This afternoon, I  came accross this perticular set of video tutorials from Adobe to learn Adobe Flex in a week. These video tutorials provide a brief introduction to Flash, Flex, ActionScript, MXML and the Adobe Flex Builder.

a nice resource for those who wish to learn

The link below talks about URL routing in PHP. It’s a three part series which tells about a basic .htaccess file that facilitates the URL routing and gives some php codes and classes to interpret the URLs and have them handled by appropriate controllers.

http://www.phpaddiction.com/tags/category/url-routing/

Now, here comes some interesting information to make the same thing work for “Aliases” in apache. I’m using apache on windows XP so, things here will talk only about apache on window. Same may work for other systems, but, I am not sure about that. (you may want to browse for documentations/help files/tutorials to enable and use mod_alias and mod_rewrite. I wont be writing much about them frankly because I don’t know much about them…)

Alias

By default, apache processes and serves the files from it’s documentRoot directory. It’s like a default directory for the web files to be served by the server.

So, when a URL is like www.somesite.com/meow/meow1.php, and my documentRoot is D:/apache/htdocs , Apache will serve D:/apache/htdocs/meow/meow1.php file by default.

However, when our meow directory does not fall under the documentRoot, that’s when we need to use aliases. Using aliases, we can have apache serve files from location other than documentRoot.

Suppose, my “meow” directory is located at “l:\apps” and i want to serve files from that directory for all “/meow” links to my site, i can add a line n httpd.conf to get this done.

Alias /meow l:/apps/meow

This creates an alias for /meow. Now, instead of documentroot, apache comes to l:/apps/meow for all www.somesite.com/meow links.

now apache also needs a <Directory > directive to define various options and access policies for “l:/apps/meow” directory.

<Directory “l:/apps/meow”>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

This block allows access to “l:/apps/meow” and also facilitates .htaccess file in the directory to manipulate all available settings for the directory. You need to place the .htaccess from “URL Routing with PHP” part one in that directory.

Options +FollowSymLinks
IndexIgnore */*
# Turn on the RewriteEngine
RewriteEngine On
# Rules
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php

Now, when you try out the first part here, everything does not work perfect…. Apache says “Bad Request” (400)

“The Problem”

Everything till here goes file, except for one thing.
The .htaccess would have worked perfect if your meow was in documentroot.

When a request like www.somesite.com/meow/abc/pqr/xyz is handled, the .htaccess in “l:/apps/meow” comes into action.

Alias takes the request to l:/meow/abc/pqr/xyz .
Provided that none of the directories in url exist beyond /meow, Apache rewrites the URL .
it takes the /abc/pqr/xyz part out and puts index.php in the place. So, request goes to l:/meow/index.php

But… that is not what we exactly want.

when, instead of alias, the meow exists under document root, (say d:/apache/htdocs), the similar request gets processed in a slightly different manner.

The request is taken to d:/apache/htdocs/meow/abc/pqr/zyx
it takes the /abc/pqr/xyz part out and puts index.php in the place. So, request goes to d:/apache/htdocs/meow/index.php
now, as d:/apache/htdocs is documentRoot, apache reduces the url to /meow/index.php only.

In case of aliases, the last step does not occur.

The Solution

In order to take the request to /meow/index.php instead of l:/apps/meow/index.php, we need to add “rewriteBase /meow” to our .htaccess file (without quotes”. This directive tells apache about the base URL from which, relative URLs can be constructed. So, the new .htaccess looks like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
IndexIgnore */*
# Turn on the RewriteEngine
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /meow
# Rules
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php

Once the rewriteBase is in place, URL www.somesite.com/meow/abc/pqr/xyz gets properly routed to www.somesite.com/meow/index.php. Thus, making us feel Happy ^^

That’s it for the aliases, apache and htaccess. It took some browsing, log tracking and afternoon hours to get things right with aliases. I’m not sure about complete correctness of the above process, this is how it worked for me. If you find any flaw or wish to make any addition/suggestion, please do so, It’s most welcome

~JaguarNac

The very variety in the different mindsets of designers and developers makes this combination a “special” case. Both types think that “the other work” is hard, tedious, unimaginable and most often, “not for us to do”.

In a general training course of a web designer, teachers or institutes follow a typical method. They usually begin with the designing tools like Photoshop or CorelDraw. Next step is to teach web designing. Basics of web page. It’s seen as designing a brochure. Students are given a topic or theme and taught the basics of placing links, images, contents etc. on the design using Photoshop or CorelDraw. A page is designed within a fixed size optimized for certain screen resolution. Web page elements (mostly links) are positioned . Later on, they teach to convert the “Image” to “Web Page” by slicing and exporting as web page, thus teaching to create a scary table based structure. During conversion, students are often “NOT” taught the basics of splitting the page into appropriate HTML elements. Soon after learning this “Page cutting” technique, students are taken to the WYSIWYG editor, in most of the cases, “Dreamweaver”. Editors are used to replace “The content” slice exported from Photoshop with actual content text and most of the remaining part of the page is kept as is… ALL IMAGES… sometimes, even replacing some image content with “Flash Animations”. Here, students are navigated through the basics of HTML and JavaScript. Though CSS is taught, it is mostly through the GUI driven interfaces provided by the WYSIWYG editors. These students however, get trained well in Designing tools and can produce good output for Print Media or Web based banners and flash ads.

Developer course on the other hand takes a complete development track. They’re taught the server side languages with a little bit introduction to the client side techniques such as AJAX. Modern server-side frameworks come with components that can effectively render the client-side AJAX stuff. Server-side developer does not need to know what exactly happens at the client side as these frameworks make the things as optimized as possible. Frameworks like Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET give good idea of this. even on PHP, There’s a huge number of plugins, scripts and API’s available for developers that render the javascripted page on their behalf.

In short, Web Developers with decent JavaScript and CSS knowledge don’t come easy and need to be specifically trained or obtained through a tiresome search. However, the things that are expected from such candidate can easily be learned through online tutorials and trial and error study.

In a few coming days, I’ll try to post a basic guideline on how to go with web designing. Wish me luck!!

~JaguarNac