My blog about HTML5 Builder has been elementary and positive so far. But I've had problems--I just haven't mentioned them yet. Well, it's time to do that before going further. I'm using the product on two different machines and am having two different experiences.

While still working with a PHP web server application, let's create a simple component, install it, and modify the Hello World app to use it.

The first application I'll create will be similar to sample ones I had tried in RadPHP. They were simple PHP tutorials and they worked--somewhat. I had some issues, but don't remember whether it was getting all the right libraries in the right place or whether it worked from some locations or browsers or what. In any case, I'm hoping HTML5 Builder will make the process a little smoother.

It's been a year since my last blog entry and while I've been busy writing Windows applications with Delphi, I've kept an eye on web technologies. I've done some PHP in the past and had purchased RadPHP XE but didn't upgrade to the XE2 version because there were practically no new features and the documentation, which was pitiful, was not improved one bit--in fact it was still labeled XE!

While working on a project accessing a slow web service, I found myself needing to extend the timeout of the HTTPRIO component. The web service, when executed straight from a browser, would happily take as long as it needed to before successfully completing. But my Delphi application was timing out.

I have recently discovered Amazon's S3 and EC2 services and think they're pretty cool. Originally, I considered them my first foray into "cloud computing" but then realized I've been using Google's email service for quite a while. There's also the fact that I give software updates via my web site and I store backups off-site via FTP. Recently, I started saving some documents out to Microsoft's Live service, just to try it out.

In the last entry, I gave an overview of the large software update I delivered to a client, an update that should've been done incrementally over a period of several months. From database schema changes, to swapping out a reporting engine, to switching from ANSI to Unicode, I really bit off more than I could chew at once. But it's now working well and I'm once again sleeping at night!

This portion of the story deals with the database changes that were made, both the structure and the character set.

I recently gave a client a major update to their custom application. Actually, "major" doesn't even do it justice. It was more like "mega major" and I don't think I'll take the approach I did ever again. But I wanted to move their code to the latest compilers and to support the latest operating systems. I also needed to change some low-level database constructs. Why all this? Because I'm a best-practices sort of guy.

The amount of information available and the proliferation of video over the last few years is nothing short of astounding. Watch this video and ask yourself, are you ready for the future?

In the old DOS days, things were simple. You had 25 rows and 80 columns of text. Period. Well, if you knew the right tricks, you could double the rows or columns, but still it was pretty limited. This made programming fairly easy--you knew how much space you had to deal with. With a GUI, or Graphical User Interface, things can get stretched out, you can have larger fonts, and you can have themes on or off. So knowing how much space you have to display stuff isn't quite as cut and dried. But I'm going to look at just one aspect that can be surprising: themes.