since version IIS5. When it comes to scalability it is once again more or less a about good software engineering practices and correct hardware configuration.

This is really an arguable case, and once again no one can really prove anything. As long as there is correct infrastructure in place and right hardware both languages will scale well.

Database

DSO – Development Started On
OVN - On Version Now

MySQL -  (DSO 1995) -  (OVN 5.1) – This is one of the most popular databases that is used with PHP for all sorts of websites. MySQL is quick, efficient, and is not clunky. However it is terribly slow when it comes to Sub Queries, Stored Procedures, and when other complex features come in to the play.  However, when it comes to straight forward data handling and storage it is a great system. From my personal experience, I didn’t have such a good experience with this database. Some of our agencies clients are using this database and they are fine, however when we have used this for scale applications such as Moodle and systems that really do grow. Time from time, tables fail, and you have to run recovery scripts to fix tables. However what you must remember is that this can be caused by hardware.

MySQL main focus was speed, and performance. When the project was started developers whee not focusing on complex tasks of sub queries and data calculation. They have focused on Speed, Speed and once again Speed. Great thing about MySQL that it supports replication very well.

Sun is working together with the community on this project and is now making certain factors of this database no longer free. For things like MySQL monitor, system that lets you know

http://www.mysql.com

PostGresSQL - (DSO 1986) – (OVN 8.2.9) This is my number one choice for database behind the PHP, reasons being, is that Postgres was written to handle complex sub queries, store procedures, to create dynamic views. When this database was being written it well documented, and bug mass bug reports have been written, which caused a lot of re writing to fix the database issues. At the end of all that hard work, the system gained respect for stability, and astonishing performance. One of the great things about Postgres, is that when you do INSERT statement, after you have inserted a record you can actually retrieve the id for that record straight away, where with MySQL it is not a fact that you will retrieve back that ID.

http://www.posgres.com

MSSQL SERVER – (DSO 1989)  - (SQL SERVER 2008)  I have to say that this is a great database and I would recommend nothing else to use with ASP.NET, the data model structure, and just easy integration with ASP.NET 3.5 and SQL SERVER 2008 is simply remarkable. One thing that has confused me, is that they are doing comparisons on their website of Oracle, MySQL and DB2 from IBM. However they left PostGres out. I Wonder why (wink, wink). To be honest looking at their website I am amazed that they have been allowed to even write half of the stuff that they have written about other products out there. But hands down, they are good when it comes to data integration with ASP.NET I can’t say anything there.
I am not going to talk about Oracle, I am sorry to all oracle fans out there. However that database is legendary and deserves a saying, so I will say few shorts paragraphs about it. No matter what any one says, oracle is powerful, it is massive, and it powered the world. That database is simply unbeatable. However it is failing in a few areas. Such as not having a good graphical interface, not having easy installation facility, and easy connection with ASP.NET. You have no idea through how much trouble I had to go through to find Oracle adapter to work with my ASP.NET applications. Remarkable database, but it is so big that it is struggling to keep up.

Performance

When it comes to this, you can’t simply argue this case. It is all about how the programmer builds his applications. If someone builds a faulty application it will run badly in ASP.NET and PHP. For all we care you can write a really bad HTML page and even that will be slow!

You must remember, that if you are a good software engineer, you will write efficient code. I will talk about efficient code in a second. However, I would love to show you graphs where it shows ASP.NET is faster then PHP or where PHP is faster, however I can’t! Simply because of 1 reason, and 1 reason only, you simply can’t compare them in performance.

I can’t run a loop in one program and then do the same for the other, why? Reason being is that PHP will be much faster that is given, ASP.NET will need to load all of it classes and all of it events. While PHP just needs to look, load it compile it. I might be wrong and ASP.NET will be quicker. What you must remember is that is that ASP.NET might not be quick at loading a loop up, but it will be quick at ensuring native ajax is plugged in. it will be quicker in ensuring that controls are simple dropped in. It will be quick when it comes to compilation because it is compiled using Windows .NET Framework that a lot of applications are running from.

However, when it comes to PHP, it will be much faster if it has modules and plug-in cached in APC (Alternative PHP Cache).  If programs are written smart and are written using efficient methods.

I will be honest, and will give quick tips to you all, it is not all in ASP.NET or PHP where performance usually lies (if you are experienced developer, plan, and implement according to a correct model) Performance usually lies in a database connections. Make sure that you place index fields, full text fields and don’t do SELECT *, but select fields you need. Make sure that Query catching is on. Pay massive attention to your database setup.

I can go on all day long about this, however, please read the following articles.

For PHP:

• http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/magic-benchmarks (Really Good)
• http://www.slideshare.net/shire/openweb-vancouver-2008-apc-facebok  (Really good, facebook technology and use of PHP)
• http://www.chazzuka.com/blog/?p=163 (Really Good)
• http://uk3.php.net/apc
• http://phplens.com/lens/php-book/optimizing-debugging-php.php
• http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/php-optimization-tips/1272
• http://ilia.ws/archives/12-PHP-Optimization-Tricks.html

For ASP.NET

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5dws599a(VS.71).aspx

Corporate Use

It is shocking how much of a fire fight there is about this topic, mainly because both languages will do just as good a job if implemented correctly.

I have seen some amazing frameworks that have been written by me and my team in PHP. Frameworks that allow you to create web forms that talk to a database, delete, edit, and calculate. Written in matter of minutes, by using cleverly created Classes in PHP. I have seen amazing structures being written, for example recently we have created PHP Live extensions that enabled you to write native PHP code and It would work with AJAX without any add ons. This was based on ASP.NET AJAX model, I have to admit. We are looking to make some of this code open source over coming months.

I have to say use PHP if you want to create a really large scale application that will go beyond normal websites. Only do this if you have a good architecture in place and a skilful team. Otherwise really big projects in PHP can be a disaster.

I have to admit and say that if you want to write a web application quickly, with little hassle, and this application is not going beyond a normal. Then stick with ASP.NET. This language is powering lots of different businesses around the web, reason being that it is using universal business model and it is simply amazing. You can hire any C# develop to take a look at another’s guys C# code and he will say “hmmm, I see what he has done, I will work wit that”, what happens when you are working with PHP is “hmmm, I see what he as done, but I think I should re write that”. This is because PHP has no framework it is a wild child, and because it is such a wild child it is so great because things that PHP can do can go beyond anything that ASP.NET can do, but if you don’t have a correct team in place and don’t have really good coders who write documentation will it will be a road to hell?

Method	PHP	ASP.NET
Robust	YES	NO
Easy To Maintain	Depends on team	YES
Scales	YES	YES
Talks To Any database	YES	YES (some adapters are buggy)
Wide Support	YES	YES
Staff You Can Employ	There are lot more PHP programmers	At this point in time market is crying out for more developers
Performance	QUICK (Depends on configuration)	QUICK
IDE Available	YES	YES

IDE – Integrated Development Environment

Now this is an interesting topic, as ASP.NET Developers have amazingly well developed IDE called Visual Studio 2005 and newly released Visual Studio 2008, which providers you with amazing debugging environment and writes half of the code for you.

http://www.microsoft.com/Express/

However! NetBeans IDE 6.1 – Early Access For PHP has been realsed for a while now, and I have to say it is just as good as Visual Studio, you can debug in real time, it corrects your code, and amazingly improves your documentation on your code,  when you define your objects and provides you with the methods with in your objects, so overall, it does exactly same things as Visual Studio does, apart from it having drag and drop facility for controls, but PHP lovers don’t worry, I am sure that is already being developed (my team is already doing this on our projects).

http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.1/final/

Please do take a look at this, as it is worth 5 minutes of every developers time! This is where evolution of PHP is happening.

 

Server Configuration

This is another hot topic, I am going to get right to it. Use Windows 2003 server if you people who can support it, or use Linux if you have some who can support that.

Answere is simple, honestly there is no difference between Linux or Windows server, infact it is known that Windows 2003 Server runs PHP better then Linux.

PHP - Recommend Server Configuration for large scale applications:
Windows 2003 Server or Linux (depending on available staff to support your systems)
Apache (static installation)
PHP 5.2
PostgresSQL

PHP - Recommended Server Configuration for small scale applications:
Linux
Apache
PHP 5.2
MySQL

ASP.NET – Recommended Server Configuration
Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 (wouldn’t recommend, as it just came to the market)
IIS6 or IIS7 (wouldn’t recommend as it did just come to the market)
.NET 2.0
.NET 3.5
.NET 1.1
SQL SERVER 2005 or PostgresSQL (adapter is available natively with the install of the PostGresSQL database)

If you have multiple servers then you will obviously will need replication setup, all systems will deal well with that, however, to be honest it is all about choosing a right tool for the job, and ensuring that you are configuring it correctly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_(computer_science)

Conclusion

In summary, I can go on all day long. I am going to close my article now, by giving more web links and things to read up on. Also I will say the following:

It is no secret that CIA and GCHQ, and other secret intelligence are using Redhat Linux, and it is safe to assume that they are using PHP with Oracle or PostGres.

Facebook.com one of fastest growing community sites is using PHP, and are growing massively. They have added technology called APC to the PHP framework.

Yahoo.com one of other massive sites who are using PHP architecture, and have been using it for years and years, their backend database is PostGresSQL and they are storing 2 petabytes of data!

Moodle.org virtual environment for education is using PHP for they system, and Open College is using that platform, and has re written half of it.

All of these massive places are using it, and I will tell you why, because you are not restricted by Microsoft, you don’t have to rely on them. You rely on your self. If you are writing the next big thing, use PHP.

I am being slightly bias here, as I love ASP.NET, I can’t get enough of it, but I am afraid that ASP.NET is simply growing to quickly, and not all developers will be able to keep up with their technology. They are putting all these people in to these frameworks that people have to study and understand. Yes it is great, however, it requires more education and more top skilled developers, and this is great as we are going to have better programmers out there who will write better code.

However, this is still business, and in business we are looking at speed, and it is a hell lot faster to write a PHP website with a  nice PHP framework that your team has written than it takes to study Microsoft’s ASP.NET framework. Also consider this, although not everywhere yet ASP.NET servers are available and popular in USA and UK, but think about Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, Estonia, think about all these countries. And remember that a lot of top developers are coming from there. All those guys love to see is Linux, a lot of developers there are Linux based, think about it, even in China. So it is hard to say.
Conclusion is that both languages are amazing in their own way, but there is no clear winner. I will say this:

If you are looking to build a community site, such as facebook, blog systems, search engine, e-commerce modules. Things like this, built them in PHP.

If you lets say are in mortgage business or you are a bank, write your systems in ASP.NET, 70% of these type of corporations are running on SQL SERVER 2000 and higher. This means that with ASP.NET there is easy integration. Your team will write software that will deliver results in hours and it will be easy to maintain and you won’t need to worry as any C# developer will be able to pick it up.

However if you are writing something that is not really corporate and it is more of a community thing, then use PHP. There are less limits, less walls, easy error handling, lots of Open Source projects where you can take code from and just work on. Simply more possibilities! This is why facebook.com, yahoo.com, and other large scale websites are choosing this language.

Verdict:

PHP is for Community, ASP.NET is for corporations. What category your business is in? That is for you to choose!

I would like to thank you for reading this article, it was written by Zan Kavtaskin Director of Web Technologies @ Prosper Web Solutions

Top 5 Tips for Successful Web Marketing

There are thousands of programmers, search engine specialist, graphic designers and we all have same goal. That is to create something that people will love, use and adapt too. But one main thing that many people forget about is marketing. Web is just like any other industry and requires good marketing; this article is going to be all about that.

1. Know Your Competition – just like any other industry, research other websites that are clear market leaders in what you want to do. Find out what they did to make them self’s successful, what are their flaws and what are their strengths, research every angel you can.

2. Know Your Statistics – When you know your competition find out what hits they are getting, what is the their conversation ration (how many hits it takes to convert to a potential lead). Find out what they are doing to get them. Use alexa.com or compete.com for statistics and rankings.

3. Know Your Selling Points -  Don’t hyde your selling points, talk about them! Show them on the main page, and explain what you can do for your clients and why they should use your service/product and not your competitors.

4. Point Of Sale – Make point of sale obvious, so user can always click it or find it. For example if you are selling some ones service, don’t hyde their number some where on Contact Page, show that number on every page, so client can always see it and can always call it.

5. Easy Navigation – Just like Point Of Sale, navigation must be obvious to use, make sure that website is easy to use. Make sure that shopping basket is always in the same obvious place. Make sure that website isn’t awkward to use. Get your business partners to test it or use it.

There isn’t a lot needed for a successful web business, or web presence. Many people over complicate things, just keep your business simple and clients will follow.

This was written by Zan Kavtaskin , Director of Prosper Web Solutions. Prosper Web Solutions is a web design Cheltenham .

Intermediate Search Engine Optimisation

Last week we have focused on Basic Search Engine Optimisation, this week we will be taking a step up and looking at more comprehensive ways of SEO.

I will be covering the following in this article:

• Dynamic / Static Links
• Alt Tags
• Robots
• Sitemap

As we have discussed in the previous article it is all about keywords and ensuring that your website is well described for search engines and for humans. Today we will focus on more in depth analysis of what search engines are looking at when they are crawling through your site, so lets start!

1. Dynamic / Static Links

   Dynamic Link: www.prosperwebsolutions.co.uk/gui.aspx?12938ds9828dj123d

   Static Link: www.prosperwebsolutions.co.uk/corporate-branding/

   Ok so whats the difference? Dynamic links don’t really give much information to search engine, where static links will tell them that web page is talking about (in this case it is corporate-branding). Also, Google use to ignore dynamic links, this is no longer the case. However it is still not healthy to have dynamic links as they can effect your web page rankings massively.

2. Alt Tags

   When you have images on your website don’t just add <img src=”logo.gif”/> but add a alt tag, this is good for accessibility and also Google will have some kind of idea what image is all about.  So do the following <img src=”logo.gif” alt=”your domain logo”/> this will also show image in the image search results when some one research for your domain logo.

3. Robots

   This is not very important, however it is good to tell search engines where to look and where not too. All you have to do is create text file document and upload it to your httpdocs folder. File should contain something like:

   User-agent: *

   Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml

   Disallow: /administration-section/

   This way Robots will know that they are allowed to spider the website, and they will see where sitemap is. Also they will know where it shouldn’t look as sensitive information might be in place.

   Robots page should be located in www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt

4. Sitemap

   Now this is very important, if you want all web pages to indexed and if you want to ensure that it is done quickly then you defiantly require sitemap.

   First thing to do is register here:

   https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&passive=true&nui=1&continue=http%3A//www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard&followup=http%3A//www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard&hl=en

   Sitemap should be located in the following area: www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

   As you noticed it should be .xml file, this is how you should write it:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
   <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
   <url>
     <loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/</loc>
     <lastmod>5/16/2008</lastmod>
     <priority>0.5</priority>
     <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   </url>
   <url>
     <loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/page1/</loc>
     <lastmod>5/19/2008</lastmod>
     <priority>0.5</priority>
     <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   </url>
   </urlset>

   You can literary take that and paste this it in to notepad and then save it as .xml . And just change www.youdmain.com and www.yourdomain.com/page1/ to your web pages. It is very simple but can make a significant difference to speed of indexing your website.

This was written by Zan Kavtaskin , Director of Prosper Web Solutions. Prosper Web Solutions is a web design Cheltenham .

LG Viewty (KU990) VS IPhone (Review)

There has been many rumours and arguments regarding these two phones. Lets just take a look at the features and draw up a conclusion.

LG Viewty Our Score 9.0

The Good:

• MP3 Player
• Full Size Touch Screen
• Internet Browser (can surf youtube, facebook, etc, works just like any normal PC browser would)
• 3G+ Internet Connection (loads web pages very quickly)
• PC Suite – you can use your phone as a internet modem
• 5 Mega Pixel Camera / Video Recorder – really high quality
• Picture Editing Software
• TV-OUT
• QWRTY Keyboard
• Phone Simply Doesn’t Crash!
• Phone charges while your uploading music on to it from your laptop
• Multitasking

The Bad:

• PC Suite “Music Manager” is slow when it comes to writing music on to your phone (however you can just take the memory card out and plug it in to your laptop and copy music over then it is mega quick)
• No Wi-Fi feature – however it does work on 3G+ so there is no real need for it, Ipone does have Wi – Fi only because it doesn’t support 3G.

IPhone Our Score 8.5

The Good:

• OS Leopard
• MP3 Player / IPod
• Synchronization With ITunes
• Safari - Internet Browser
• QWRTY Keyboard
• Phone charges while your uploading music on to it from your laptop
• WI FI Connection
• Multitasking
• Lots of different software

The Bad:

• 2 Mega pixel Camera
• No Video recoding
• Slow EDGE Connection
• Only available on O2 unless you buy it
• Very expensive handset

Conclusion:

For the money your are paying and for the current technology that is out there we have t face it and bow down to LG Viewty. I strongly believe that LG has done it, they have made IPhone killer. I can't stop using LG. Such a solid, easy to use, and amazing phone.

It has really quick internet connection, it doesn’t crash, takes amazing pictures, has a IPod style MP3 player. What more can you want? It does everything that IPhone does apart from Wi – Fi and ITunes synchronization.  This phone is just pleasure to use, and I am a person that is hard to impress! I am very impressed with this Phone, far more impressed then I was with IPhone.

IPhone is simply out of date only because it is using EDGE internet connection and it has 2 Mega pixel camera, that is about 3 years behind the current technology!

You can get LG Viewty on contract from Vodafone on £25 a month, now compare that to IPhone. I strongly believe that LG Viewty has not just met IPhone league but also gone beyond it.

LG has sold 310,000 models after 5 weeks of launch! It sold 6,300 units a day across Europe. However vocal Apple has kept figures to them selves. Clearly something is not right.

Written By:

Zan Kavtaskin - Director of Prosper Web Solutions . Prosper Web Solutions is a web design Cheltenham

Content Management Systems Issues

We have been looking around for a good Content Management System for a while and we have to say all of them fail in one way or the other. All we wanted to find was a system that will let our clients update their pages by just logging in and simply editing it.

We are running .NET on our servers so we have decided to move away from PHP and utilize as much as we can our resources. But we have been disappointed with most Content Management Systems out there are, for the following reasons:

1. Hard to use
2. Not Search Engine Optimized
3. Take a while to load

Hard To Use
Most content management systems like DotNetNuke have grown so much and forgot the main purpose of it existence. To give user control over the pages and let users simply change the content. If it takes a good while for a expert programmer to realise how to use it, how long will it take normal non computer literate person to use it?

When installing CMS like dotnetnuke which is the best open source ASP.NET CMS out there it fails on you. After doing file tests and checking that database connection is active when it comes to installation stage it fails. If you ask me that is poor testing. Once again they have grown it so much that they are forgetting about the main points.

Not Search Engine Optimized
It is confusing to see CMS and BLOGS for that matter that don’t produce sitemap.xml . This is in web standards and should be added as a normal feature but so many open source systems forget to do it, same goes for robots.txt. Sitemap.xml can be one of the most important things, if you are installing a CMS chances are that you are a large organisation. If that is the case sitemap is crucial for your website, it will speed up the process of indexing your web pages.

URL friendliness, to many CMS are trying to be smart and use AJAX to update web pages when some one clicks on URL. Now it is funky, however the content is missed! Even worst having a Global Identification Number.

Good:

www.prosperwebsolutions.co.uk/e-commerce

Bad:

www.prosperwebsolutions.co.uk/?gid=21298usd9232139898dw989832

Take a while to load
What we find is that all pages are generated each time different user goes on to the page, now that is fine. But what if you have hundreds of visitors? Pages should be compiled in to .html document. That way content is being sent and no processing is done on the server. This will cut the processing time beyond believe. Another solution is to activate a web catch however some CMS systems don’t support that.

Best free .NET CMS systems:

DotNetNuke – http://www.dotnetnuke.com/

Umbraco – http://www.umbraco.org/

These are the two that are very popular and seem to satisfy peoples needs, however both of them are not great.

Best free PHP CMS systems:

Joomla! -  http://www.joomla.com/

PHP Open -  http://www.phpopen.net/

These are the best open source CMS that are available for PHP and also are very popular, however once again they are not amazing, but ironically enough they are better then .NET CMS systems that are available out there. They are simply more flexible.

Prosper Web Solutions is releasing it is own CMS called socms.net in next few months, this CMS will be open source and will focus on issues that have been raised in this topic, it won’t be the best CMS out there but it will be simple to use and it will do basic functions that most companies want. Currently this CMS is being tested with Prosper Client Base, to ensure it has a reliable framework.

Written By:
Zan Kavtaskin - Director of Prosper Web Solutions . Prosper Web Solutions is a web design Cheltenham

Basic Search Engine Optimisation

Many web agencies out there forget about main purpose for the website and that is simply to generate more business and make more profit. But why so many people are so sceptical and say web marketing doesn’t work? There is an easy answerer; it is because they haven’t actually marketed their websites correctly.

So what does Search Engine Optimisation actually mean? In effect it means “making your websites easy to read and making sure that your website is targeted for certain keywords that will sell your products”

That is it really, there is no more to it. I will give you a little quick tutorial on how to target your market correctly.

Lets imagine that you a garden designer and you are based in Bath Spa UK. When it comes to selling your services you want to be found on Google when some one searches for you. But how do we do this and how do we know how?

• Ask your self, what you would put in to Google when you want to find some one. If you want to find a garden designer would you put “Garden Designer Bath”?  Think of what kind of search terms would you put in to Google to find your self.
• When you know what you want to be found for, review the search terms and see if you can come up with more keywords. For example instead of “Garden Designer Bath” have “Landscape Designer Bath”.
• Once you have collected your keywords have a look at your competition and see how many search results there are. See how competitive your search phrase is.
• Once you have done your analysis it is time to apply these keywords to your html.

Applying these keywords to your html is very easy all you have to do is the following:

• For the home page title don’t have “Home Page” but add something like “Garden Designers Bath Spa” *It is crucial that you do this for your index page*
• Add Meta Tags with description and keywords (make sure they are different on different pages , they should match the content on the page)
• When writing the content use “Garden” , “Design” , “Bath Spa” as much as you can, but don’t be silly with it. If you use it to much Google can pick up on that and then black list your domain name

That is it, for the basic Search Engine Optimisation. I will be writing next few articles that will be going more in to depth. But by simply doing these few easy things you are targeting your market and you are focusing on traffic that you really want. Remember it is all about being specific!

If you are a web master and you don’t know why you cant find your website at all,  then make sure that you have added your website to Google list:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

This was written by Zan Kavtaskin , Director of Prosper Web Solutions. Prosper Web Solutions is a website design Cheltenham .

dasBlog API Tutorial

We have been looking around for blogs for a while. We wanted something that would be hosted on .NET platform and something that will run smoothly using XML.  

So we have found dasBlog. This is what our Blog system is using and I have to say it works like a charm. Speed is great, and dasBlog has gave you great access to a portal, which enables you to manipulate your Blog. This way you can really take control in to your hands.

Question is: how do you use das Blog API web service?

I spent hours looking for a little tutorial just showing me how it is done, because I really didn’t have a clue. I am far from new to web services but I just couldn’t find anything. So I have decided to do a Blog post regarding this.

This tutorial will show you how to do a request, and get top 5 posts from your own blog using web service. You can then change your code and make it do different things.

• Go to http://dasblog.info/blogger.aspx
• This page gives you information about all web services that you can actually call!

• Then once you have your blog setup go to your blogger page. So http://www.yourcompany.com/blog/blogger.aspx
• This is your blog documentation page, and also this is the main web service point.

In order to get information from blogger.aspx page, you will need to post information in to it, you will need to use the following XML code for that:

• Once you have configured that XML post, you will need to post it to your blogger.aspx page. It is really that simple! There is nothing more I can say…

That is it! I am actualy not going to go in to details of how to do this using ASP.NET in this post. I will be talking more about this in my next post and I will also distribute some open source code.

Written:

Zan Kavtaskin – Director of Prosper Web Solutions . Prosper Web Solutions is a web design Cheltenham

ASP.NET VS PHP (Official Post)

After years and years of reading posts and looking at facts from both languages. I have decided to answer all the questions by using facts. Not my own opinion, but in facts,  no one cares what any one thinks, we live in commercial world and we need to look at this objectively. Some of these results will surprise people.  So, lets start.

Popularity:

Popularity of the keyword PHP: 8,720,000,000

Popularity of the keyword ASPX:  1,220,000,000

Let have a look at the statistics for the for both sites, as we can see PHP is getting around 40 Million of page views. ASP.NET website is getting 20 Million page views.

Right, this just explained popularity on the internet.

Now lets have a look at the reasons why ASP.NET is not as popular on the web and why PHP has more of the market share.

Languages History:

ASP.NET was launched in January 16 2002.

PHP was launched in June 8 1995

Just look at the numbers, php had ahead start in the market for the past 7 years of ASP.NET. PHP is the technology that has overtook  PERL.

Perl it self has been around for years, and reason why PHP has over turned the market was only because it had less overheads and used less memory and used more processing power. This made PHP a winner.

Industry Language uses:

ASP.NET is used with in large scale organisations such as totaljobs.com,  codeproject.com , dell.com , match.com , monster.com ,  nhs.com, and even londonstockexchange.com

PHP is used in organisations such as : yahoo.com, rackspace.com, imgaeshack.com, istockphoto.com, winamp.com and facebook.com

So we can clearly see that both languages are favoured by big boys. However, what does this actually tell us?

Putting Cards on the table:

Right, so we had a look at these facts, now, lets stop and think.

PHP has been running for  7 years more then ASP.NET,  PHP came to the market when internet was booming. It is the current market leader, lets face it.

However, is it a real market leader? Answere is no, here are the reasons why:

• In  these 13 years PHP didn’t come close to becoming pure Object Oriented Programming
• It has no clear structure of rules and regulations
• It has security issues
• It doesn’t really support business lawyers and logic layers
• It has no IDE

These are just few things that are negative, I can go on and on, however, I am not trying to say that ASP.NET is amazing neither.

Now lets look at ASP.NET, in the past 6 years ASP.NET came a long way. It has reached half the market share of the PHP just in 6 years. If you ask me that is preaty good going. What are the problems with ASP.NET?

• Doesn’t run on Linux (this is currently being worked on)

Lets look at the positive for PHP:

• It is free
• Runs on all Operating Systems
• Lots of code online that you can pick up and just work with
• Lots of support
• Huge community base
• It is based around C++ so it is easy to pick up if you have programmed already
• Lots of open source systems that are available for the download

These are just few things, I can go on and on, but I will stop, but lets face it. When you Google something on the web for php you will get answere for everything. This is because of 13 years of development and research, lots of solutions have been created and posted.

Lets have a look at the positive for ASP.NET

• Visual Studio
• Clear Structure
• Integrates with Microsoft Platform easily
• Multiple Language support so you can code in VB, C#,  J, C++, what ever you want really!
• .COM support and projects can be compiled with .DLL files.
• Clear code structure( when correctly implanted of course)
• Great Support
• Great Team Development Environment

Once again, I want to be fair so I will stop. I don’t want people to think that I am going for PHP or ASP.NET, I like both languages.

So, who is better or worst?

No one, both languages have found great place in the market and have closed that gap or have tried too. However, you need to ask this question differently.

Rephrase:  So when should use one and when should I use another?

Use PHP when:

• Your programmers know PHP and been working with it for years and they have library that they can use that will enhance the speed and productivity.
• You’re a large scale organisation and all of your files and fixes are in PHP
• You are starting to program and just want to learn some coding
• Your client wants his/her application in PHP
• You have Linux Servers

Use ASP.NET when:

• You have programmed in PHP for 2 years +
• You want enhanced productivity and cut down labour time
• You have Windows 2003 Servers
• You want to use SQL SERVER 2000 / 2005
• You want  detailed IDE (Visual Studio 2005)
• Your organisation uses ASP.NET in their company
• Your client wants you to use .NET technology

Conclusion:

One thing that I cant stand is when people start to argue about both languages. I hope this article will make people realise that there is no point arguing. Both languages are great.

Final facts:

ASP.NET is taking more and more share of the market, if ASP.NET can take over 20million of hits in 6 years. That means that they are doing something right.

ASP.NET is growing, and very quickly and rapidly. Of course there is growth in PHP and that is because development market is still growing, so both languages will be becoming even more popular then they currently are. However, remember, that most business run on Microsoft 2003 Servers, and company directors love SQL SERVER 2005 and they just generally love words like Clustered and .NET and Framework and Microsoft.

I am not going to go in to more detail, all I am going to say that is not language that makes language popular, It is the things that are based around it.

With .NET you get free things like:

Great programming environment like Visual Studio. Which includes add on’s like AJAX. You also get SQL EXPRESS 2005 for free. This just makes things so much easier it is unbelievable. There is also lots of Open Source software such as blogs, cms,  etc. 

With .PHP you get free things like:

Support, lots of open source applications. MySQL, PostgresSQL, Unfortunately there is no real good free IDE for PHP out there. You have to pay for them.

Final Conclusion:

When you look at your companies performance, and you look at how much you have spent on programming in PHP and how long it took to do things. You might see that it takes half the time in ASP.NET.

I am talking from my experience, and from experience from some of the large scale companies. They all say that they see massive improvement in productivity, and In the quality.

When it comes to programming for large scale corporations I would suggest to use ASP.NET because that is what it was built for.

When it comes to learning and programming for small enterprises then use PHP because it will be cheaper, only because PHP programmers seem to be cheaper then ASP.NET. (There is a massive shortage of .NET developers)

Written:

Zan Kavtaskin – Director of Prosper Web Solutions . Prosper Web Solutions is a website design agency based in Cheltenham .