Web Development

Category for articles related to web development

Serializing and Deserializing XML Through a URL Endpoint in C#

Recently, at the company I work for, I had to merge two very different web sites together. While both use C#, that is where they pretty much stopped in similarity. We were exploring ways to have them talk to one another very plainly and transmit only minimal amounts of data. One website was a store which was built around the idea of digital products and it had to talk ...

My Experience With The Wireframe Tool MockingBird

Recently I have been put in charge of a company's design of new mobile site. I have been doing web design for quite a few years now and have been doing some mobile dev a fair bit recently as well. As part of this new project I wanted to get down some quick website wireframes that I could present to the senior staff, so they could make the crucial decisions. ...

The Anatomy of Sliders and Scrollers

Everywhere you go on the web you see some sort of slider or scrolling widget on the page. You see a lot of them on blogs advertising the latest posts, you see them on event pages showing shots of the audience and speakers and you even see them on software company homepages showing screenshots of the their latest software release. Sure you can get a ton of different ones from ...

Tips for Building HTML Emails

If you have ever tried your hand at building an HTML email you may have quickly discovered that a lot of the techniques you use for the desktop/mobile web simply don't work. Designing HTML formatted emails these days, and have them work on the plethora of email clients out there flawlessly, is quite a chore. It makes you feel like you are designing with one arm tied behind your back ...

Book Review: PHP 5 in Practice

PHP 5 in Practice is a PHP recipe book from Elliott White III and Jonathan D. Eisenhamer. Its most recent printing was in 2007 and is part of the "Developer's Library" series from Sams Publishing. At 456 pages in length, this book is a bit shorter than some of the other books I have reviewed over the past several months. I have become a big fan of the Developer's Library ...

The Basics of Passing Values From JavaScript to PHP and Back

One of the common questions I often run into from new programmers to JavaScript or PHP is how to pass values back and forth between the two. The quagmire is that JavaScript is a client side language (most of the time) and PHP is a server-side language. Once you know how the process works when someone submits some data on the front end, and how it is manipulated and returned ...