Getting started with SAPUI5

A while back I had the opportunity to investigate SAPUI5 as an option for user interfaces on our current project. Here is a quick little getting started guide that I wrote back then, partly for my own benefit in case I ever need to get started on it again.


JSON to ABAP data structure program

On my current project, I had to write some ABAP code to convert a (deep) ABAP structure to JSON. I have seen at least two projects out there that do the same thing, but nothing that converts JSON to ABAP. So I set out to produce an ABAP program to do this.


Categories: Uncategorized

Nice web server script to serve any directory using WEBrick

At present, I am doing some web development in the form of a rich Javascript client. Now I have a need to serve up pages locally, but I don’t want to run a heavy web server just for that. So I wrote a little Ruby script to allow me to start a WEBrick server in any directory on the fly, which is great for testing content locally.


PuzzleSurfer is live!

Huzzah! PuzzleSurfer is online and available for your enjoyment. To take part in the fun, head over to PuzzleSurfer right away! The site represents the culmination of weeks of late nights at the computer and heated debates over some of the functionality (which I guess you could consider bonding).


Categories: Rails

Paperclip: Adding an annotation to an uploaded image

This is a little late-night hack for my late-night project I’m doing for a friend. I’m using Paperclip for uploading image attachments, and one of the requirements was to add some text (watermark or annotation or whatever you call it) to an image to indicate the website as the source of the image.


The pain of PHP debugging

You would have thought by now that I am up and running with a good PHP development environment and coding away furiously. Nothing could be further from the truth. I got stuck on debugging PHP. The main problem is this: I am too thrifty (some would say cheap) to invest in a proper PHP IDE. Instead, I have spent much time looking around for open source alternatives, or failing that, anything that is free.


Understanding MVC

I am in the process of creating a website from scratch, which is proving to be my first real encounter with PHP. For a while, I was looking at several PHP frameworks out there, but decided that I would rather get to know the language first than attempt to learn a framework.

One of the things I got hung up on was how I could redirect to a particular page depending on the logic of the currently executing page (by doing a redirect on the server). An example would be if you access a particular page for which you need to be logged in. At this point, you would want to redirect the user to a logon page. I searched all over and found people asking the same question, even someone asking how to redirect in PHP the way one does in Struts, which I realize now is not a very sensible question, as Struts is a framework, and PHP is a language.