Because Web Scripts involve two computers talking to each other, they are potentially hard to debug. We’ve found that it pays to test the scripts from a web browser before writing any code. We iron out our exact understanding of what parameters the script needs and what it returns before doing it from within our application. There’s an [...]
A large part of our Documas application concerns ordinary Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD) operations on a MySQL database. Really Documas is a hybrid application, part document management and part CRUD. Documas centres around a database model called Study. Studies are typically clinical trials that have dozens of properties reflecting their type and their progress. People such as administrators, lawyers, pharmacologists, [...]
REST is a set of ideas that promise to simplify communication between applications. If you have not come across REST before, there is an entertaining description here. Conventionally applications use something like Remote Procedure Calls to call on each other for services, but every single call tends to have different parameters and return values making [...]
We’ve built a web application, Documas, on the solid foundation of the Alfresco Document Management system. In this article we’ll explain why and how we did it. Using Alfresco from another web application Alfresco is a solid platform for managing documents and the events that happen to them during their lifecycle, but the ‘Web Client’ user interface is [...]
We recently had a small job to chop and reassemble a dozen or so pdfs and then include them into a website archive. Our client needed all the first pages exchanged with new first pages that had new information on them. A laborious task manually, but PDF Toolkit came to our rescue. It’s a cross [...]
Jonathan Franzen’s UK imprint of his latest novel, Freedom, was sent to the pulper at a rumoured cost of over forty thousand pounds after finding out that the wrong version had been printed. The moment where Franzen realised disaster had struck was caught on camera, as it happened in the middle of recording a reading [...]
Generating pdf newsletters automatically from WordPress: how to include a few pages and resolve memory limit errors