One of the most common mistakes I see people make when talking about web architecture is with regards to MVC. Generally it comes down to a statement such as this:

It's a web app, so we have to use MVC. That way we separate the logic and presentation, which means keeping PHP out of our display layer. All the important projects do it that way.

Of course, such a statement is false. It demonstrates a lack of understanding about MVC, about web applications, about "important projects", and about software architecture in general. Let's try to clarify, with a little help from Wikipedia.

There are two things that tend to happen at the end of the year: Predictions about what the new year will hold that never come true, and new years resolutions that last until Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday. I'm not going to spend time on the first (at least this year), and I'm not going to be so lame and predictable as to call this a resolution so I avoid the curse of the second. That said, though, I am going to do something for the new year, and ask others to join me.

Announcing the Open Source Project of the Month!

In an earlier entry I talked about different character encodings and how Microsoft manages to break the rest of the world with theirs. Thanks to a chance reading of a SitePoint forum post, I have a little more information on the problem. At least now it has a proper name.

By far the most common idiom when using SQL from a web application (PHP or otherwise) is simply listing records. The standard logic looks something like this (give or take real templating):

That's all well and good, but in practice can be quite limiting. Why? Because you can't then group records, that is, display not one but several tables, one for each color. SQL, of course, offers a GROUP BY clause. That doesn't do what we want, however. GROUP BY is an aggregate clause, and is used for creating totals and summaries of records. We want to cluster records by a field that is not the ordering field, or a value that is calculated off of the record itself.

I've generally used two different methods for PHP-side grouping, one of them much cleaner and more flexible at the cost of a little performance.

So apparently I don't have an accent. The InterWeb said it, so it must be true!

A perennial problem for anyone in IT is the infernal beast known as "smart quotes". Smart quotes, also known as "curly quotes", refers to the angled apostrophe and quotation characters that are often used in print but are not found on any conventional keyboard. There's a number of problems with them. First of all, most people don't realize what they are. Then most people don't understand how they work. And finally, Microsoft broke them.

The great question of the day has been solved, and it is Emacs that wins.

Not that I use Emacs, mind you, but I've said for years that sooner or later, GNU/Linux would go away and be replaced by your choice of KDE/Linux (KDE having taken over so much functionality that all it needs is a kernel) and Emacs/Linux (Emacs already being almost an OS, except for missing a text editor). The only question was which would happen first.