Pragmatism in the real world
2 December 2012: Note that as of ZF2.0.4, this no longer works due to changes to fix a security issue. See the release notes for further information. Following yesterday's article on returning JSON from a ZF2 controller action, Lukas suggested that I should also demonstrate how to use the Accept header to get JSON. So this is how you do it! Set up the JsonStrategy We set up the JsonStrategy as we did in returning… continue reading.
The new view layer in Zend Framework 2 can be set up to return JSON rather than rendered HTML relatively easily. There are two steps to this: Set up the JsonStrategy Firstly we need to set up the view's JsonStrategy to check to a situation when returning JSON is required and then to render out JSON for us. The JsonStrategy will cause the JsonRenderer to be run in two situations: The view model returned by… continue reading.
One thing that I've wanted to implement for a while now is automatic vhosts on my dev box. The idea is that I want to drop a folder into a directory and have it automatically turned into a vhost for me accessible at http://foldername.dev. It turns out that this isn't nearly as hard as expected which is usually the case with things that I've been putting off! This is how to do it. Apache configuration… continue reading.
It's been around 18 months since I wrote up some notes about OS X, so clearly it's time for an updated article. This article is intended to give a quick and easy introduction to some key things that I think you should know when you move to using OS X. Basics There's one menu bar for all applications. That is, you can only see the menus for the currently active application. Closing the last window… continue reading.
Both the Module Manager and the MVC system use the Event Manger extensively in order to provide "hook points" for you to add your own code into the application flow. This is a list of the events triggered by each class during a standard request with the Skeleton Application: Module Manager Zend\Module\Manager: loadModules.pre For every module: Zend\Module\Manager: loadModule.resolve Zend\Module\Manager: loadModule Zend\Module\Manager: loadModules.post Application Successful: Zend\Mvc\Application: bootstrap Zend\Mvc\Application: route Zend\Mvc\Application: dispatch Zend\Mvc\Controller\ActionController: dispatch (if controller extends… continue reading.
Ralph Schindler has posted PHP Constructor Best Practices And The Prototype Pattern If your knowledge of constructors ends with “the place where I put my object initialization code,” read on. While this is mostly what a constructor is, the way a developer crafts their class constructor greatly impacts the initial API of a particular class/object; which ultimately affects usability and extensibility. After all, the constructor is the first impression a particular class can make. In… continue reading.
Pádraic Brady has posted A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) in PHP (Part 1): How Not To Use Htmlspecialchars() For Output Escaping: Always set the third parameter to htmlspecialchars(), set it correctly, and make sure your document is never served with a mismatched or invalid character encoding! Don’t expect some theoretically perfect world to magically appear – browsers are filthily efficient at doing weird things you don’t expect. With a nod to the anniversary… continue reading.
With the release of Beta 3 of Zend Framework, we now have a significantly refactored the ZendView component. One of the changes made is that there is a ViewModel object that is returned from a controller which contains the variables to be used within the view script along with meta information such as the view script to render. The really nice thing about ViewModels is that they can be nested and this is how the… continue reading.
Update As of Beta 4, this method no longer works. Evan Coury's post on Module-specific layouts in Zend Framework 2 is the correct way to do this. Following on from the discussion on modules, we can hook into the event system to do module specific bootstrapping. By this, I mean, if you have some code that you want to run only if the action to be called is within this module, you can hook into… continue reading.
Matthew Weier OPhinney has posted View Layers, Database Abstraction, Configuration, Oh, My! Late last week, the Zend Framework community 2.0.0beta3, the latest iteration of the v2 framework. What have we been busy doing the last couple months? In a nutshell, getting dirty with view layers, database abstraction, and configuration. This is a must read article if you want to know what's new in ZendView, ZendDb and ZendConfig!
