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I see a number of questions regularly about module bootstraps in Zend Framework, and decided it was time to write a post about them finally.

In Zend Framework 1.8.0, we added Zend_Application, which is intended to (a) formalize the bootstrapping process, and (b) make it re-usable. One aspect of it was to allow bootstrapping of individual application modules -- which are discrete collections of controllers, views, and models.

The most common question I get regarding module bootstraps is:

Why are all module bootstraps run on every request, and not just the one for the requested module?

To answer that question, first I need to provide some background.

Continue reading "Module Bootstraps in Zend Framework: Do's and Don'ts"

Zend Framework 1.10 sports a ton of new features, as well as completely revamped online documentation. In this webinar, Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Framework Project Lead, and Ralph Schindler, Zend Framework Software Engineer, will present a synopsis of the new features, discuss the new online documentation system and how it’s built, and answer your questions about the new release….

Finally managed to upload my slides from my ConFoo PHP 5.3 == Awesome! talk.
Slides

Thanks for all the attendees, especially those who asked questions

Finally managed to upload my slides from my ConFoo PHP 5.3 == Awesome! talk.
Slides

Thanks for all the attendees, especially those who asked questions

I’ve just uploaded the slides from my confoo.ca talk “Making software management tools work for you”. You can download the slides from here.

Thanks again to everyone who attended! Please give me feedback on joind.in.

Tuning a webserver in three minutes while it's being slashdotted.

I just finished my PHP in the Enterprise talk at ConFoo, Slides are available here: PHP in the Enterprise - ConFoo March 2010

Was just looking through some code and came across this function I wrote some time ago. If you do a lot of your processing scripts in PHP like we do, you probably need to know what is going on sometimes. So, I made a progress bar for use on the cli. I thought I would share it.  Here is a video of it in action. And the code can be found here.

On Webitech.net there's a new tutorial showing how to combine PHP and jQuery to create a simple content editing system when you don't need a full-blown CMS to manage the pages of your site.

I'm going to show you how to use jQuery and PHP to build a content editing system that will allow you or your client to easily edit .html pages visually. [...] Our file structure is going to be really simple - just admin.php, the wymeditor package and jquery together in the demo directory.

The tool uses PHP's file_get_contents to pull in the source of the page into a textarea and edit it with jQuery and the WYM Editor. Full code is included for your cut and paste pleasure but if you need a quicker fix, you can download the source. There's also a demo to see it in action.

In a recent (quick) post to the php|architect site Koen Van Urk reminds us that it's not all about the code, there's planning to consider too.

Sure, it is important to have your code as bug free as possible, well documented and as optimized as possible. It is, however, impossible to achieve this all without prior planning. Good project coordination.

He suggests one of the most useful and reliable forms of planning and defining the requirements for an application - writing them down on a normal piece of paper. Then from there let the ideas flow with things like look and feel, mapping out page structure, etc. Website planning tools are good, but when it comes down to basic prototyping, sometimes there's just nothing better than a pencil and a few sheets of plain white paper.

In a new post to his blog Brian Swan compares the database drivers for MSSQL and SQLSRV by what they have to offer and what the real differences are to your applications.

In this post I want to begin looking at some of the differences between the two drivers and perhaps gain an understanding of why the mssql driver continues to be used (although I have some good guesses). There are lots of comparison points between the mssql and sqlsrv drivers. I'll break my comparison into two posts, focusing on high-level differences in this post and then dive into an API comparison in the next post.

This first of the two parts looks at some of the differences between the two - the Microsoft support for the sqlsrv driver vs community-driven mssql and the fact that they're very different "under the hood" (see this diagram).

Joseph Crawford has a new post to his blog today with a look at his use of the Zend_Rest_Controller and Zend_Rest_Route components of the Zend Framework to create a simple REST service.

You might be asking yourself why do I have to use both components, why is it not rolled into one nice component. The answer is really basic and if you look at the source code for the Zend_Rest_Controller you will see that it is solely an abstract class that defines the methods required for use with the Zend_Rest_Route.

He includes the code to add to your bootstrap file to get the routing working and a sample controller (MyController) that extends the Zend_Rest_Controller and sets up some basic actions - get, put, post and delete. He does mention one issue he's coming across in a feature he's wanting to add - putting the version number of the API in the URL for easier separation.

I’ve been working hard on Goodsie.com lately trying to bring it to launch. It’s been great being in on a new PHP project from (near) the beginning, as it frees up a number of things.

One of those, is the fact that I can be using PHP 5.3 and all the new features that come with PHP 5.3. While I’ve used my fair share of the short-cut ternary already (?:), the bigger win for me, are the Lambda functions with scoping (anonymous functions).

I found a very specific use out of the blue of Lambda functions that I have now used and I see as a great use-case. Which is specifically passing functions/logic from your Controller to your View.

In the case of Goodsie, I’m using PHP for my templating language and as usual I’m trying to remove as much logic from my View as possible, while still allowing the view to be malleable.

The specific case I had, was a subview that was generating some pagination code for me. You know, the standard ‘previous, page 1, page 1, next’ section of links. The basic html template I had, looked looked similar to:

<div class="pagination">
    <a href="<?= $baseurl . '/page:' . ($page - 1) ?>">← Previous</a>
    Page <?= $page ?> of <?= $total ?>
    <a href="<?= $baseurl . '/page:' . ($page + 1) ?>">Next →</a>
</div>

Rather straight forward, but I quickly ran into a problem. The way it worked, as you see, is that you passed in a base URL, and the page number you are currently on, and it generated appropriate forward/back links. (Ok, there was also some other logic where it determined if you needed the prev/next links at all, but I’ve removed that for clarity)

But I then had a case, where I wanted to reuse this subview in an ajax situation. Where instead of straight URL’s being passed in, I might want to pass in a javascript function, and have that function be called with the page number as a parameter. That would be nice as I could use it in both situations. What pagination looked like, could completely change, and still work on both cases. Perhaps we’d want to give a full list of all possible pages. Or show a couple forward/back, etc. The view could handle all of that without a change to the controller.

But therein lied the problem. When using a URL based pagination, I wanted to concat the page number onto the end of the URL. But when using javascript, it wasn’t pure concatenation, it instead needed to wrap the page number with the function call. Oh the pain a simple ) could cause me.

I started writing code, where I ended up with tons of switch statements and logic inside of the view. I’d have to pass in two different possible values, a URL or a javascript function. The view at every point where it would output a link, would need to see which version was being used, and from that decide what type of output to create. In short, it was a mess.

But then the solution dawned upon me. A lambda function would work admirably here. So what I did, is inside of my controller I created a function on the fly, that would generate the appropriate type of link that I was wanting. It looks something like:

if ($jsfunc) {
    $url = function ($p) use ($jsfunc) { return "javascript:{$jsfunc}({$p})"; };
} elseif ($baseurl) {
    $url = function ($p) use ($baseurl) { return "{$baseurl}/page:{$p}"; };
}

Now I could simply rewrite my original template, to use this lambda function $url to generate it’s URLs.

<div class="pagination">
    <a href="<?= $url($page - 1) ?>">← Previous</a>
    Page <?= $page ?> of <?= $total ?>
    <a href="<?= $url($page - 1) ?>">Next →</a>
</div>

Now not only would this work for my specific situation, but ANY controller could reuse this pagination subview and define exactly how it wanted it’s URLs to be formed. Now, the view could completely change around how the pagination section is displayed, show as many, or as few pages as it wants to, and all that without ever touching the controller.

This is one simple example, but I’ve become enamored of this approach. Using lambda functions in this way, you are able to have complicated logic represented inside of your view, but encapsulated/created by the controller. Also of note is the fact that the view is managing to use the $jsfunc and $baseurl values, but without actually having to be granted access to them. This allows for another level of encapsulation, as I exposed one function,

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1389 bytes)

• unlimg
• CouchDB Session Handler
• Proxy
• Apinstall
• Automatic Priority Setting
• GraphML Generator
• DS Create table
• Search Files
• Simple record set
• Fibonacci
• Stream Steganography
• MySQL & Session
• MPO Extractor
• Query Build Exec

This is a very unusual blog post for the open source area of my website, since it contains a recommendation for a science fiction book. The reason I've put it here instead of the private section is on the one hand, that it will definitely reach more geek - and therefor probably scifi interested - people here. On the other hand, the book I'm writing about can be found online for free in English language, but the private section is mostly kept in German.I love scifi literature and movies, as most geeks do. But the quality of works in this area varies quite a lot. Beside the style of writing, there is one crucial point, which can make the best novel be a total disaster: Authenticity.

Qaiku, the conversational microblogging service that launched a year ago had a refresh that launched today. While it hasn't yet convinced the twittering masses, it has already proven itself as a lot more thoughtful platform for the Finnish online community, and as a valuable workstreaming tool.

The new version looks quite nice and fresh. Notice the privacy information on the right-hand side, which is relevant as Qaiku allows channels and profiles that are private or invitation-only:

Technically the new version is also remarkable as it is the first major website to run fully on top of the legacy-free Midgard2 platform. So yes, every entry you see there is a GObject. And D-Bus signals fly when you post.

On to the challenge, then

To highlight Qaiku's threading, conversational nature I started a new "On my travels, I have" thread for sharing your most extraordinary travel experiences. This is not on Twitter or Buzz as with Qaiku it is so easy to keep the conversation together and accessible for the future as well.

To contribute, sign up on Qaiku, go to the thread and add your experiences as a comment. If you have a link or picture to include, you can also do so. My first entry was:

seen ice descend from the heavens and provide us with cold beer on a hot day in Lesotho

Will be interesting to see what comes out of this :-)

From CMStr.com there's a new tutorial showing you how to set up Joomla manually just in case something happens with the install and you need to change things yourself.

Why would I want to do a manual install when my web host has this Fantastico thingy that will install Joomla for me? Good question. [...] If you are building websites for a living, and or plan on using Joomla a lot, then you really need to start doing your own installs. [...] If you are an experienced parachute jumper, you would pack your own chute right? This is no different.

Screenshots are included to help make the process easier as they walk you through setting up the basics like language settings and database information. They also touch on the FTP setting (off for security) and removing the admin user's information to help make things a bit more secure. It's not a comprehensive list of the things you'd need to do to get it 100% configured for just what you need, but it's a start.

On Kavoir.com there's a new post that reminds you that hashing isn't enough anymore to protect your users and their passwords. They offer a suggestion or two of what you can do to help lock things down a bit more.

The common practice is to hash the user password and store the hash string of the password in the database. When the user tries to log in and supplies his password, it is used to generate a hash string to be compared to the one stored in the database. [...] This approach may be secure in the 70s of the last century, but barely any more.

Computing has evolved enough to where hashed can be matched, sometimes in less than two or three minutes. Their answer to the problem? Generate a random salt each time you create the hash with a constant being used as a base. A code snippet calling a user-defined function and the sha1 function are included.

Brandon Savage has posted his own response to the "don't be afraid of the upgrade" thread that's been going around concerning updating to PHP 5.3. He takes a different approach to the matter, though - one of a bit more caution.

When it comes to open source projects endorsing PHP 5.3 as their one and only PHP platform, I encourage caution. When it comes to open source projects that use PHP, there are three main issues that I believe should be considered before making the leap to PHP 5.3 (or any new release of any new software).

He sees three considerations projects and companies should consider before making the upgrade on their servers - the amount of control you have over the environment, deciding if the upgrade is worth possible backwards compatibility breaks and how much support you want to still provide for the pre-5.3 version(s).