Web Species blog

What a ride this was… Just a bit more than a month ago I posted an article on the project we were secretly working on - Azure+, the PHP cloud platform built on top of Windows Azure infrastructure. From then functionality was improved, amazing additions were planned, I travelled tens of thousands of miles and showed it to hundreds of people. And now I can announce that it’s dead. Here is what happened.

We built a cloud platform for PHP. Yep, you heard it correctly. We see a huge opportunity in the market and are willing to work hard to make deploying PHP projects very easy. However this is a different one and here is the story behind it and what it can do for you.

Rarely a project lives by itself, especially in the days of frameworks. Furthermore, there are a lot of great open source libraries you might want to use to save time. But all of this raises a new problem - how could we manage all those dependencies. Here are some thoughts on this problem and how you might want to solve it; without shooting yourself in a foot. Which is commonly known as DLL Hell.

Data validation sounds like an obvious thing and it appears that everyone is doing it, but here are some ideas on where you might be doing it wrong. It’s not a practical examples article though, I’d assume they are pretty easy to figure out; this is more about implications and causes of various different validation errors. All of them are where we had suffered before, so make sure not to repeat the same mistakes.

For some of our clients we worked on extracting or submitting data automatically from websites which didn’t have an API we could use. This and more is called web scraping. Since our announcement of SellerScout, which relies heavily on this, I received a list of questions how we actually do this. So here are some thoughts on how to get started in the interesting web scraping world.