CakePHP uses the Prototype Javascript library for its ajax helper class but I've come to prefer jQuery. Prototype is a fine library too but I've just gotten used to jQuery.

A web application I'm working on needed a ttw html editor so I grabbed TinyMCE and copied in some of the example code and everything seemed to work fine at first glance. Unfortunately TinyMCE has an issue with jQuery's $(document).ready function and it also has an issue with saving via ajax in CakePHP.

There's a helpful page on the Bakery that outlines some issues you'll run into trying to get CakePHP & Prototype working with TinyMCE but it's a little out of date now (I'm using CakePHP 1.2RC1, TinyMCE 3.09 and jQuery 1.2.6 at the moment). I'll go through examples that illustrate how I solved the two problems I ran in to but I'm not going to explain everything you need to do ajax submissions with CakePHP.

CakePHP is a really nice MVC framework I've been using for a project I'm working on. I've been using one of the 1.2 betas for what seems like forever but I just now saw they've got a Release Candidate out as of a couple days ago. The MVC pattern fits a whole lot of applications or acts as glue for a lot of web apps where the main goals don't fit MVC. I find that CakePHP is fantastic for getting a lot of the monotonous code out of your way so you can focus your efforts on the important stuff.

I've always thought growing grass was a terrible idea. As a kid I was pretty practical and I didn't see any benefit to having a green lawn full. I was also pretty well aware of the amount of effort required to maintain the lawn at home growing up since the mower was often my job. I hated mowing it and my parents weren't even really big lawn freaks. We had weeds and dandelions and bare patches. I always marveled at the crazy amount of time and effort our neighbours across the street wasted on keeping their yard green and presentable.

Now I've grown up and I feel pretty much the same way. It might not make my neighbours happy but at least I didn't follow through with my plan to pave it and paint it green. As a child I assumed the problem was that people wanted a large green square in front of their homes and concrete seemed to be a very practical solution to that problem.

Getting together a good development environment for PHP websites isn't that hard any more. On a Windows machine, I recommend a pretty simple approach. Install Xampp, install Eclipse PDT, install XDebug. For bonus points set up Subversion and get TortiseSVN (or, I guess, whatever other version control works for you).

I'll give a quick rundown here on how I set up a development environment on a Windows machine, I tested it as I was writing it and I don't think it took but 2 hours.

The SVG Open is shaping up fast. The call for papers has been out there for a while now but if you're quick you can still present a paper or run a workshop but the deadline to submit for papers and courses is April 18 and that'll be here before you know it. The SVG Open is the conference for people doing SVG.

Google I/O looks like it's right up my alley. I was surprised to see Steve Souders is presenting there. He's the author of YSlow and Yahoo! was printing his 14 tips for speeding up website front-end performance on cards for Blogher last year (under the unusual title of "How to be a Better Binary Babe"). I have used YSlow to improve my own sites' performance though I definitely don't get an A on all of them yet. I'd love to hear what else he has to say on the subject.

On Pavlov.net talking about some improvements in memory handling on Firefox 3:
It isn’t reasonable to expect all those authors to write code to manually break the cycles themselves.

This reminded me immediately of an MSDN article that took a decidedly different stance on pretty much the same problem in Internet Explorer:

Here's a quick tip for PHP error reporting and display in development.

When a project is in the early stages of development you want to see all the error information you can. You probably want E_STRICT on especially when you're starting from scratch, to help avoid relying on deprecated behaviour. The E_STRICT flag is only available as of PHP 5 and is not included in E_ALL until PHP 5.2 (there's a little disagreement on php.net between the definition of E_ALL in this table and the earlier note about error_reporting on the same page).

In an early development project you also don't want to have to keep tailing log files to see the error messages. That's a pretty sure way to miss errors. So you want to set the display_errors flag on. You also want to control this on a per-project basis, since some projects will have legacy bugs that you're not fixing right now and those can be left spouting errors to logs until someday in the future when you decide to fix them.

Not all time is created equal. I've started getting up a lot earlier lately and I've found that for me the hours from 6 am to about 10:30 can be really productive. I have a pretty easy time getting focused and if I can get myself in front of a project then I really take off and get things done. Compare that to the early afternoon from, say, 1 until 3 pm and the afternoon version of me seems to be asleep by comparison. I'm unfocused and mentally wander around looking for shiny objects.

Usually I have to get on a plane to get to really talk to anyone else that blogs. We won't make it out to Vancouver for Northern Voice this year, but we did go last February. Then there was BlogHer in Chicago last year and San Jose the year before. Come to think of it I've been doing this blogging thing for a few years now. I've never really considered myself a typical blogger though.