For the last few months I've been working on a project that is part website and part data processing.

In theory the website is the bulk of the project, but in practice processing the data has taken a disproportionate amount of resources.

Data exchange with another organisation is always tricky - and in this case we have incoming data that doesn't conform to specification, business rules that change, and a daily data import to run.

The code I've been working on has been through a couple of versions, and now I have in mind a third

When developing a website it's important to test it in as many different web browsers as possible.

If a client has a problem viewing the page there's little point saying "but it works on my machine"

I have found that the differences between different versions of firefox to be small enough that testing in one version is sufficient.

Internet Explorer is so different between versions that each target version must be tested seperately.

There is a package for multiple IEs.

I've recently been working with AJAX and SOAP which both result in multiple sessions running concurrently.

For example if you have an AJAX progress bar for a large file upload one session is uploading the file while a series of shorter sessions check on progress and update the bar.

How to track both parts of this cleanly has had me scratching my head a bit - but the solution is fiendishly simple.

It turns out that there is a buried configuration setting in Eclipse (my IDE of choice) which allows you to debug multiple sessions.

Any complex website that needs updating has to be tested without affecting the users of the live site.

The challenge then is how to replicate the changes made on your test site on the live site.

If all the changes are in code then version control systems such as svn and cvs solve this problem very neatly.

But with a CMS such as Drupal some changes are inevitably required in the database.

Managing these changes without affecting the site content can be tricky.