₦airaland Forum

Hey , i am sure you are reading this article because you are  either interested in learning web development  or improving your experiences; whatever the case may be, you are welcome. I am an advocate of open source technology and so contributing to the development of these technology is a hubby. It's a fact that learning a new technology is not an easy task but the secret to learning any new technology is by practical experience. That way you begin to see the value of what you are learning and how best to apply what you have learned.

I run a blog that  i wish to use to help anyone with web development problems.If your problem spans these domain ( xhtml , html , php , css , javascript, ajax ,url-rewriting ,object oriented programming, code optimization,patterns as it applies to web development, front and backend validation,regular expressions ,mysql optimization,classes, database design or modelling, entity-relationships etc) be my guest.

Post your questions on my blog at www.youbanize.com , and i will get back to you. When posting your questions please be specific.

For the experience programmers in the house i think its time we stop talking grammar and start sharing our ideas with those coming behind us.
That way we will see our shortcomings and try to upgrade; The greatest mistake a coder will make is to be complacent about his programming level. If you are confident about your skills i invite you to my blog to take up challanges and   have a real test of your skills.

I respect you all  and perhaps i can learn from the skills of veterans in the house.

Hello programmers, it has been a while i posted here; well , i have been busy doing some real code, for my company and at the same time doing some research work on online payment engine. I must say that i am really disappointed with the payment engines we have on ground at the moment not because they are not doing well but because i found them really prone to futuristic attacks. My point is  they lack real security as regards real transaction processing. I have worked with the eTransact as well as Interswitch(The current market dominating payment engine), i have integrated a number of sites with these payment engines ( i will be sharing my experiences about integration with eTransacts and Interswitch payment engine in my blog  http://www.youbanize.com).I am surprised that in all, the concept of secure transaction is less considered. I expected the payment gateways to provide apis for developers to hook up with and process transaction but what you are given is a document with over 90 error codes you have to test on return and some sample code you have to customize for usage. I expected stuff like CURL ,SOAP (Although Interswitch WebPAY uses nuSOAP) or XML_RPC, or RESTful transactions. Well i can understand the fact that not everyone may be knowledgeable in using this tools but i find them really impressive and time saving.Having a site running behind secure http(https), does not imply that it is secure, if you doubt what i am saying check out slashdot, and read up the article on how the biggest search engine email application's CAPTCHA code validation was cracked- Google GMail; was it not running behind https?
Hey for your information , the first female programmer i have come in contact with is the person in charge of the Interswitch payment integration and the second is the girl sitting besides me in the office. Well they are good i must say, but we need more of them to challenge male programmers.

cdeveloper but my friends call me Ama.

hey i just came across this write up ; well i have an up and running school management system , capability of handling online payment using the interswitch payment gateway or etransact payment gateway if you are interested mail me at ozala24@yahoo.com.
It has a lot of features incorporated into it.

Hey i like it when people try to brainstorm on ideas and not when they tell you that you are trying to achieve something that has already been done by someone.
When it comes to building a social networking site you have to do a whole lot of planning.It is not like the normal sites you just sit down and build without some planning for optimization, framework etc. I know a lot about building social sites because i have done a couple research on it and i have figured that it is not something that can be done with real planning.
For instance what kind of database column type would you us to store the id of users? what type of application architecture do you intend to us? would you like to build your own architecture or borrow from the works of great guys out there?
These are just a few things you have to consider when building a social networking site and of course you will have to do a lot of integration with existing social networking site this will require you to build solid API that would integrate with theirs.
Oh before i forget , when creating a user table you will need to use BIGINT for the user ID column, facebook did not realize this until the had over a million users with their system. So i encourage you to go on with the project i will support you in my own little way;

Would like the coders in this forum to take a look at what i have done with the bulletin board i configured lately and leave a feedback or comment
check it out here www.youbanize.com
would appreciate your comments
Thanks

Would like your comments on what i have done with the bulletin board i configured myself, please review the bulletin board and leave your comment there,
check it out on www.youbanize.com
would appreciate your comments
thanks,

Web development has gone a long way that it looks bizzare trying to catch u with all the latest innovation that is taking place on the web.One of such innovation is the concept of 3-tiers architecture developement. The 3-tiers architecture development is the process of structuring application in such a way that the parts of the application are totally independent of each other.These 3-tiers are often referred to as
*The presentation layer or logic
*The business layer or logic
*The data access layer or logic
These architecture is very close to MVC architecture which stands for Model-View-Controller architecture, how ever there is are differences between them.
The 3-tier architecture provides a way of structuring your application such that the interation among them is as follows
Presentation logic Only communicates with the Business logic and the Business logic is the only layer that can communicate with the Data access layer; The business layer is the only layer that communicates with the other two layers.

#The Presentation Layer is usually the visible part of the application. this is usually the GUI for web applications.

#The Business Layer is usaully the application logic that you want your application to implment. That is the solution to the problems for which you took the initiative to implement.
#The data access layers deals with the databases
One will often wonder why it is important to adopt a programming methodology as the 3-tiers architecture. Well one of the outstanding reason is that it allows for application development using different technology and without minding the kind of database engine that would be used.Imaging this senario, you have built a sparkling application and two months later your manager in the phone asking you that due to some circumstances beyond BLA BLA BLA the organization would not want to switch from a MySQL engine to say the great Oracle. what would you do? bring down the site and recode again using the Oracle API for your database and modifying almost all the files that has to access database.
Some gang of 4 programmers figured a way to deal with such problem and termed it the 3-tiers architecture.
The 3-tiers architecture allows a group of programmers that are expert in certain technologies to build application that can be coupled in to a working system, using the 3-tiers principles. Let me illustrate how they can go about doing this.
The gurus in CSS,XSL,XHTML will be giving the task of design an elegant interface with knowing anything about the underlying codes that would be interact with the GUI all the have to do is to build templates using templating system or XML and XSL,
The expert coders will handle both the business logic layer and the data access layers.However when it comes with the data access layer the will usually abstract that layer so that it is not tied down to any specific Database API. This they can achieve using classes.
When this parts are coupled together you have an application that is easily maintenable.
Lets say 1 year after you did the application using 3-tiers, the manager is again on the phone wanting you to switch from MySQL to that fire brand Oracle, all you have to do is change the Data access layer with out touching the other parts, or your are the GUI designer and the same manager calls again to tell you that they wan you to upgrade to Web 2.0 GUI , all you have to do is change the Presentation layer. Still further suppose that business game plan has changed due to competition and you are again called to effect the changes , al you need to do is change the Business layer with out changing either the Presentation layer or Data access layer.
In these i see a wisdom of saving yourself some recoding hours and ability to upgrade your application without much work.

Hey Webmaster, i would like the good guys in here to tell me how or the cost of obtaining a private sms number like 2134 etc with the leading mobile networks in the country . if any one has done this before pleas share your experience

Hey i have been i Jos all along until recently i moved to Lagos, doing web application development for a company. If you need a good coder back i Jos you do not need to go far, just get yourself to Unijos and ask for Daser Sunday at the Natural Science lab. When you find him tell him that Ama referred you to him and he will attend to You. if you do not know where Unijos is send me a mail at ozala24@yahoo.com

It would really be a bad idea for a coder to marry a coder because from experience it would be a disaster. I work for a company and we have a flat where i and three other programmers stay. last weekend we were so busy that one of us forgot that he had a kettle on a gas cooker, by the time we realized that something was smelling in the flat; Low and behold our sparkling kettle had be turned into an aluminum paper on the gas cooker.It was that close, the entire flat would have been in flame.

I remember how frustrated i was trying to build my site and keep getting power outage and at a point i decided i was done with the power thing. i picked up my plane sheets which i still have with me got down to biz, writing building my site layout on papers using DIVs and CSS after two days of consistent work, i was done with my site and i did not border again with the power thing cos all i do whenever they decided to flash the light was to type in my code and save it quickly. I was doing that with the off and on of this power guys until i was done with it. Just a little adjustment did i do and my site was up and slick.
I am used to building my site purely from code view and that gives my the power to place thing apropriately on each page. I am not familiar with Dreamweaver, cos the first time i used it it crashed my system, so i stopped using it .

Hey , You need not drop out of school. it is kind of like stupid to do that, you will not be the Bill Gate of our time. relax, one thing at a time. you need to go through the rigor of academic stress to prepare your mind for what you really want to do. This would be a time to really think and choose what is feeling for your live. Live is not always rosy anyway. You could get on with your career in banking stuff and still come out top, but if you feel that you could be cool with coding, well welcome to the world of programming were you stretch your imagination beyond what you see around you. and start looking at things from the eyes of a programmer. We programmers have the task seeing the beauty of solving problems through our programs and our duty is to make life easy for others.
I am a coder in a number of development languages and i am still striving to learn more. I could code in PHP, Python,Javascript, Java, HTML,Ajax and a whole lot of them. I am currently working for a company that does e-portal development.
So if you think that coding is your calling take some time to figure things out for your self. Get your degree cert first, no company would want to pick up a guy that does not have a cert with him. When you have that under your belt , then you could then start with the coding thing. It is not really easy to start off but i could tell you that once you are able to scale through the inertia , you are on your way to becoming a developer.

Hey coders what are we bragging about in here, PHP is This .NET is That, Java is Them, Open Source is Boo and on and on we go bragging about things that are very irrelevant. I am an open source advocate and i do most of my development in it. Personally i have a strong dislike for using open source pre-packaged application because it does not give you room to understand the philosophy of a language. Someone once said that learning a programming language does not only ends with learning the syntax and semantics, but more importantly, understanding the philosophy of the language; that way you could sit down and develop applications that people will look at and marvel at the concept behind it, One such application that i have taking time to look at the programming concept is Joomla. I must commend the brains behind that application because that is what i called an real application, every single line of code they wrote had a reason for it and the architecture of Joomla is something those of us who profess to be programmers should study in depth.
The problem is we want to learn programming just to use the knowledge to make money, which is very much ok, but it is a wrong reason for wanting to code. Just imagine that Joomla was to be built by a Nigerian coder, he would not be thinking what he would contribute to the developers community but how much he would make from selling it. The majority of the western developers code for the sake of imprinting there names in history and that is why the do things that we are not likely to do.

I recalled i posted sometime back about building an online payment system that is independent of all those big e-payment giants; it is a concept that would take time to build, but how many of us in the house would be willing to work collaboratively on it? How many would honestly work on it for the sake of delivering us from the powerful monopolistic players in the market that would squeeze every dine from us just to integrate our applications with there gateway and not have ulterior motive of hijacking to code when it is near completion.
It is rather unfortunate. If only we would think like the likes of Eric Raymond ( Open source evangelist), Kevin Mitnick ( Greatest hacker of our time) and the rest who used the languages they have learned to create what was not, then we would not sit here and be bragging about what language we know but be trudging down the street like the Brain in Pinky and The Brain , planning how to take over the world.

Hey man what you are facing ,others have faced it and i would want to believe that you probably used javascript  or so. Well when it comes to web 2.0 you have to build and test in almost all browsers you could lay your hands on. Particularly those that are very popular IE and of course the most beloved Firefox. Gone are the days when you build sites with one browser in mind . Building a true web 2.0 entails  not RAD(Rapid Application Development) it involves careful planning. This planning has to do with determining the client browser before hand and render the appropriate interface that is suitable for that client.It is rather tedious , but the work is finally up and running, you sit back and marvel at the work you have done.For this you would some kind DOM hacking  better known as DOM manipulation using Javascript. But unfortunately, a lot of us done like bringing Javascript in to the picture of web development, too bad, everything has its place and i must tell you if you are ever going to do a  near perfection web 2.0, you would need to learn not how to do it but how to do it better. I have written a number of Javascript related articule that is commonly used in web 2.0 particularly, patterns in Javascript to help in handling issues of this kind. You could check it out on http://www.javascriptrev..com , I am still putting out some more on that.
For now welcome to the world of real web programming where everything that glitters is not always gold.

Baron de Rothschild was right when he said that the Eigth wonders of the world is compound interest. It can work wonders for a small investor who is prepared to wait and see his or her money grow. As the Japanese proverb says,"Money grows on the tree of patience".The more you learn about investing and the more care you take to develop a sound investment plan, the less likely it is that you will be caught between those nasty twins-greed and fear.
I took my time to research on what shares is all about and what i came out with is something i think would be of some help to some of you who have been asking questions about shares and want to know what it is all about.
You will find in my blog http://www.ozala..com tones of information that  would get you informed about shares and how you could go about investing in it. I hope that this work of mine would be of some help to a lot of people in the house and perhaps someday you would tell the story of how an ordinary research work changed your life for good
When that happens do not forget to tell us in the house.

Baron de Rothschild was right when he said that the Eigth wonders of the world is compound interest. It can work wonders for a small investor who is prepared to wait and see his or her money grow. As the Japanese proverb says,"Money grows on the tree of patience".The more you learn about investing and the more care you take to develop a sound investment plan, the less likely it is that you will be caught between those nasty twins-greed and fear.
I took my time to research on what shares is all about and what i came out with is something i think would be of some help to some of you who have been asking questions about shares and want to know what it is all about.
You will find in my blog http://www.ozala..com tones of information that  would get you informed about shares and how you could go about investing in it. I hope that this work of mine would be of some help to a lot of people in the house and perhaps someday you would tell the story of how an ordinary research work changed your life for good
When that happens do not forget to tell us in the house.

Baron de Rothschild was right when he said that the Eigth wonders of the world is compound interest. It can work wonders for a small investor who is prepared to wait and see his or her money grow. As the Japanese proverb says,"Money grows on the tree of patience".The more you learn about investing and the more care you take to develop a sound investment plan, the less likely it is that you will be caught between those nasty twins-greed and fear.
I took my time to research on what shares is all about and what i came out with is something i think would be of some help to some of you who have been asking questions about shares and want to know what it is all about.
You will find in my blog http://www.ozala..com tones of information that  would get you informed about shares and how you could go about investing in it. I hope that this work of mine would be of some help to a lot of people in the house and perhaps someday you would tell the story of how an ordinary research work changed your life for good
When that happens do not forget to tell us in the house.

Baron de Rothschild was right when he said that the Eigth wonders of the world is compound interest. It can work wonders for a small investor who is prepared to wait and see his or her money grow. As the Japanese proverb says,"Money grows on the tree of patience".The more you learn about investing and the more care you take to develop a sound investment plan, the less likely it is that you will be caught between those nasty twins-greed and fear.
I took my time to research on what shares is all about and what i came out with is something i think would be of some help to some of you who have been asking questions about shares and want to know what it is all about.
You will find in my blog http://www.ozala..com tones of information that  would get you informed about shares and how you could go about investing in it. I hope that this work of mine would be of some help to a lot of people in the house and perhaps someday you would tell the story of how an ordinary research work changed your life for good
When that happens do not forget to tell us in the house.

Baron de Rothschild was right when he said that the Eigth wonders of the world is compound interest. It can work wonders for a small investor who is prepared to wait and see his or her money grow. As the Japanese proverb says,"Money grows on the tree of patience".The more you learn about investing and the more care you take to develop a sound investment plan, the less likely it is that you will be caught between those nasty twins-greed and fear.
I took my time to research on what shares is all about and what i came out with is something i think would be of some help to some of you who have been asking questions about shares and want to know what it is all about.
You will find in my blog http://www.ozala..com tones of information that  would get you informed about shares and how you could go about investing in it. I hope that this work of mine would be of some help to a lot of people in the house and perhaps someday you would tell the story of how an ordinary research work changed your life for good
When that happens do not forget to tell us in the house.

Baron de Rothschild was right when he said that the Eigth wonders of the world is compound interest. It can work wonders for a small investor who is prepared to wait and see his or her money grow. As the Japanese proverb says,"Money grows on the tree of patience".The more you learn about investing and the more care you take to develop a sound investment plan, the less likely it is that you will be caught between those nasty twins-greed and fear.
I took my time to research on what shares is all about and what i came out with is something i think would be of some help to some of you who have been asking questions about shares and want to know what it is all about.
You will find in my blog http://www.ozala..com tones of information that  would get you informed about shares and how you could go about investing in it. I hope that this work of mine would be of some help to a lot of people in the house and perhaps someday you would tell the story of how an ordinary research work changed your life for good
When that happens do not forget to tell us in the house.

Baron de Rothschild was right when he said that the Eigth wonders of the world is compound interest. It can work wonders for a small investor who is prepared to wait and see his or her money grow. As the Japanese proverb says,"Money grows on the tree of patience".The more you learn about investing and the more care you take to develop a sound investment plan, the less likely it is that you will be caught between those nasty twins-greed and fear.
I took my time to research on what shares is all about and what i came out with is something i think would be of some help to some of you who have been asking questions about shares and want to know what it is all about.
You will find in my blog http://www.ozala..com tones of information that  would get you informed about shares and how you could go about investing in it. I hope that this work of mine would be of some help to a lot of people in the house and perhaps someday you would tell the story of how an ordinary research work changed your life for good
When that happens do not forget to tell us in the house.

Baron de Rothschild was right when he said that the Eigth wonders of the world is compound interest. It can work wonders for a small investor who is prepared to wait and see his or her money grow. As the Japanese proverb says,"Money grows on the tree of patience".The more you learn about investing and the more care you take to develop a sound investment plan, the less likely it is that you will be caught between those nasty twins-greed and fear.
I took my time to research on what shares is all about and what i came out with is something i think would be of some help to some of you who have been asking questions about shares and want to know what it is all about.
You will find in my blog http://www.ozala..com tones of information that  would get you informed about shares and how you could go about investing in it. I hope that this work of mine would be of some help to a lot of people in the house and perhaps someday you would tell the story of how an ordinary research work changed your life for good
When that happens do not forget to tell us in the house.

I created this Google Group for those who are PHP freaks, not could you post challenging problems to the group, but also you could get challenged by helping in solving any posted problem. This will not only be helpful to those who are new to PHP development but also to those who are veterans, for you get a chance to flex your PHP muscle by dealing with the posted problems  You could visit the group at:
   http://groups.google.com/group/phpdigest

the groups name is PHPDigest

Hello Nairalanders,
i will be looking at how the langauge javascript allows you to accomplish the same task in a number of different ways and how you can take alternative approaches to object-oriented programming by using concepts from functional programming.The truth is you can apply design pattern concepts in your Javascript programming. In a couple of articles that follows i will be discussing briefly the following design patterns as it concerns javascript with functional example to give you a concrete example of each of them:
The Factory pattern
The Bridge pattern
The Composite pattern
The Facade pattern
The Adapter pattern
The Decorator pattern
The Flyweight pattern
The Proxy pattern
The Observer pattern
The Command pattern
The Chain of Responsibility pattern

Keep a date with me in my blog http://javascriptrev..com ,
while i take you through the world of javascript design patterns

Sometimes it is often a hard thing to select a particular hosting company for your site; you get to see all kinds of services, cpanel,50 MySQL Databases or unlimited, PHP vs4 or vs5, Debian or windows OS, the list is so much that you get confused if you do not take your time to review  and compare other web hosting companies. I have seen web hosting companies with a face price as little as $4.95/Month and this looked great to you because you are likely to pay for one year hosting service which will cost you roughly $60. Now Imagine after you upload your site and there was a problem that is not likely to be from your codes  and you complain to them and the refer you to their tech guys who will tell you to give then 24hours to fix what ever problem it is only for that 24hours to turn in to eternity. It is not a good feeling at all, especially when your site should have commenced its purpose.
Against this back drop i did some findings on the things that a web hosting company should have on ground before you consider hosting with then. There are basically 7 things to checkout in a hosting company before you think of having then as you host company. This is particularly for those of us that host on LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP). i have written an article on this and you can read about it in my blog  http://www.krisama..com . I hope it will help newbie webmaster on there way to hosting their first site live on the world wide web

Sometimes it is often a hard thing to select a particular hosting company for your site; you get to see all kinds of services, cpanel,50 MySQL Databases or unlimited, PHP vs4 or vs5, Debian or windows OS, the list is so much that you get confused if you do not take your time to review  and compare other web hosting companies. I have seen web hosting companies with a face price as little as $4.95/Month and this looked great to you because you are likely to pay for one year hosting service which will cost you roughly $60. Now Imagine after you upload your site and there was a problem that is not likely to be from your codes  and you complain to them and the refer you to their tech guys who will tell you to give then 24hours to fix what ever problem it is only for that 24hours to turn in to eternity. It is not a good feeling at all, especially when your site should have commenced its purpose.
Against this back drop i did some findings on the things that a web hosting company should have on ground before you consider hosting with then. There are basically 7 things to checkout in a hosting company before you think of having then as you host company. This is particularly for those of us that host on LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP). i have written an article on this and you can read about it in my blog  www.krisama..com . I hope it will help newbie webmaster on there way to hosting their first site live on the world wide web

Joomla is not really rigid like you said it has space for expansion , meaning you can adding in you own code and have you functionality built in to it. Joomla 1.5 has provided developers like us the opportunity to create our own separate code and add it in to Joomla as a component , the process is really not difficult, just a couple of classes, that comply with the Joomla architecture and that is all you have to do.

House , has anyone of you used VTN payment system before? if so how is there services and what is the price for integrating it to a site.

Quite impressive but first we need to know what language you are going to use to implement this web services before we can contribute our own part. And just a little advice , i think it would be a good idea to host the project in a public or private place where developers eithere registered or not can look at the project framework and work on it

Hey i like this discussion and i have been studying these CMS from my work place for a while and i realized that i had once made that same judgement that Drupal is better of than Joomla, only to realize that the reverse is the case.
A little history on Joomla. Joomla as a CMS was an offshoot of Mambo, A CMS that was first developed by an Australian company called Miro back in 2005. When the CMS gained popularity the company decided to have a commercialize version of it as well as an open source version of it, a BIG MISTAKE BY THEM !, anyway , they were to do the official announcement in September 2006.
Problem started when the announcement was over and the team of developers who had worked on the project right from the onset were sadly left out. YES!!! it sounds too good to be true, but it happened. The team of developers were baffled but did not said anything until the next day. They decided to opt for the open source version and to cut the long story short, the did an overhaul of the entire application and a couple things followed which you can find in their site, and finally Joomla was born. and today it is one of the most used open source CMS.
It has gone through a lot of changes over the years , right now they are at the 1.5 version of it while Mambo is still lagging behind. Joomla is a powerful CMS with a lot of capabilities, it is extensible meaning you can build your own application on top of its framework. To do that you would have to understand terms like Component,Modules, Extensions,Plug-ins etc. You can customize it because the developers has abstracted a lot of things in it to allow for customization.
Even Google had arranged student PHP programmers in there Google Summer of Code to come up with a very good extension for the Joomla CMS, six of this extension are proposed and five of this proposals have been completed.You can check the php official site to find out what the extensions are. JUST A GOSSIP!! Google guys a paying each of this student $4,500 cash for their work.
To me i think it is the best CMS system, if you are interested in knowing more about it and how you can build on its framework, i have a very good book that is written about the CMS. To get it you have to pay me , let me see, N5000 raise to power zero minus one .


Just email me at chris4ama@excite.com