Welcome! I'm Lorna Jane Mitchell, a web developer, working particularly with PHP, the LAMP stack and related technologies. My main interests lie in working with open source software and building excellent APIs so that data in one system can be used in another. I'm freelance, so if you want to work with me as a consultant, developer, trainer, writer or evangelist, then let me know.
Work With Me
Development and Consultancy
Need a safe pair of hands or some targeted expertise on your next development project? I think of myself as a provider of both, let me know if you need me.
Training
I love to teach and am happy to come and share what I know. If you want to learn about PHP, tools for efficient development or even a spot of project skills for developers, then you're in the right place.
Technical Editing
If you've got great ideas but the words are letting you down, let me work with you to put them across clearly.
Writing
My work has been published in various places and the more I do it, the more I enjoy using the written word to communicate to a wide audience
From The Blog
23 Jan
2012
Building A RESTful PHP Server: Routing the Request
This is the second part of a series, showing how you might write a RESTful API using PHP. This part covers the routing, autoloading, and controller code for the service, and follows on from the first installment which showed how to parse the incoming request to get all the information you need.
19 Jan
2012
Building A RESTful PHP Server: Understanding the Request
Once upon a time, what seems like a lifetime ago, I was away for a couple of weeks, and I wrote a series of posts about serving RESTful APIs from PHP to keep my blog going while I was away. Fast forward a few years and those posts are outdated and still wildly popular - so I thought it was about time I revisited this and showed how I'm writing RESTful PHP servers today!
In the first part of this (probably) 3-part series, we'll begin with the basics. It might seem boring, but the most important thing to get right with REST is parsing all the various elements of the HTTP request and responding accordingly. I've put in code samples from from a small-scale toy project I created to make me think about the steps involved (should I put the code somewhere so you can see it? Let me know). Without further ado, let's dive in and begin by sending all requests through one bootstrap script: Continue reading
17 Jan
2012
SQL Joins with On or Using
I recently wrote a post about inner and outer joins, and a couple of people asked what the difference is between USING and ON. Continue reading
