Chatting with Flex

Writing a robust chat client in Asynchronous JavaScript andXML (Ajax) is an exercise in pain management. Hazard pay should beinvolved. To start with, you need to account for all the variousbrowser versions, the vagaries of each of their object models. Andthen there are the browser bugs, like memory leaks, that show upwhen you’re making thousands of Ajax requests over hours. There isa better way: Adobe Flash.—by Jack Herrington

Writing a Custom WordPress Plugin

There are blogs in every corner of the Internet, writtenabout every topic under the sun. And for as many variations asthere are in blog content, there are differences in blogsthemselves, both in style and function. The only obstacles in theway of getting your blog to do what you want are the constraintscreated by the blogging code itself. This is where WordPressshines. When you want your blog to do something its originalcreator didn’t intend, you can extend the functionality with aplugin.—by James Q. Stansfield

Desert Island Jukebox

If you knew you were about to be stranded on a desertedisland for the rest of your life, which ten albums would be in yourjukebox?—by Richard Lynch

Case Study: A Million Products

Making a webshop is supposed to be easy. Making a webshopthat will continue to work with 800,000 products and rising, issomething entirely different. Our team was recently faced with thistask; this case study explains how we went about meeting thechallenge of bringing one of Belgium’s largest e-commerce sites upto date.—by James Cauwelier

Editorial: Trendspotting

It’s always fascinating to me to hear about the waysdevelopers put PHP to work in an enterprise context, and even moreso when minor trends appear to be emerging out of that anecdotalevidence. But this month, one of our authors went a stagefurther.—by Steph Fox

/etc: Web Bot Battle: Test Your Skillz!

Somewhere between a coding contest and a game, you’ll findWeb Bot Battle. Read all about it here—and thencome along and give it a try yourself!—by Paul Reinheimer

Test Pattern: The Perfect Storm

Take one inexperienced programmer with an itch to scratch.Throw in a handful of low-level control statements and a heavysprinkling of copy-and-paste. Delete nothing along the way. Theapplication might well work, but beware—it couldalso become the basis for a cautionary tale.—by Jeff Moore

exit(0): Nineteen Eighty-Private

Good developers are the laziest bunch of slobs!—by Marco Tabini