specializing in digital media technologies

A couple of months ago I started hearing about the Merb framework, an alternative to the Rails framework for creating Web sites in Ruby. As you may know, Rails came under some fire for not scaling well; Twitter, in particular, had several problems. (Although I would argue that the demands of a site like Twitter are probably in the top 0.1% of all sites, so this concern may not be an issue for most Web sites.) Version 2 of Rails specifically addressed these concerns, but still, people started to look around for alternatives, including not using Ruby at all. This is where Merb came in: a smaller and faster Ruby framework. I hadn’t yet gotten to play with Merb but was going to add it to my framework-comparison homework. That may be a moot point now, as it was just announced that Merb and Rails will work together on the next version of both frameworks. Version 3 of Rails will incorporate some of Merb’s best attributes, resulting in a better Ruby framework for Web development and ending a minor feud within the Ruby community. So the next version of Merb will be Rails 3.0 and the next version of Rails will be influenced by Merb: what does this mean? (continue reading…)

There won’t be any new posts for the next week as I’m planning on taking some time off to enjoy the holidays. I will post some more before the end of the year, though, and I have already started some very rough drafts. The topics to be covered over the next month or so include better error reporting, choosing development tools (IDE’s and text editors), and some notes on the 2008 Adobe MAX conference and my first foray into Flex and Flex Builder. Thanks for your interest in what I have to say and happy holidays to those that celebrate holidays around this time of year.

In my PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickStart Guide book I demonstrate how to paginate query results over multiple pages like you’d see on a search results page. Here’s an image from that example:

The code in that example creates links for every page. If you have hundreds or more returned results, this isn’t practical. The solution is to rewrite the code that creates the links so that it only shows a few links at a time. (continue reading…)