Beyond Coding

Latest release: v1.2.3

Initially I was going to wait for my Layerful Framework (a transparent layering framework for Kohana) to mature before releasing its bundled modules. However, since this Authlite module can be used independently to Layerful, I am releasing it now.

What is Authlite

Authlite is a user authentication module for Kohana.

What’s the difference between Authlite and Auth?

Kohana comes with an official Auth module which does exactly what was described in the last paragraph, so why another module then?

It is because Authlite offers greater flexibilty. Please read the features outlined below to find more.

Features

• Legacy database compatibility
• Configurable database columns
• Multiple instances of Authlite
• Does not enforce user roles
• Auth-like syntax and usage
• Lightweight

Read the rest of this entry »

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Latest release: v1.3

If you don’t already know, endless scroll (or infinite scrolling) is a popular technique among web 2.0 sites such as Google Reader and Live Image Search, where instead of paging through items using the traditional pagination technique, the page just keeps loading with new items attached to the end.

I have developed a jQuery plugin to easily achieve this.

Requirement: jQuery 1.2+

The plugin is tested with jQuery 1.2.6 and 1.3.

There are a few options to customise the behaviour of this plugin:

• bottomPixels (integer) – the number of pixels from the bottom of the page that triggers the event
• fireOnce (boolean) – only fire once until the execution of the current event is completed
• fireDelay (integer) – delay the subsequent firing, in milliseconds. 0 or false to disable delay.
• loader (string) – HTML loader
• data (string) – plain HTML data
• insertAfter (string) – jQuery selector syntax: where to put the loader as well as the plain HTML data
• callback (function) – callback function, accepets one argument: fire sequence (the number of times the event triggered during the current page session)
• resetCounter (function) – resets the fire sequence counter if the function returns true, this function could also perform hook actions since it is applied at the start of the event

Read the rest of this entry »

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Merry Christmas to all our readers! We hope you have a safe and fun time. You’ve no doubt worked hard all year so enjoy the holiday season and we look forward to brining you some great content in business and tech in 2009… :)

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Just to be clear, this is NOT a fanboyism post nor do I encourage the debate between which language is superior. My personal belief is to use the appropriate tool for appropriate projects.

PHP Pros

• Widely available libraries (including PEAR and PECL)
• An absolutely outstanding online manual
• Relatively easy to learn (can hack together some code without deep understanding of the language)
• Widely used (easy to find clients, etc)
• Most if not all control panels have PHP integration
• Development packages (XAMPP, WAMP, MAMP, LAMP, etc)
• C style syntax (easier transition for people with C/C++/Java background)
• Powerful array feature (Ruby’s equivalent to PHP’s associative array is Hash, which is not interchangeable with array)
• PhpDoc is better than RDoc (this might be because I am too used to PhpDoc)

Ruby Pros

• Fully object oriented
• Rake (Ruby’s Make)
• RubyGem (Ruby’s apt/yum)
• Code blocks
• ‘Ghost’ classes
• Modules (aka namespace/package, PHP 5.3 will have namespace too, but with much uglier syntax)
• lambda functions (PHP 5.3 will have this too, but not as powerful)
• Children-aware parent classes (’inherited’ hook)
• Multi-inheritance through Mixins (PHP is single-inheritance)
• Ruby 1.9 is unicode friendly (PHP 6 will be)
• For what I do, Ruby on Rails > all PHP frameworks combined
• Regular Expression built into the language core

I am pretty sure there’s heaps of pros for both PHP and Ruby missing from the list, but at least it gives you a rough idea on what to look for if you are not very familiar with them.

Please share your experience with us too (and I will update this post accordingly). :)

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It’s funny how a company the size of Telstra can have such bad usability on such a basic part of their web site. Take for example, where users can log in to pay their bills or check their account:

Tabbing through the form takes you from Username to Forgot your username, instead of going from Username to Password. When choosing your tab sequence, always go for the order that the majority of users will be using the majority of the time.

To make matters worse on the Telstra login, when you hit enter after typing your Username and Password, it doesn’t submit the form. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve waited a few seconds before realising.

Not as serious, but why have the Register button the same size and style as the Login button…?

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I came across an ad for Sumo Salad the other day (a “healthy fast food” chain here in Australia):

www.sumosalad.com/sumo_ad.html

It’s a good play on words making Mac a Big Mac, but overall very unoriginal and rather boring after the first “hello” lines. How can they blatantly copy the Mac ads so much (especially the music) – I know it’s a parody but you have to draw the line somewhere.

I don’t know if Apple would be happy having “Mac” in this ad as the bloated, fat, slow kid… they wouldn’t want people to associate actual Macs with bloat and slowness would they? :)

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