light weight images for the web

When posting images to your website, it is important to ensure that they are optimised for the web.

Yahoo has launched a very useful service: http://www.smushit.com

Which shrinks images nicely (even those which are optimised through photyoshop web optimiser!)

Worth bookmarking.

popularity of programming languages

TIOBE, a company founded in 2000, collects statistics on the popularity of programming languages. They recently released a new ranking:



Interesting to see that PHP is doing very well, with progressive C on the rise (Iphone App programming language).

continuous integration

Countinuous integration is the last buzz word... keep reading it everywehre.

What is continuous integration
Continuous integration is a software development process, which ensures that bugs which have been detected earlier are not coming back into the code un-noticed.

It relies on a few principles:

• use of a version control: each time someone carries out a commit, a new build a done automatically in the background
• automatic build: as seen above, a build can be automatically triggered.
• automatic testing: the bug raised and fixed previously must have a matching unit test which will automatically test whether it is still fixed or not.

Continuous integration and PHP
A few tools can be useful to get started with "continuous integration".

• http://www.simpletest.org: Easier to use that PHPUnit, you can this software to implement and test your unit tests.
  
• http://phing.info/trac/: Tool to automate the build.
• 
  

Test Driven Development (TDD)
The idea behind TDD is to write the test before starting coding. The objective of the code should be to get the test passing.

This can be nicely applied to continuous integration: whenever a bug is raised:
1) Write the unit test for it, which currently fails
2) Write the fix.

The idea is that the tester could actually build the unit test**, so that the developer can still focus on development.

Note **:It is worth considering integration testing also, using selenium RC for instance.