On a recent project I worked on, I needed to find a way of customer details through an iFrame for processing.  After perusing through the Joomla forums on several occasions and even asking questions, I was still left without the answers I wanted.  In the end, I decided the best way of doing what I needed was to add some code from the Joomla framework into the iFrame.  This enabled me to pass session data as well several pieces of information very easy to my component's iFrame.

I am always on the lookout for new IDE's I can use to do most of my web development work.  At the moment, my favourite is phpDesigner.  The sheer number of features included in the application make it easy for me to do my work.  This is closely followed by Netbeans and the Aptana.  Dreamweaver at the moment is rarely being used unless I need to update sites created with the the Adobe Developer Toolbox.

If you are looking for an alternative to using Dreamweaver especially with working with Javascript libraries, you may want consider Aptana Studio. A new version has been released and it fixes a number of issues.

If like me, most of you are using the 64-bit flavours of Windows, you may have noticed that Aptana was sometimes pretty slow in doing things and did have some annoying problems.

My recent dabble with Joomla has prompted me to re-evaluate whether to use Dreamweaver to develop my applications. Now that Adobe has decided to stop working on any future versions of ADDT, I am having to find something else to use. To this effect, I have also started looking at CodeIgniter. After reading up some of the documentation and watching some videos tutorials, CodeIgniter certainly does seem to be a good alternative for me to take.

A few weeks ago, I had a slight rant with the issues I was facing with Joomla and its MVC architecture. Having developed a number of PHP sites all based on my own code, I think the main problem was that I was not quite comfortable working with a framework that had a steep learning curve. I don't think some of that rants about Joomla I read online helped either.