Magento Developer Toolbar extension- Its Amazing

Professional magento developer toolbar with profiling, database queries, handles, event/observer overview, block nesting, requests and caching.

Be Professional, see what happens in the dark

The Mgt Developer Toolbar for magento is very useful for all developers and frontend guys. 
Many professional developers all over the world use this extension to find possible performance bottlenecks. 
You have an overview of the parse time, memory consumption and number of queries executed. 
It also gives you information about the Controller, Module and Action which is responsible for the current request. 
The advantage for frontend guys should also be mentioned, you get a complete overview 
how the blocks are rendered and which templates are used. This makes all block and template changes
 easier than ever before.

More info : http://www.mgt-commerce.com/magento-developer-toolbar.html

Saass.. Fun with CSS :)

Sass makes CSS fun again. Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It’s translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin. Sass has two syntaxes. The new main syntax (as of Sass 3) is known as “SCSS” (for “Sassy CSS”), and is a superset of CSS3’s syntax. This means that every valid CSS3 stylesheet is valid SCSS as well. SCSS files use the extension .scss. The second, older syntax is known as the indented syntax (or just “Sass”). Inspired by Haml’s terseness, it’s intended for people who prefer conciseness over similarity to CSS. Instead of brackets and semicolons, it uses the indentation of lines to specify blocks. Although no longer the primary syntax, the indented syntax will continue to be supported. Files in the indented syntax use the extension .sass. Reference : - http://sass-lang.com/

Cakephp With Facebook HipHop

A new revolution in the world of web development in PHP. You can now compile the code in C++ using the Facebook Hip Hop Compiler.

You can find more details at :-

Running CakePHP using the Facebook's HipHop compiler

Rails : Sweepers

The sweeper is a new mechanism inducted in rails which allows you to get around having a ton of expire_{page,action,fragment} calls in your code.It does this by moving all the work required to expire cached content into an ActionController::Caching::Sweeper subclass. This class is an observer and looks for changes to an object via callbacks, and when a change occurs it expires the caches associated with that object in an around or after filter.

Continuing with our Product controller example, we could rewrite it with a sweeper like this:

class ProductSweeper < ActionController::Caching::Sweeper observe Product # it keep watch on the Product Model # As soon as sweeper detects that any new Product was created call this def after_create(product) expire_cache_for(product) end # As soon as sweeper detects that a Product was updated call this def after_update(product) expire_cache_for(product) end # As soon as sweeper detects that a Product was deleted call this def after_destroy(product) expire_cache_for(product) end private def expire_cache_for(product) # Expire the index page now that we added a new product expire_page(:controller => 'products', :action => 'index')

# Expire a fragment
expire_fragment('all_available_products')
end
end

You may notice that the actual product gets passed to the sweeper, so if we were caching the edit action for each product, we could add an expire method which specifies the page we want to expire:

expire_action(:controller => 'products', :action => 'edit', :id => product)
Then we add it to our controller to tell it to call the sweeper when certain actions are called. So, if we wanted to expire the cached content for the list and edit actions when the create action was called, we could do the following:

class ProductsController < ActionController

before_filter :authenticate
caches_action :index
cache_sweeper :product_sweeper

def index
@products = Product.all
end

end

So just get rid of unnecessary caching and refresh the caching using sweepers mechanism.

ijab with ijabber under the hood of Openfire

What a fantastics chatting solution !!! Its works unimaginable. yes, its the webclient ijab (http://ijab.im) which works fantastics with jabber. No other chat can beat this solution. You can install the ijabber using openfire which provide the complete solution for managing all attributes and actions related to chat.

Both are opensource and available without any cost and very easy to install on the server.

References to both opensources:

(1)http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/

(2)http://code.google.com/p/ijab/


Have a happy and fast chatting :)

Cloud Computing Vs CDN ( Content Delivery Network )

There are many question which are arising regarding the servers. Which one is better and how long it will sustain ? . Currently two servers Cloud and CDN are majorly used in web Development. But what is the main difference between both ? The answer in nutshell is as below :-


The big difference is that cloud computing is a big group of servers in 1 data center building which is usually at one location. On the other hand CDN is also group of servers but distributed around the country so it allows web visitors a better and faster access to the website. For example if you're in Boston trying to access a server in California it can be faster to be hitting a server locally in Boston for the files. The CDN is usually able to support much larger traffic volumes since the speed is calculated based on location the traffic comes from.


So finally selection of the server will depends on your choice by looking the traffic on site and offcourse your budget also matters :)

Magento a hope that will change the world....

Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform offering complete flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality
of an online store.

Key Features :-

Site Management
Control multiple websites and stores from one Administration Panel with ability to share as much or as little information as needed
Web Services API for easy integration between Magento and any third-party application

Marketing Promotions and Tools
Flexible Coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories.

International Support
Multi-Lingual
Support for Multiple Currencies

Shipping
Shipping to multiple addresses in one order

Customer Accounts
Re-orders from account

Catalog Management
Batch Import and Export of catalog

Catalog Browsing
Layered / Faceted Navigation for filtering of products
Product comparisons