The number of people capable of building a web site is growing daily (I said capable, I didn’t say good 
. Something else that is also growing along side this is the number of web based applications being built. More and more developers/people with some know how are devoting time to producing some kind of application that uses a web based language like ASP or PHP. The hard part about building something that uses a server side script like PHP is that it is impossible to test your application with out access to a web server. I suppose you could just upload it to an active web site and test it live on the internet so to speak. Would you be honestly comfortable releasing something that hadn’t been tested? It would be all too easy for some one to find an exploit to use that causes serious problems. I’d say it’s much easier to have some way of testing this on your local network, that way if you have no internet access for some reason at least you can keep working
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Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two
of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box
with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do
you think this is?”
One advisor, an Electrical Engineer, answered first. “It is a
toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded
computer for it?” The advisor: “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I
would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and
quantifies its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow
white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as
the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would
turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial
value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it
would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and
I’ll show you a working prototype.”
One of the biggest problems we have in our office is accessing data about all of our clients. As the company has developed over the years various systems and databases have been put in place to hold data about our clients. As you can imagine this can be a problem as some information you need is in one system but some the other part of it is held in yet another database. Recently I have been working on a way to marry all this information together. I’m looking at running this through a php web interface and a mysql database. Continue reading »