Have you been using MySQL for your web applications since your first foray into website development? Perhaps you now run, or are thinking about running, your own server and you will set up MySQL because that is what you have always used. Did you know there are alternatives? A NoSQL database is one of them, and it has its use cases, but that will need some consideration, and almost certainly some rewriting of your application, to take advantage of. Instead, let me talk to you about some databases that speak your applications language, namely MySQL's client server protocol.

magine a workshop of a racing team. The very first thing you will notice is that everything has its own place; spanners hanging on walls sorted by size, other tools placed in drawers, divided by their purpose, bolts and nuts placed in separate dividers and once again sorted by size. Everything is labeled, clean and in order.

Outside-in Development is an agile development methodology that places the intention and goals of the stakeholders at the centre of the process. This is achieved by having human-readable user stories and scenarios being invoked as scripts that feed back on the progress, continuously leading the development towards the stakeholders’ goal. Developers will start from this executable specification, and write the high level controllers that will provide the functionality. They then go into what they need to provide that functionality by specifying how their library class should work. By the time all classes’ specifications are met, all scenarios will also be fulfilled and the cycle is complete.

Gathering requirements for software development is a vital communication process. There are multiple parties involved and a project relies on customers, users, domain experts, and many others, each with their own view of how the system should function. We will look at how user stories can help us to gather the information we need for a successful project.

Magento is a feature rich ecommerce platform which offers several shipping methods out of the box. However, when building large ecommerce sites, you may meet a requirement to develop your own custom shipping methods. This is especially true if your client requires integration with a specific courier or shipping supplier...

With most web applications, there comes a time where there is a need to perform either CPU or I/O intensive work based on user actions. Whether processing uploaded files, or performing system-wide database updates, developers are increasingly turning to Gearman as a simple way to hand off the heavy lifting to another server to be performed asynchronously.

Version control for source code is used by most development teams today. It gives you a history of all the changes you made, you can use it to share your code with others and you can work on an experimental feature without polluting the stable product. These are just some of the reasons why version control software is considered indispensable today.

Testing the database layer is a fundamental step during application development. It allows us to ensure that all data operations behave properly, without data loss or corruption. In this article, we are going to describe a simple way to test the database layer of our applications, using PHPUnit database classes, Zend Framework extensions and some custom reusable code to facilitate the process for all the domain models. This article will walk you through, step by step, for each of the tasks needed to achieve this.

After recently attending the MongoUK conference in London, it is clear that MongoDB is fast finding application amongst cutting-edge web developers. As a relatively new concept for persistence, NoSQL (Not Only SQL) and more specifically document-oriented databases, such as MongoDB, are starting to enter the web applications landscape. Its strength lies in speed and ability to cope with dynamic data, making its goals align closely with requirements of many websites around today.

Static blocks are blocks of content which are created and modified through the Magento Admin. Their main purpose is to act as a dynamic piece of content which can be placed on one or multiple pages, highly customisable and allows clients to modify the content through the admin area. They’re ideal for sections of you site where you need to display a piece of content which is likely to change throughout the course of the site’s lifetime and the piece of content doesn’t require its own page like About Us or Terms and Conditions pages...