Smarty is a template engine for PHP whose main goal is to facilitate a very useful way to separate the business logic from the presentation logic. This article introduces Smarty and demonstrates how to install the template, create an application from scratch and interact with a database.

Installation of the tool is simple and using it is as easy as including the Smarty class, configuring it a bit through method calls and outputting to a template (tpl) file. A both a "Hellow World" and slightly more complex example using database results to build a table are included.

Last few days I have been playing with Ruby and Rails, again. Today, when someone was asking on a forum about the efficiency of web frameworks, I thought I'd give the few frameworks I work with some more benchmark testing.

His benchmarking is based on basic "Hello World" page requests for each of the frameworks. His results were interesting with CodeIgniter coming out with the fewest number of requests responded to (per second) and Rails coming out on top by a margin of about eighty or ninety over CodeIgniter/Kohana.

Today's example was requested by a user called Devo. This example illustrates making an animated GIF image by creating the frames from scratch. It's been so long since I've really drawn anything so I decided to use text as the base for this animation.

His example ends up as a string ("Hello World") that's animated to show one more letter at a time as each frame loads.