Koebbe.com

I do a lot of coding at my job. Most of it is in PHP and MySQL. My projects are fairly visible in the company so I like to do my best at coding things properly and make them as slick as possible. I was never really good at organizing my code or choosing a coding convention and sticking with it. In addition, I’ve grown tired of typing the same three lines of code to get a MySQL row. I knew there had to be a PHP framework that would make coding easier, scalable, and give me a convention to stick with. Enter CodeIgniter…

CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework - a toolkit - for people who build web sites using PHP. Its goal is to enable you to develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.

I’ve also been getting on the AJAX bandwagon with the rest of geekdom. I started using Prototype and Script.aculo.us, which were very nice, but there was a lot of stuff I didn’t need in both of those. Recently I heard about a similar javascript package called MooTools. Just going to the website tells you this thing is very cool.

MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented javascript framework designed to make writing extensible and compatable code easier and faster. Mootools lets you get the job done efficiently and effectively.

Just a few useful tools for you web developers out there.

If you work at company that traps you in to using Windows, here’s something that may make life easier. I just ran across a little open source app that saves you from wasting time venturing in to your start menu to launch a program. Enter Launchy…

This little guy is my new best friend. It indexes directories you specify (i.e. Start Menu, Documents, etc) and allows you to just type in a few letters anywhere in the name of the file/program and launch the program or file.

I’ve been on a quest to find a good open source billing system to handle web hosting billing. I think I’ve found a winner phpBMS. This thing uses AJAX and is surprisingly comprehensive, from sales and clients, to order entry and task management. It’s worth a look if you are in the market.