What do you need to know if you are interviewing for a job that involves Javascript development? What kind of expectations do employers have of candidates now that the state of client side development has been changed with the rise of asynchronous JavaScript and the often slick, supporting interfaces? These were questions I was asking myself after a friend pointed me to an interesting job posting over at Meebo that included some JavaScript puzzlers on logical operators, DOM oddities and… well that’s all I should say so as not to drop any hints. At any rate I thought...

After PHP 5.3, we can use DateInterval object or date_interval_create_from_date_string() function to add or subtract days,weeks,months or years to or from a DateObject.But prior to PHP 5.3,we cannot do this. If we want to achieve the same effect. We need to use some skills. Here is one:We can use strtotime() function to achieve this. For example:$date=date('Y-m-d',time());$datestamp=strtotime(date('Y-m-d',strtotime($date)).' +1 day'); $datestamp=strtotime(date('Y-m-d',strtotime($date)).' +1 week');  $datestamp=strtotime(date('Y-m-d',strtotime($date)).' +1 month');  Her...

DateInterval is (amongst others) a relatively new addition to the date extension in PHP 5.3. It allows to describe an interval in time, and you can perform actions with that interval. Basically, it allows to calculate with dates in a very easy way, and do even more fun stuff with it.Unfortunately no documentation exists today for DateInterval and friends, but PHP is open-source so you can easily have a peek at the code to see what’s happening under the engine. This is more or less what the documentation for DateInterval and some helper functions could look like:Prototype:DateInterval Da...

Given the background of Lars Bak, the Google engineer whose V8 JavaScript interpreter upended Firefox's claim on speed, it was reasonable to suspect Google's new Web development language might look a lot like Smalltalk. But that might have taken the Web in a strange and different direction. Today, on the day of a Web developers' conference in Denmark, Google and members of the Chromium open source development team raised the curtain on Dart, the company's bid for a new and somewhat more structured approach to Web programming.Making Dart work will require a new virtual machine, which puts ...

When manipulating the DOM, it's often useful to remove all child nodes from a specific element. This typically comes in handy when you're looking to replace the content of an element with a separate form element, such as an <input>, so the user can edit the actual value.Here's an example of something I recently created that illustrates my point:Get the Flash Player to see this player.These "dynamic form elements" are written to the page only when the user performs a certain action; in this case: clicking on a table cell.The HTML for the table cell ...

[Apple and Google have locked application discovery and distribution within their app stores. VisionMobile's Andreas Constantinou explains how Facebook is using the web to disintermediate Apple/Google and why the web needs a new leader].The platform duopoly.In just the space of 3 years, the mobile platforms landscape has changed from an election race to an oligarchy. The network effects at the heart of the Apple and Google business models have created formidable barriers to entry. The growth in device shipments and apps created seems to continue a relentless climb, showing no signs of develope...

I see a lot of people on forums and on my training courses asking about the best way (or any way) to manage dates stored in a MySQL database and used in PHP. Three options follow, but first the problem.PHP uses unix timestamps for all its date functionality. It has methods to convert these timestamps into pretty much any text format you could want but internally it uses the timestamp format. A timestamp is simply an integer. Specifically, it’s the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight on January 1st 1970 (greenwich mean time).MySQL has three date types f...

Getting started with web development isn’t easy. Looking back to when I started, the first few weeks were the toughest to stick with it. For someone who is new to text editors and the terminal – the installation process can be really overwhelming. I recently went through the process of helping some of my friends get set up with Ruby on Rails and after doing it a few times, I realized it would be helpful to write a post that others looking to get started could refer to.The following is not going to fully explain the steps (which at some point will be important to understand). Inst...