Our own Cal Evans has been documenting his adventures in AIR land for a while on his blog—and now brings his musings on the subject of image encoding to php|architect. Read on for some fun with Flex!

Facebook’s PHP-to-C++ transformer made waves when it was announced earlier this month. Now, an initial release is finally available for download and public consumption.

Having a fully functional and highly automated DTAP working environment is a developers dream. There are problems though, not the least of which is that it can be expensive to implement.

Development, Testing, Acceptance, and Production, (DTAP) these are the for development areas your code should move through. How many of them does your team actually deploy?

While so many of us are still busy trying to make things work on Internet Explorer 6, HTML is slowly evolving from a relatively simple mark-up language into the backbone of tomorrow’s dynamic web. In this interview, we asked Ben Ramsey, Senior Software Architect for Schematic, to give us a quick overview of how it’s going to affect our work in the near (and not so near) future.

Some software development projects fail because the parties involved confuse the Estimate with the Sales Quote. Asking “How long will this take?” is not the same as asking “How much will this cost?”

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen thinks so, and argues that masking passwords, while necessary in some cases, is a pointless burden on usability that offers no security advantages most of the time.

We have all, at one point or other, made the mistake of asking a question like “does delimiting strings with single quotes yield better performance than using double quotes?”, only to be rebuffed by other people in the community who point out to us micro-optimization is often a pointless pursuit. This doesn’t stop the discussion from cropping up from time to time, though, especially when one of the world’s most sophisticated IT companies makes micro-optimization the subject of one of their official blog posts.

Most developers moonlight. Some companies forbid the practice; others turn a blind eye to it. Forward thinking companies, however, encourage their developers to have some kind of side project. Which type of company do you work for?

PHP 5.3 is much more than a point release—there are some significant updates that are coming just around the corner. Are you ready to take advantage of everything that the new version of PHP has to offer?