Someone, I forget whom, shared with me these two good CSS resources, and I thought I’d pass them along. The first is Make CSS3 Buttons That Are Extremely Fancy and the article explains exactly that. I’m not a graphics person, so being able to do something using only CSS is great for me (and being told exactly what to do is even better). A benefit of CSS buttons is that the user does not have to download the additional resources of all those extra images, especially when you factor in images for different states (hover et al.).

The other resource is ProCSSor, a CSS prettifier. It’s just a utility that you can drop a slew of CSS into and it will clean it up as you’d like. It will even work on CSS in an uploaded file or located on a provided URL.

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• What Were You Thinking? => Using JavaScript
• On the Web => Introduction to MongoDB
• On the Web => The Protocol-Relative URL
• On the Web => 10 Steps to Becoming a Great Web Developer
• On the Blog => My Yii Book Update
• On the Blog => Adobe’s Significant Flash and Flex Changes
• Q&A => How Do You Choose Between Competing Technologies?
• Q&A => How Do You Spend Time Between Projects?
• What is Larry Thinking => Starting a New Project
• Book Giveaway => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide” (4th Edition)
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design”

Last week, or thereabouts, Adobe announced that it was discontinuing support for Flash on mobile devices. This is, by all accounts, a wave of the white flag in Adobe’s battle against Apple and its iOS devices (if only Steve Jobs were alive today to celebrate). I didn’t think too much of that decision: it does make sense to use HTML5 or native apps for dynamic content to be run on mobile devices anyway. And Flash would still continue to run on desktops, where something like 99% of browsers have the plug-in and 90-some% of video is run through Flash. Flash is such a large component of Adobe’s various technologies that I can’t imagine Adobe leaving it behind.

And then Adobe announced today that it was offering Flex to the Apache Software Foundation (managers of the ubiquitous Apache Web server, among other projects).  Apache will need to vote on whether to accept Flex or not. This announcement does surprise me, as Flex is used not only for Flash creation, but also desktop and mobile application development via the AIR platform. Adobe says it will continue to support Flash and Flex, but clearly Adobe is moving more towards HTML5.

phpmaster recently posted an article titled Introduction to MongoDB. I’m not entirely sold on non-relational databases yet, in that while I can see how wonderfully beneficial they can be in many situations, they’re not as ubiquitously useful as all the hype would seem to suggest. But in any case, a good article like this one, which introduces MongoDB, shows how to install support for it in PHP (although the instructions are for Unix-like systems), and provides code for actually interacting with a MongoDB database is worth the time to read.

Some time back, I came across this excellent nugget of information that Paul Irish has put forth about the protocol-relative URL. I don’t want to reveal the details here (it’s a short article, and you ought to read it), but the gist is that there’s a very simple way to link CSS, images, JavaScript, and whatever other resources so that they’ll be served over HTTP on HTTP pages and provided over HTTPS on HTTPS pages. I wish I had thought to use this when I wrote my e-commerce book (instead of using two different header files)! Sometimes the simple solution is the most brilliant one…

I’ve received a few comments and questions lately about my intentions to write a book on the Yii framework. I’ve never formally discussed the idea, and so it seems like it’s about time I do so.

I first started using the Yii framework about two and half years ago. I’ve never been much of a framework person, but Yii really felt right to me, quite similar to Ruby on Rails, which I also always liked. Being a writer, after learning to use the framework, I wrote an introductory series on the subject, which has been quite popular. In all modesty, many have suggested it’s the best documentation available. In fact, the creator of Yii liked my series so much that he listed it prominently on the official Yii documentation page (it’s now under tutorials). Some time after writing that series, I started thinking about writing a full book on Yii, because that’s what I do.