Web Application Development Guidelines

  • February 27, 2010
  • James Skemp
While Web application development is just as complex as other application development, if not more so, it's fairly difficult to find information on best practices while doing Web development. In order to move towards implementation of Subversion, I needed to write up documentation on how we'd use it. After a couple drafts, which I ended up scrapping almost completely, I came up with the below. In the interest of sharing, I've included the full document below, after removing the few instances where I had to specify a non-Subversion application (our help desk application).

Read More

What I'd like to see in 201X in regard to browsers

  • December 9, 2009
  • James Skemp
Situation 1: WebKit Microsoft drops all active development on Internet Explorer 9. Instead, they throw their full support (development team) behind WebKit. Apple, with Safari, and Google, with Chrome, are already behind WebKit. Apple's implementation on Windows, via Safari for Windows, is shoddy at best, and Google's Chrome is a completely slimmed down version. By getting Microsoft's support behind the engine you have an experienced team that has already developed for Windows.

Read More

Steps to setting up a Windows Server 2003 Web Server on VirtualBox

  • October 24, 2009
  • James Skemp
The following goes through the steps needed to setup Windows Server 2003, with Web server capabilities (IIS 6 in this instance), on a Sun VirtualBox virtual machine. Why Windows Server 2003 when Server 2008 is out and available? Because a large number of hosts (mine included) haven't made the switch yet. Requirements Sun VirtualBox. We want this in particular for the great networking functionality, but other apps, like Microsoft Virtual PC, will work fine as well.

Read More

Browser environments for testing

  • November 20, 2008
  • James Skemp
In a previous post I mentioned using virtual machines for testing. Here's the three virtual machines that I feel cover the most options for browser testing (on Windows):  Current versions Looking at the top 10 browsers for this site, using data from Google Analytics, we have; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Mozilla, Opera, Playstation 3, Konqueror, SeaMonkey, and Camino. Of those, Internet Explorer and Firefox, obviously, account for the largest amount of traffic, at about 86% of all visits.

Read More