For his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins developed a program that created "biomorphs": virtual creatures created by a computer simulation. The simulation, called Biomorph, was developed in order to demonstrate the power of natural selection.

Recently, in an effort to better understand how the Biomorph program worked, I decided to implement it myself in JavaScript using the HTML5 canvas element. The result of this endeavour can be found here and the GitHub repository here. Read more to learn how to use the Biomorph program.

Webble is a pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript implementation of some of the core features Wezzle game engine. By "pure" I mean that there are no external plugins like Flash used. Furthermore, Webble does not make use of the HTML5 canvas element: all the animation is done purely by moving around HTML elements using JavaScript.

Writing a simple game engine using the DOM and JavaScript poses some interesting problems that are atypical to regular website development. In this article I will discuss a few of the problems that I encountered while writing Webble and how I solved them.

Ever wanted to filter a query_posts call by template? If you're reading this post, you probably have or need to right now. You probably went to the query_posts documentation and scanned for something like "template=foo" and were deeply disappointed. Then maybe, in an act of desperation, you started to trudge around the plugin library. Stop! Stop right there! You don't need a plugin to do this. Everything you need is already in WordPress.

Interfaces in object-oriented languages like Java, C# and PHP are useful language constructs for ensuring that objects will respond to certain methods. However, unlike Java and C# (until recently), PHP has optional parameters. As it turns out, this feature has an interesting (and a little bit unexpected) effect on how we can implement interfaces in PHP.

If you've ever used the .NET Framework version 3.5 of later, you'll probably have encountered extension methods. Microsoft describes extension methods as:

Extension methods enable you to "add" methods to existing types without creating a new derived type, recompiling, or otherwise modifying the original type. Extension methods are a special kind of static method, but they are called as if they were instance methods on the extended type. For client code written in C# and Visual Basic, there is no apparent difference between calling an extension method and the methods that are actually defined in a type.

In this article, I will show you how to write a base class that will allow you to add methods to any PHP class that inherits from it at runtime. You will be able to call these methods transparently, without any special syntax.

jQTouch is a pretty nifty little jQuery plugin for making websites look like native iPhone apps. Unfortunately, beyond a bunch of examples included with the distribution, there's not a whole lot of online documentation written for jQTouch. Having started to use jQTouch for a professional project, I thought I'd help remedy this deficiency by posting what I learned along the way.

We'll start with something fairly straightforward by making a jQTouch app that makes an AJAX call to a PHP script to search a database. It then displays the results of that search in the jQTouch app. This article is split up into two parts. The first part deals with the jQTouch UI and the second part deals with the PHP script and the supporting JavaScript.

This is part 1 of a two part series.

Channel 9 has posted a great talk by Anders Hejlsberg, the original author of Turbo Pascal, the chief architect of Delphi, and the lead architect of C#.

History lesson: Anders was lured away from Borland by Microsoft with a hefty offer of a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of up to $200,000, and options to buy 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock.

Looks like it was worth it, as each C# release has added many interesting and powerful features, while maintaining a fine balance between complexity and simplicity.

Sometimes we want to remove whitespace from the ends of our strings. In fact, this task is so common on the web that the ubiquitous jQuery library includes a utility method for that purpose.

What about in ActionScript 3? Well, not so much. The String class in AS3 is, in my opinion, a bit lacking compared to languages like C# and Scala. What's worse, you can't augment prototypes easily like you can in JavaScript to add missing methods (see update at the end for more information on this).

While working on Flash sidescroller stuff I noticed that there was no easy way (that I could find) to create multiple sprites from a single bitmap (something you'd do when doing a tile-based graphics layout).

As I've made up my mind to learn Flash, and don't want to pay a honkin' amount of cash, I decided to go with a free Flash IDE called FlashDevelop.

Since I'm toying around with the idea of sidescrollers, I did a search for "Flash sidescroller tutorial" and found this excellent 3-parter by devnote.org. Unfortunately (for me), the tutorial expects that you're using Adobe's Flash IDE. Thus, as a contribution to the web (and myself... mostly myself), I translated the tutorial to work with FlashDevelop. Read on to see how I did it, or just grab the source here.