Design Disclosure – Portfolio & Personal Blog of Alistair Stead

Magento is an Open Source eCommerce platform developed using the Zend Framework by Varien. It is a fabulously customizable and extendible platform that once mastered can allow you to develop feature rich eCommerce solutions for your clients quickly and effectively. However for some mastering the Magento platform may not be that easy.

Magento uses common design patterns such as MVC, Application Controller and Two Step View to structure the application and provide mechanisms to extend and override the functionality and presentation. The platform has a huge number of files and directories that can cause confusion for newcomers to the platform. However this extended folder structure clearly defines where the platforms core files exist and where you can place your custom code and modules. Allowing you to extend the platform without modifying the core and breaking the upgrade process.

However daunting the platform appears or skeptical you may be due to the unfamiliar concepts, invest a small amount of time with the platform and it will soon start to payoff. This list of tutorials and resources will help you get up to speed quickly. Read More…

Magento is an Open Source eCommerce platform developed using the Zend Framework by Varien. It is a fabulously customizable and extendible platform that once mastered can allow you to develop feature rich eCommerce solutions for your clients quickly and effectively. However for some mastering the Magento platform may not be that easy.Magento uses common ...

I don’t think I’m alone in the fact that over the past twelve months I have been learning Cocoa specifically Cocoa Touch for the iPhone. Apps and tutorials will follow! However I have also been looking at Cappuccino (http://cappuccino.org/) a direct port of Cocoa to JavaScript. The intention of Cocoa and Cappuccino is to make the development of applications a quick, simple and fun exercise, however if like me you are approaching this from a web development standpoint those first steps can be a little hard.

However I have found a set of resources that will be invaluable if you too are trying to get to grips with Cocoa or Cappuccino.

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I don't think I'm alone in the fact that over the past twelve months I have been learning Cocoa specifically Cocoa Touch for the iPhone. Apps and tutorials will follow! However I have also been looking at Cappuccino (http://cappuccino.org/) a direct port of Cocoa to JavaScript. The intention of Cocoa and Cappuccino is to ...

The Gaia Framework for Adobe Flash is a something I have been using for some time. It is one of the most useful frameworks I have found for use with Flash. It adds a great deal of useful functionality and can generate large swathes of source code that you would otherwise need to write from scratch. However it is a very lightweight and unobtrusive ActionScript framework, you are still free to build your flash application in the same way you always have. You can continue to use your existing workflow but also take advantage of the framework features such as scaffolding, swfAddress, SEO optimization and asset loading and pre-loading.

With all this said when using the Gaia Framework with MDM Zinc application wrapper you have a couple of issues to resolve.

• File paths and references from the application executable.
• External Interface calls.

Most flash developers are likely unfamiliar with developing installable applications so these issues may be daunting when first encountered. However once explained there are simple solutions to both these issues that I will explain in detail.

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The Gaia Framework for Adobe Flash is a something I have been using for some time. It is one of the most useful frameworks I have found for use with Flash. It adds a great deal of useful functionality and can generate large swathes of source code that you would otherwise need to write ...