The background

I’m just about to start a new web application development project. The site to be developed ultimately and supposedly will have millions of users (i.e. needs to scale nicely) and needs to be mobile/tablet friendly on all major platforms (that is, Android and iOS for now).

My usual choice for web application projects is some kind of LAMP stack, with the “P” level utilizing a framework - Elgg for social oriented sites, Yii for general application development. For mobile compatibility, I’d use either HTML5 responsive layouts (like Twitter bootstrap) and some add-ons (KendoUI, Wijmo); or I’d go with Titanium Appcelerator if native look is a must.

Now this is a project where no requirements were made on the technology stack we’re building on. This gave me the opportunity to shop around for best of breed, new technologies. One technology stack that particularly got my attention was NoSQL for data storage, and JavaScript for code all the way (both server and client side). And the latest buzz seemed to be around Wakanda in that arena.

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Recently I had to choose an issue tracking system for a small, web application developing operation (small meaning 4 developers and a dozen projects). Main requirements were

• ease of use
• an intuitive and attractive GUI (yeah, you heard that right, after all it would be used daily by developers and managers alike)
• open source project, and possibly free to use
• time tracking feature
• automatic roadmap and changelog
• and a lot more smaller requirements, but you’ll see those from the comparison matrix

I’ve used mantis in the past, and trac during the last year and a half, and was not entirely happy with either of those. Nonetheless, I included them in the comparison, just because both are popular and they were the “standards”, other systems would be measured against. I did my homework, and after a lot of research, I added Jira and Redmine to my shortlist.

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No matter what Javascript framework you prefer to use, date pickers should be no biggies for quite a while now. jQuery certainly has at least 20 different plugins - heck, even the official UI library has it’s own, may I add very decent one. All the other big players out there, like Mootools, Prototype/script.aculo.us, YUI, etc. since long come with their own flavour of date picker controls.

Having said that, there is a tiny possibility that one day your employer will come up with the twisted idea of creating a birthday input just as on Facebook. I’m sure you know how it looks like, but just in case:

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Elgg has a very powerful views system that lets you override any previously defined view. All you have to do is create a custom plugin with a views folder, and within that folder create the new view file with the exact same path as the original view. You’ll also want to make sure that your plugin comes later in the plugin order than the other plugin you’re overriding, so your view will take precedence.

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Though the infamous exception mentioned in the title looks really bad, and initially seems hard to locate the root of the problem, there are actually only a few situations when this exception will be thrown. These are:

    * an exception is thrown within the exception handler
    * an exception is thrown during the php engine shutdown
    * an exception is thrown in an object’s destructor function

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