August 18th, 2009
I thought I share this mini tutorial I put together on RegEx. It is meant to get you started under 5 minutes. hope you find it useful.
Rugular Expression (RegEx for short) is a way of specifying a certain amount of textual data. For example, “^X” means “a line that starts with the letter X”.
The simplest regular expression is the literal expression. The expression “Where are you?” matches the test “Where are you?”. Any literal, letter or digit, will match itself with few exceptions that we will talk about below. There is a certain set of literals that have special purpose in RegEx and it is those literals that give RegEx its power. These literals are called meta-characters. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Haitham Salawdeh Posted in Programming | No Comments »
August 6th, 2009
I am very interested in knowing how outsourcing helped companies save money. Furthermore, I would like to know how much of that saving was passed on to consumers; If there was saving did it happen at the cost of software quality and customer loyalty? My company has an offshore office in Palestine that is meant to serve the Middle East. The question is: should we offer offshore development services to our clients in the US? Our industry has been notorious for under delivering. I can’t help but being very skeptical when I hear positive examples of outsourced projects, and yes there are few of them. Adding social, political and physical barriers to the development of software is not going to help the industry as a whole to produce software on time and on budget.
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Posted by Haitham Salawdeh Posted in CTS, Consulting, Sales and Marketing | No Comments »
July 27th, 2009
Recently I ran into and issue implementing SEF (Search Engine Friendly) urls on the for a Joomla website hosted on IIS. Specifically, I wanted to disable the SEF modifications made by Joomla for the search component in the site. When the Joomla property for SEF urls is turned on, it will automatically convert all hyperlinks on the page into server friendly urls. However since the Joomla feature in IIS requires a filter to be placed on the site in order to decipher the url, it can cause problems when the links are dynamically created, and can cause the links to be undecipherable by the filter. This problem occured in the search component, where the search results contain hyperlinks that are dynamically created. Therefore it was required that the search engine friendly names conversion in Joomla be turned off for the search component. In order to do this I was forced a custom code change in the Joomla site, by tracking down where the SEF urls are created and disabling it for the search component. The following steps we executed on Joomla 1.5, using the built in component for SEF conversion in Joomla if you are using a newer version, a different component for SEF conversion, or your site is not hosted on IIS these changes may not apply.
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Posted by Brian Vosicky Posted in Technology, Tools | 1 Comment »
July 20th, 2009
A question was posed to me as to why so many developers neglected to use beneficial tools which help in data modeling, performance testing, stress testing, and security testing during the development cycle. I believe this is a result of several factors. First, developers and customers miscalculate the cost to benefit ratio. Performing data modeling, performance, stress, and security testing comes down to one question. What benefit does the application gain from the time and money investment? A majority of projects start small, and they do not take into account the possible growth and ultimate usage. Many customers are interested in two things a quick turn around and that their requirements at the time were met, but the problem is requirements constantly change and expand, which then exacerbates the shortsightedness in design and testing. With requirements contanstly changing it makes it hard to judge what benefit a tool might have towards your application. In conjunction with this it can be very hard to determine the cost of learning a new tool. With the cost of the tool being unknown and the benefit often underestimated, this will often result in it not being used.
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Posted by Brian Vosicky Posted in Tools | No Comments »
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