Mark’s Site

I’m in the process of creating a csv import application for employee data among other things, so I needed good quality test data. Instead of writing a few lines of test data myself, I thought I’d check if any free applications existed to do the work for me. I’m into free applications that I don’t [...]

Some call it coding preparation, others will call it planning and design, but we’re talking about the same thing. The more I code, the more I see professional programmers who just want to code. They don’t care if the design is complete. After all, they have enough info to get started right? They have the [...]

This is important, listen up! The singleton design pattern is used to ensure a class has only one instance, and that global access to that instance is available. In other words, it restricts instantiation of a class to one object.

What are design patterns and why do I want to know about them?

A useful example that I thought I should share

Stuff you need to know about downgrading

When I first started web development, one thing I was always torn on was how to design my screens. I had loads of information that I needed to display in some meaningful, easy to search format. After many years of trial and error, I’ve now got my ‘template’ screens that I use for all my content management screens.

My preferred approach to any moderately sized system is a modular, or component based approach.

So you probably know that for a given SQL user, you can specify what permissions the user can have, such as CREATE, DROP, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE etc. But are you one of those people that just sets up a general user with S/I/U/D permissions and leaves it at that?

Time to share some serious code I’ve developed my classes with flexibility and ease of use in mind. What follows are actual classes used in my application to handle requests to and from the database.