In my earlier post, I contributed my updated version to Google Adsense Sidebar Widget on Wordpress based on previous work by Mike Smullin. I received some comments about errors in implementing the widget. This weekend, as I mentioned earlier, I decided to take further investigation to know the root cause of the malfunction.
I compared two references i could find. The first is right from the dashboard of my Google Adsense publisher account and the later is Google’s documentation for Adsense API. There should be another reference from Mike Smullin’s own work but since he’s now charging for the plugin, I’d better have someone send me the plugin to be analyzed and synchronized with my update.
After reading the documentation and toying with my account, I’d like to provide some notes regarding google adsense implementation:
1. Google Adsense API
This API provides programmatical way to modify and manage the ads. It uses SOAP web service with available callbacks listed in its published WSDL. The API will enable a user to manage his adsense account without logging in into his Google Adsense account. Instead, the third party application communicates with Google server to update the modification executed by user while utilizing the application.
However, Wordpress widget expects simple configuration values for each of the widget. Rearchitecting existing widget to support SOAP communication is a bit out-of-boundary and redundant. I’ll explain this in the subsequent point. Continue reading
These days in the web 2.0 era, we are using XML extensively. We use xml on our browser, to represent the hypertext. We use xml in our most recent MS Word documents. We use XML in web services. We use XML in our AJAX applications. To the bigger scale, the enterprise, we also use XML in the service oriented architecture implementation.We fall onto XML as our first choice for universal data format. And also databases?
As a plain text data representation, XML should incur extra overhead for the size and processing time. Indexing XML documents is also another issue, not to mention providing relational data on top of XML documents. Building pure XML database is non-trivial, hence we hardly find implementation for such. However, given all the disadvantages of utilizing XML as the database, is it still possible to do basic database functionality for XML documents?
Fortunately, the answer is yes.
I provide a paper containing my survey to existing approaches to querying XML documents and achieving database functionality over XML documents. Although the structure of the paper may be inclined to academic domain, i think it will still be useful for developer who is looking for quick hindsight for such matter.
You can download the paper from the link below:
XML Query Processing and Query Languages: A Survey (376)
Fellow developers may have noted that Zend released their Zend Framework 1.5 (including the 1.5.1 branch) last March. As a person who was away from ZF development milestone for a while (and when i was back i noticed bunches of emails in the mailing list), it’s interesting for me to see the changes made in the framework. I come up with a slideshow presentation which is grabbed from the ZF homepage.
Interesting feature sets from this release are Open ID integration and the availability of Zend_Form. When I was building my application on the beta platform or the first stable release, creating advanced form with complex view was quite a problem. I will delve more into current source code and documentation and see the logic and approach behind this component. It will also be interesting in finding the approach for ajax interaction model. Regarding Open ID, it’s great that it’s finally bundled in the framework. I believe, Open ID will be more widely adopted and Zend has played its role by supporting the technology in its Framework.
Congratulations to all Zend Framework developers. I hope I will start contributing especially on solving the performance issues.
Finally PHP 4 is approaching its end of life. With the upcoming PHP 4.4.8 release, development on PHP 4 will be officially stopped. No more release will be shipped to end user. This is not very fresh news since this has been announced on php.net since July 2007.
Conquering Reluctancy To Upgrade
As open source project, PHP has enjoyed its growth through the support of its enthusiasts, name them web hosts and application developers, not to mention the wide use from end-users. Referring to Google Trends, PHP scores the second lagging behind java as the most queried programming languages. This comparison is taken as simple as possible, neglecting the most appropriate functional environment of each language.
Although the trend can’t lead us into final conclusion on the future of PHP, it’s interesting that just like other programming languages, PHP trend is negative. This may lead to additional question whether PHP still keeps or expands its audience or starts losing its grip.
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Javascript. Is it nightmare? I’m not a seasoned javascript developer myself but I can say that it’s sometimes nightmare especially when dealing with tedious DOM selection and cross browser compatibility workaround.
Good news is the javascript gurus out there always try to find new methods and best practices in dealing with javascript. Libraries and frameworks are developed and published. Best practices are evangelized. More tutorials are written. But still, for non programmers, it’s not that easy to get in touch and familiarized with javascript.
Until jquery comes.. (and you must believe me, I’m not associated with jquery team. I’m an independent writer).
What’s good with jquery? Will it suit your development platform, especially when building Web 2.0 where javascript is extensively deployed? You can read the following reasons and then decide yourself.
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