While running my unit tests for an application I’m developing, I noticed that certain web service components were intermittently failing.  The failure was caused by irregularly formed XML responses from Amazon’s Web Services. The failures occured as Exceptions from within the Zend_Service_Amazon component, but upon further inspection I was able to discover that the HTTP Adapter being used from within Zend_Service_Amazon, which is by default Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Socket, was not returning the entire stream from Amazon.  After [...]

Since I was first exposed to the Internet back in 1995, people have erroneously had a tendency to use the terms Internet and World Wide Web interchangeably. It may take the mind of a true geek to really care about the difference, but the World Wide Web is actually only a small fraction of the Internet. This article is the first in a series meant to supplement the web design course that I’m currently teaching [...]