Why change the default Look and Feel? Aesthetics apart, every developer should change the default Look and Feel of NetBeans. Why? because it has an annoying bug. Here’s what happens: you’re pumping code in the NetBeans code editor like crazy. You need to switch to another window for a quick copy / paste from your eternal library of super code. You press ALT + TAB, you go to your other window,...

Zend Framework is currently one of the best MVC-based frameworks in the PHP world. Zend_Mail is part of Zend Framework and it provides the ability to easily send email messages. If you’re like me, most web applications you have developed are setup to use Google Apps as their email provider. Here’s how to send email messages via Gmail or Google Apps by using Zend_Mail. public function send()...

Introduction You are programming in PHP and you have an array variable that you’d like to explore at different execution paths. Of course, the best way is to use a PHP debugger like xdebug or Zend Debugger, but, what happens when you’re too lazy to install a debugger? What happens when you don’t want or can’t install a debugger and you just need to check the content of that...

Does the spam count in Gmail bother you? It certainly does. Are you too lazy to delete your spam messages every few minutes? Of course you are. Would you like to preserve your spam messages just in case they might contain a legitimate email? Of course you would love to. You hate using third party tools such as Greasemonkey scripts to accomplish this very simple task? Of course you do. Well, you’re...

What is URL Rewriting? URL rewriting provides shorter and more relevant-looking links to web pages on your site. This improves the readability and the search rankings of your URLs. For example, URL “a” can be rewritten as URL “b”. a) http://example.com/index.php?section=casting b) http://example.com/casting There are many articles on the web discussing the benefits of shorter...

The ubiquitous Hello World post is here to stay. For the sake of programming traditions, I’m not removing it. But I do promise that my next post will be more useful.