If you are in the business of creating wallpapers or abstract art, you should head over to Daz 3D’s website – right now. For a limited time only, they are offering free downloads of their 3D modelling and rendering software. I like to create abstract backgrounds and Bryce 7 is perfect for this. I’m a [...]

Yesterday I downloaded and installed Aptana Studio 3 to assist my PHP development. I’d only used notepad++ to code previously (which actually does a grand job) but with me now doing more object oriented dev, I thought I’d have a look at PHP IDEs. I downloaded Zend Studio (advertised as the leading PHP editor), noted [...]

Last month, we had an in-depth look at the JavaScript variable. We dwelled on one of its weaknesses: that it is automatically destroyed by the browser when the Web page that it belongs to is no longer displayed. We then looked at a way of getting around this weakness by stashing the variable in another document (in the example we considered, a frameset) that would remain loaded by the browser for as long as we needed the variable.

For the new readers out there, welcome; and for those of you who read the first article in this three-part series, welcome back! This month, we’ll be taking a first look at cookies—the most popular method of creating persistent data on the Web without using a CGI script. If that last sentence didn’t make any sense to you, you might want to go back and read Part 1, where I explain all the basic concepts you’ll need.

In part 2 of this article, I hinted at some limitations that are placed on cookies. In general these constraints aren’t much of a problem, and are more than made up for by the strength of cookies: persistence. Anyway, here are the specifics: