Pragmatism in the real world
Recently I needed to speed up a legacy project that makes a lot of database calls to generate each page. After profiling, I discovered that 90% of the database calls returned data that rarely changed, so decided to cache these calls. One of the nice things about Zend_Framework is that its use-at-will philosophy means that you can use any given component with minimal dependencies on the rest of the framework code. In my case, I… continue reading.
This is very off-topic, so feel free to skip! Received a round-robin today via email. As I don't send on such things, I thought I'd mention it here as I'm getting fed up with the price of petrol, especially given the profit that the big oil companies have recently announced: Received from a good friend so leave the rest to you! See what you think and pass it on if you agree with it. We… continue reading.
Some of our Zend Framework applications have to run on IIS without ISAPI_Rewrite installed. In these cases we need urls of the form http://www.example.com/index.php?module=mod&controller=con&action=act. I couldn't get this to work out of the box with Zend Framework 1.5, so wrote my own router called App_Controller_Router_Route_RequestVars. This code obviously only supports what I needed and I've only tested it on IIS for Windows 2003 Server, so you may need to tweak to make it do what… continue reading.
When you render a Zend_Form, the elements will render to HTML compliance rather than XHTML compliance, even if you have < ?php echo $this->doctype('XHTML1_STRICT');?> at the top of your layout script. Practically, this means that all the input elements do not end in "/>". To resolve this, you need to call the doctype() view helper prior to rendering your form. Within my projects, I do this within a front controller plug-in called ViewSetup that looks… continue reading.
I've been thinking about the Simple Zend_Form File Upload Example that I discussed last month. To recap, if you haven't read the comments, if the form fails to validate for some reason then you get a nasty error: Warning: htmlspecialchars() expects parameter 1 to be string, object given in /Users/rob/Sites/akrabat/Zend_Form_FileUpload_Example/lib/Zend/View/Abstract.php on line 786 Essentially, what is happening is that the App_Form_Element_File class that we wrote assigns the $_FILES array to the $value parameter for the… continue reading.
Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review. This post is about the second one I received, Learning PHP Data Objects by Dennis Popel. I was excited to receive this book as PDO underlies a lot of the Zend_Db_Adapter objects that I use in my day to day programming. It seemed like a good idea that I should know more about it. Overview of the book This book starts out introducing PDO… continue reading.
Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review, so let's start with Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. According to the introduction, the book is intended for beginners to intermediate PHP5 programmers and the first chapter has a good introduction to what object oriented programming is and why you would want to use it. Overview of the book Chapters two and three of the book are an excellent discussion of how… continue reading.
The new Flickr Uploadr was written using Xul. Richard Crowley has put up a post at the Flickr blog with links to various articles that he's written about devloping with XUlrunner. Fascinating stuff and a must read for anyone who writes Xulrunner apps. Even better, the full source to Uploadr is available!
UPDATE: This is out of date. Nowadays, you want to use Zend_Form_Element_File. Zend Framework 1.5's Zend_Form component is missing support for the file input element as it is waiting on a file upload component to build upon. We're busy people, so we'll fake it… This is a super simple example showing how to do file uploads with Zend_Form in Zend Framework 1.5. I'm building on the Simple Zend_Form Example, so make sure you have read… continue reading.
As I mentioned a while ago, I'm now using a MacBook Pro. All is going well, and I like Mail.app's search and data detectors very much. There are some niggles though that I miss from Thunderbird. My top 3 are: * GPG integration (Thunderbird's Enigmail) * Mail.app's insistence on attached PDFs and images inline * Filing mails to arbitrary folders using the keyboard (Thunderbird's nostalgy) It turns out that there are solutions to all three… continue reading.
