CPTTM software developer newsletter issue #32

CPTTM software developer newsletter issue #32, Kent Tong, Editor in Chief

Dear Software Developers,

This CPTTM Software Developer newsletter is to bring useful news to you, software developers in Macau, for references without obligations, so that you can do your jobs easier and better! Hope you like it. if you'd like to unsubscribe or recommend your friends to subscribe, just email me at kent@cpttm.org.mo. Old issues are available here.

Topics in this issue:

Real-world hyperlink - 2D barcode
PHP.JS - Use PHP functions in Javascript
Software Developer 's Missing Skill: Self-marketing
Upcoming courses for software developers

Real-world hyperlink - 2D barcode

In Japan, you could find 2D barcodes on everything from business card to large outdoor billboard. The most valuable part of 2D barcode is that it could contain more data than normal barcode and many modern cellphones are potential as a reader with built-in camera and software. You could use it for textual data transfer. One QR barcode could contain up to more or less 984 of Chinese characters (Unicode format in UTF-8).

The most common use case is that 2D barcodes are hyperlinks in the real world. We could convert a link into QR code format. We could get those QR codes printed, so people could simply snap them by cellphone's camera, they don't need to write the URL down. The hyperlinks are very useful way that people could get more information from the Internet. For an example, if your company website has a Google Map to show the location of your company. If you provide a QR code next to the map. The visitors could capture it to open a Google Map in their smartphone, which navigate them to your company's location.

Here is online QR-code generator so you could convert many kind of information into QR code, such as a phone number or vCard (a file format standard for electronic business cards) : http://www.mobile-barcodes.com/qr-code-generator/

If you want to encode data into QR code in your website or application, you could try these open source projects or free web services:

PHP QRCode Encoder: QR code image generation on the fly by using provided class or functions.
http://phpqrcode.sourceforge.net/index.php#demo
libqrencode: C library could be used for batch generation of QR codes in your application.
http://megaui.net/fukuchi/works/qrencode/index.en.htm
Google Chart API: You could embed QR code image by passing query string according to the API
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/docs/gallery/qr_codes.html

If you are a mobile app developer, you might be interested in ZXing. ZXing (pronounced "zebra crossing") is an open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library implemented in Java. Android OS running on smart-phones have already had a built-in barcode scanner app based on ZXing. Check out more information ZXing's project website: http://code.google.com/p/zxing/

The use of QR Code is free of any license. Thanks to Denso Wave which the company owns the patent rights on QR code and has chosen not to exercise them and published QR Code as open standard.As more and more mobiles are able to read those 2D barcodes, it is nice to have more QR codes in your websites and printed material. Let your target audience to store your information in a convenient manner.

Tim Ma

PHP.JS - Use PHP functions in Javascript

If you are a PHP programmer, you always jump between two worlds - Server-side and Client-side. You write PHP server-side scripts to deal with stuff like database accessing. You write Javascript client-side scripts to present interactive user interface.

Thanks to PHP.JS, now you could apply your favorite PHP functions in JavaScript. Due to JavaScript comes with web browsers only provides functional and foundation functions so you always need an external JS file or framework to fulfill your need. But PHP had already provided many handy and high level functions.

For example, if you want to strip the HTML tag from a text area by Javascript. strip_tags() is a famous built-in function from PHP. With PHP.JS, you could use those high level PHP functions in Javascript.

One more example shows that JavaScript is not quite handy to deal with time:

var now = new Date();
today = (now.getYear() +1900) + '-' /* getYear() return 110 for Year 2010 */
+ (now.getMonth() +1) + '-' /* getMonth() return 0~11 */
+ now.getDay() ;
alert(today);

With PHP.JS, you could simple use date():

alert(date('Y-m-d')); //date() from PHP

To use PHP.JS you can either:

Copy-Paste one of implemented Functions here .
Customize a (CommonJS) package here
Download the default package (only use for study and development only, because it will slow down the browser performance when you load all supported functions at one time)

Of course, PHP.JS is not an excuse for you not to learn JavaScript. PHP and JavaScript are naturally not the same. They are built for entirely different environment (server and client side). There is no DOM (Document Object Model) manipulation in PHP and you could not access File IO or database in JavaScript. So the same function in PHP.JS might behave sightly differently that you should read the document carefully or learn some JavaScript when you try to use PHP.JS.

PHP.JS project home: http://phpjs.org

Tim Ma

Software Developer's Missing Skill: Self-marketing

As a programmer, we love to write code and try to delivery a high quality code. We work hard and love to learn new languages or techniques to improve ourselves. Sometimes we just too focus on our ability to tell people how good we are. Have you even tried to market yourself?

You might wonder who are your target audiences for that. To market yourself to non-technical people, getting certificated is a good start to let them know how professional you are. Since they might don't understand what you are doing, a certification from a industry authority could convince them. For example, if you are developing in Java, go and get SCJP (Sun Certified Java Programmer) certificate.

Practically, a certification only proves your have a basic standard. More further, to market people having a strong technical background such as your superiors and colleagues. The key point of self-marketing for software developers is to tell people what you could do and how you do that. There are many way you could do so. First, don't be afraid to share your knowledge and your findings. You could email and share some technical tips for your superiors and colleagues. You could simply share a website and a free tool you use that help your colleagues ease their problems. It is nice that you could are volunteering to be responsible for a project, to conduct a tech briefing for your colleagues. By sharing your knowledge, you will win your reputation from your colleagues.

At the end, you might think why bother to market yourself? I think as a software developer, sometimes our effort is not easy to be seen and evaluated. We are not salesperson that we could be evaluated by company's revenue. Our key value is the ability to solve problems by designing or conducting software system. If you could market yourself to your boss, your boss see your value and you could get a promotion. If you could market yourself to your colleagues, you win more trust from them and you both share knowledge to each other.

Tim Ma

Upcoming courses for software developers

Course code	Course name	Start date	Duration	Fee	Remark
CM367-06-2010-C	JSF and AJAX	5/8/10	26 hours	MOP1,000

Feedbacks

Any questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at 28781313 or kent@cpttm.org.mo. We also have two other newsletters: CIO newsletter and Network administrator newsletter, your friends may like to subscribe.

Until next time,

Kent Tong