Unfortunately the title of this post is nonsensical. NoSQL isn’t any one thing, it’s a broad spectrum of emerging technologies. NoSQL could be used to describe just about any data store that isn’t a traditional database, and it turns out there are many flavours of databases.

I haven’t used any NoSQL product personally but I have the answers to some important questions:

Are these database systems proven and used in large scale productions?

They sure are.

Do they provide advantages over traditional RDBMS’s?

In some cases they are very interesting, in others there is debate as to whether they’re the right tool for the job.  Read more... (200 words, 1 image, estimated 48 secs reading time)

Lately we’ve been looking for ways to build custom web applications faster. Our existing software is great but it’s not quite up to the calibre of some of the frameworks out there. After deciding on using Symfony to build our next generation software, and loving it, I set out to wrap our existing software in Symfony. As it turns out that was fairly easy thanks to Symfony’s routing system.  Read more... (248 words, 1 image, estimated 60 secs reading time)

Google recently launched a new site layout for it’s search results page. Google dropped official support for IE6 on March 1st, 2010. This meant that Google could rearrange the results page to be both mobile friendly (without switching to their mobile version, iPhone users rejoice!) and make the page much, much faster to render by the browser. In this day and age of fast, inexpensive computing, that might not look like much, but it’s still an advantage for mobile users, and lets face it, you’re probably still supporting Windows XP on your mom’s 6 year old computer, or trying to send links to your sister’s spam ridden and slow laptop, right?  The less time we’ve gotta spend chewing on a page load, the better for everyone.  Read more... (314 words, 2 images, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)

I’ve recently needed to get longitude and latitude coordinates for several locations. I first went about it by getting the values from http://www.geonames.org/. This was difficult because it requires you convert degrees, minutes and seconds to the wgs84 format. This is no treat.

After some googling I discovered that it’s pretty simple to make a Google map with a pin on it which tells you the coordinates of the pin in the wgs84 format.

Here’s the code:

HTML

<p id="coords"></p>
<div id="map_canvas" style="height: 600px"></div>

Javascript

 
function gogmap() {
 
	var map,
		marker, 
		point = new GLatLng(52.482780222078205, -102.65625); // default position
 
	var posChange = function() {
		point = marker.getLatLng();
		document.getElementById('coords').innerHTML = "lat: " + point.lat() + "<br>lng: " + point.lng();
	};
 
	map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map_canvas"));
	map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
	map.addControl(new GNavLabelControl());
	map.setCenter(point, 4);
 
	marker = new GMarker(point, {draggable: true});
 
	GEvent.addListener(marker, "dragend", posChange);
 
	map.addOverlay(marker);		
 
	posChange();
}
 
gogmap();

Live Example

When you drag the pin to a new location the longitude and latitude below will update.  Read more... (154 words, 1 image, estimated 37 secs reading time)

Forms are something a web developer makes and maintains nearly every day. Despite their common occurrence they’re easy to do badly. Luckily they are something of a solved problem. There are many tools out there that help the PHP developer create forms including PEAR‘s HTML_QuickForm2, Zend Framework‘s Zend_Form, eZ Components‘s ezcInputForm, CodeIgniter‘s Form Helper, and many others. Having drunk the Symfony Kool-Aid and being pretty impressed with it I thought I would see if I could use their sfForm class in a non Symfony project.  Read more... (271 words, 1 image, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)