Web Development

FOSS Project Spotlight: the Codelobster IDE--a Free PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript Editor

Stanislav Ustimenko — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 14:01:43 +0000

The Codelobster free web language editor has been available for quite some time and has attracted many fans. It allows you to edit PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, and it highlights the syntax and provides hints for tags, functions and their parameters. This editor deals with files that contain mixed content easily as well.

If you insert PHP code in your HTML template, the editor correctly highlights both HTML tags and PHP functions. The same applies to CSS and JavaScript code, which is contained in HTML files. The program also includes an auto-completion function, which greatly speeds up work for programmers and eliminates the possibility of errors.

The Codelobster IDE provides contextual help on all supported programming languages, and it uses the most up-to-date documentation, downloading it from official sites so you quickly can get a description of any HTML tag, CSS attribute, PHP or JavaScript function by pressing the F1 key.

The built-in PHP debugger allows you to execute PHP scripts step by step, sequentially moving through the lines of code. You can assign check points, view the process of the work of loops and monitor the values of all variables during the execution of a script.

You can view the HTML templates directly in the editor, highlight the interesting elements on a page and explore the associated CSS styles. The HTML and CSS inspector works by following the well known FireBug principle.

Other useful functions and features of the IDE include:

Pair-highlighting of parentheses and tags—you'll never need to count parentheses or quotation marks; the editor takes care of it for you.
Highlighting of blocks, selection and collapsing of code snippets, bookmarks to facilitate navigation on edited files, recognition and building of the complete structure of PHP projects—all of these functions ensure easy work with projects of any scale.
Support for 17 user-interface languages, including English, German, Russian, Spanish, French and more.
The program works on the following operating systems: Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, macOS, Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian.

The professional version of the Codelobster IDE provides programmers with even more features.

For example, you can work with projects on a remote server with the use of the built-in FTP client. You can edit the selected files, preview the results and then synchronize the changes with the files on the hosting side.

In addition, the professional version includes an extensive set of plugins:

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How-to Take the Plunge and Replace the "I'm not a programmer" Mantra

Reuven M. Lerner — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 16:15:14 +0000

by Reuven M. Lerner

For the past few years, the bulk of my consulting work has been in corporate training. Many of the participants in my courses are people who have been developing software for years already and simply want to learn new languages and techniques. But, there are also those who are new to programming; they realize the potential that programming skills can have for their careers and are excited to learn, but they aren't necessarily sure where to start.

Moreover, given how pervasive websites (not to mention mobile apps) are in the modern world, people don't merely want to program. They want to build web applications. They want to build mobile apps. They want to start to control their computers and not just be passive users.

And, although Linux Journal readers tend to be people in technical careers and positions, many of you are likely similar to the network engineers, system administrators, sales engineers and data scientists who use Linux and open-source software all the time, but haven't ever considered themselves programmers.

So in this article, I'm encouraging you to try to learn to program, to get started and to build some simple web applications. I'm not going to say that it's something you can do in a few minutes; you definitely will need to learn a number of different skills. But, you know what? Everyone, including those who have been programming for years, constantly needs to learn new things and improve skills to keep up with ever-changing technology.

So if you're ready for a lifetime of excitement, and also for never-ending learning and improvement, I definitely encourage you to take the plunge and replace the "I'm not a programmer" mantra with a sense that yes, you can indeed do it.

Language

Perhaps the biggest question that newcomers (and potential newcomers) to programming ask me is this: "What language should I learn?"

They ask this for a few different reasons. First, they want a language that will be practical for their work. Second, they want a language that is fairly easy to use. Third, they want a language that has the capabilities that are of interest to them.

So, let me get a few things out of the way. You almost inevitably will need to learn a few different programming languages during the course of your career. All of them are equally capable. However, some languages have steeper learning curves than others, expecting you to come in with more knowledge than others.

I also should add that many newcomers to programming aren't coming in with zero background. They're arriving with some programming skills, such as bash scripting. Bash is a language, and I've seen all sorts of amazing things done with it, but as a general rule, I'm talking about higher-level and more sophisticated languages that can do more with less code.

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Integrating Web Applications with Apache

Andy Carlson — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 12:36:27 +0000

by Andy Carlson

When you deploy a web application, how do end users access it? Often web applications are set behind a gateway device through which end users can access it. One of the popular products to act as an application gateway on Linux is the Apache Web Server. Although it can function as a normal web server, it also has the ability to connect through it to other web servers.

In this article, I discuss what it takes to integrate a web application into Apache. This includes integrating the HTTP protocol functionality, customizing content to render properly and reusing pieces of configuration. Once you understand those basic bits of functionality, you'll have the tools you need to maximize your web applications' usability. So, let's get started!

Crash Course in RegEx

A mechanism that I use throughout this article that might need a brief introduction is Regular Expressions (or regex). Regex is used to define a text pattern to search for within a URL or to find and replace text within content, such as HTML or JavaScript. The text processing command sed uses regex to do searches and substitutions.

For each example below there will be three parts: input, regex pattern and output. The pattern will be applied to the input text and determine the value of the output text.

Example 1:


Input:
  Name: Frank Sinatra
  Genre: Jazz
  Name: 2Pac
  Genre: Rap
  Name: Reel Big Fish
  Genre: Ska

Regex pattern: "^Name: "

Output:
  Name: Frank Sinatra
  Name: 2Pac
  Name: Reel Big Fish

This example searches the input text for text that matches the pattern "^Name: ". This pattern says, "Look for the text 'Name: ' at the beginning of each line." Since there are two lines that begin with that text, only those two lines are returned. While "^" represents the beginning of a line, "$" represents the end of a line. So if you were to apply the pattern "a$", two lines would be returned (Frank Sinatra and Ska). Let's expand on that example and use the input from Example 1 with a new pattern.

Example 2:


Regex pattern: "^Name: [0-9]"

Output:
  Name: 2Pac

As you can see, I've taken the original regex pattern and added [0-9] to the end. This will search for a single character that can be any number from 0 to 9, which is why "2Pac" was the only line returned. You also can specify a range with alphabetic characters ([a-z] or [A-Z]).

Along with pattern selection, you also can do substitution with regex. There are two formats for regex substitutions: s|pattern|replace|modifier or s/pattern/replace/modifier. In Apache, I find it easier to use the pipe-style substitution. Example 3 uses the same input with a new pattern.

Example 3:

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Celtra's AdCreator Platform

James Gray — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 11:53:17 +0000

by James Gray

Mobile advertising campaigns today are often hampered by broken, non-viewable ads with a poor UX experience. An important open-source initiative aimed at solving this problem and making the web better for all is the AMP Project, which enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms.

Now, Celtra AdCreator, a SaaS creative management platform for digital advertising, integrates support for the creation of AMP Ads, a new standard for making ads faster, lighter and more secure. Celtra foresees a transformative power in this new product, because AMP helps pave the way for better creative, a significantly improved customer experience and higher mobile ad engagement rates and resulting ROI. Celtra AdCreator overcomes the barriers of cost of data and slow network speed that make it difficult to engage with viewers meaningfully.

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nginx and WordPress

Reuven M. Lerner — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 12:13:35 +0000

by Reuven M. Lerner

In my last article, I took an initial look at nginx, the high-performance open-source HTTP that uses a single process and a single thread to service a large number of requests. nginx was designed for speed and scalability, as opposed to Apache, which was designed to maximize flexibility and configuration. But through the years, nginx has become increasingly flexible as well, with a growing number of plugins and modules that can be used to customize its configuration. Between the performance, increasingly good documentation and convenience, it's no wonder nginx has been increasingly popular.

It's also no surprise that WordPress, the open-source blogging and CMS platform, has become hugely popular. I've heard people say that 10% of websites are now run using WordPress. Even if that's not precisely true, there's no doubt that a huge number of sites are powered by WordPress. I'm a mostly satisfied WordPress user, having converted my main site and my two ebook sites to it in the past year after years of using it to power my blog.

So, I thought it would be interesting to demonstrate how easy it is to set up WordPress with nginx, given the popularity of each of these systems alone as well as together. In my last article, I described how you can set up a plain-vanilla PHP system with nginx; WordPress is a bit more complex, but less than you might think. Starting with a bare-bones Linux installation, let's walk through the configuration needed to get WordPress up and running.

The Basics

In order to install WordPress and nginx together, you're going to need three basic software systems installed: WordPress, nginx and MySQL. The first two are pretty obvious, given this article's goal; the third is a byproduct of using WordPress, which works exclusively with MySQL.

So, on my Ubuntu Linux machine, I would run the following:


$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client nginx-core
 ↪php5-cli php5-fpm php5-mysql

This installs a very large number of packages, but it will give you the core of what you need to get your system up and running. Notice that you're not installing WordPress here, so that you can install it manually, using the source code. Indeed, installing WordPress via apt-get also means installing Apache; although it's certainly possible to undo this choice, the benefits of installing WordPress on your own outweigh those of doing it via a package manager.

You will, as part of this installation, need to choose a password for your MySQL root user. This is an important part of security on your system, so do try to use a strong password.

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Let's Automate Let's Encrypt

Andrei Lukovenko — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 10:08:36 +0000

by Andrei Lukovenko

HTTPS is a small island of security in this insecure world, and in this day and age, there is absolutely no reason not to have it on every Web site you host. Up until last year, there was just a single last excuse: purchasing certificates was kind of pricey. That probably was not a big deal for enterprises; however, if you routinely host a dozen Web sites, each with multiple subdomains, and have to pay for each certificate out of your own dear pocket—well, that quickly could become a burden.

Now you have no more excuses. Enter Let's Encrypt a free Certificate Authority that officially left Beta status in April 2016.

Aside from being totally free, there is another special thing about Let's Encrypt certificates: they don't last long. Currently all certificates issued by Let's Encrypt are valid for only 90 days, and you should expect that someday this term will become even shorter. Although this short lifespan definitely creates a much higher level of security, many people consider it as an inconvenience, and I've seen people going back from using Let's Encrypt to buying certificates from commercial certificate authorities for this very reason.

Of course, if you are running multiple Web sites, having to renew several certificates manually every three months quickly could become annoying to say the least. Some day you even may forget (and you will regret that forgetfulness). Let's leave routines to computers, right?

If you are using Apache under a Debian-based distribution, Let's Encrypt already has you covered with the libaugeas0 package, and it is capable of both issuing and renewing certificates. If, like me, you prefer nginx and want to have zero-downtime automatic certificate updates with industrial-grade encryption, keep reading. I'm going to show you how to get there.

First things first—some assumptions and requirements:

You are running the nginx Web server/load balancer, and you are going to use it for TLS termination (that's a fancy, but technically correct way of saying "nginx will handle all this HTTPS stuff").
nginx serves several Web sites, and you want HTTPS on all of them, and you are not going to pay a single dime.
You also want to get the highest grade on the industry standard for SSL tests—SSL Lab's SSL server test.
You do not enjoy the idea of running some not-so-well-sandboxed third-party code on your server, and you would rather have this code in a Docker container.
Naturally, you are lazy (or experienced) enough, so you want to write some scripts that will re-issue all certificates way before they expire.

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nginx

Reuven M. Lerner — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 13:30:00 +0000

by Reuven M. Lerner

Engineers love to think that they make decisions based on pure logic and merit. But of course, everyone has biases in terms of programming languages, editors and other technologies—biases that probably can be defended in technical terms, but that often come down to an emotional argument as much as a technical one. (Except in the case of Emacs, of course, which is clearly the best editor by all objective standards.) The problem with such biases is that they can cause people to make choices and decisions that feel comfortable, but aren't necessarily right.

Case in point: I've been using the Apache HTTP server for many years now. Indeed, you could say that I've been using Apache since before it was even called "Apache"—what started as the original NCSA HTTP server, and then the patched server that some enterprising open-source developers distributed, and finally the Apache Foundation-backed open-source colossus that everyone recognizes, and even relies on, today—doing much more than just producing HTTP servers.

Apache's genius was its modularity. You could, with minimal effort, configure Apache to use a custom configuration of modules. If you wanted to have a full-featured server with tons of debugging and diagnostics, you could do that. If you wanted to have high-level languages, such as Perl and Tcl, embedded inside your server for high-speed Web applications, you could do that. If you needed the ability to match, analyze and rewrite every part of an HTTP transaction, you could do that, with mod_rewrite. And of course, there were third-party modules as well.

Things got even better through the years as the Web got larger, and Web sites were expected to do more and more. Scalability became an important issue, and Apache handled it with (not surprisingly) a variety of modules that implemented different back-end schemes. You could have the traditional mix of processes, or use threads, or combinations of the two.

Beyond the flexibility, it was clear that Apache httpd was well maintained, well documented and stable. Installation was easy, upgrades were easy—really, everything was easy.

So, it's no surprise that Apache always has been my first choice when it comes to HTTP servers. And yet, I always knew in the back of my mind that I really should spend more time checking out other options. In particular, one alternative stood out—nginx.

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Analyzing Data

Reuven M. Lerner — Mon, 15 Aug 2016 15:30:00 +0000

by Reuven M. Lerner

My first Web-related job was in 1995, developing Web applications for a number of properties at Time Warner. When I first started there, we had a handful of programmers and managers handling all of the tasks. But over time, as happens in all growing companies and organizations, we started to specialize. One of the developers took charge of the logfiles—storing them and then performing some basic analysis on them.

Although I recognized that this work was important, it took years for me to realize that in some ways, his job was more important to the business than the applications that I was writing. The developer who worked on these logfiles, and who analyzed them for our bosses, made it possible to know who was using our system, what they were viewing and using, where they came from, and what correlations we could find among the different data points provided by the logs. Sure, we were providing the content and the applications that brought people to the site, but it was the person analyzing the logfiles who was ensuring that our work was paying for itself and meeting our business goals.

During the past decade, I've come to appreciate the need for such analysis even more, as the Web has exploded in popularity, as businesses have learned to use such data to increase profitability and as data science has become a growing field. We're now drowning in data, and being able to make sense of it using analytical tools and libraries is more important than ever.

In this article, I start an exploration of data science using Python, and how you can take something as ordinary as an Apache logfile and extract information from it to understand your visitors better and what they do. In upcoming articles, I plan to cover how you can use data science methods to analyze this logfile in a number of different ways, gaining insights into the raw data it provides and answering questions about your Web application. I'll describe how this analysis also can be presented to your managers and clients, providing powerful visualizations of the analysis you've performed.

Data Science and Python

I studied something called "learning sciences" in graduate school. While I was there, we often would joke that any discipline that includes the word "science" in its name is probably not a real science. Regardless of whether data science is a "real" science, it is a large, important and growing field—one that allows businesses to make decisions based on the data they have gathered. The more data, and the more intelligently you use that data, the better you'll be able to predict your users' and customers' wants and needs.

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Client-Side Performance

Reuven M. Lerner — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 16:00:00 +0000

by Reuven M. Lerner

In past articles, I've covered different ways to understand, analyze and improve the performance of your web applications. I've shown that between your network connections, server hardware, database design and HTTP server configuration, you can change and improve the performance of your web application—well, sort of. Web applications, when they first started, were dynamic only on the server side. Sure, they output HTML—and later, CSS and JavaScript—but the overwhelming majority of the processing and computation took place on the server.

This model, of course, has changed dramatically in the last decade, to such a degree that you now accurately can claim to be a web developer and work almost exclusively in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with little or no server-side component. Entire MVC frameworks, such as Ember.js, Angular.js and React.js, assume that you'll be writing your application in JavaScript and provide you with the objects and infrastructure necessary for doing so.

If you're worried about the performance of your web application, you need to concern yourself not only with what happens on the server, but also with what happens in the browser. Some commercial performance-monitoring solutions already take this into account, allowing you to see how long it takes for elements to render, and then to execute, on your users' browsers. However, there is also no shortage of open-source tools available for you to check and improve the ways in which your client-side programs are executing.

This month, I'm concluding this exploration of web application performance with a survey of things to keep in mind, as well as tools that help ensure that you're actually doing what you should be.

Client-Side Considerations

Client-side code is written in JavaScript. The code, whether inline in