Migrating user account databases

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As a part of my work at The Group, I’ve been developing a suite of applications for them. As most web applications do, these applications have to store their user data somewhere – in a database. As you may guess, the user’s password has been stored as a hash. As a part of some new developments, we are moving our …

GroupFight: My old PHP-based game

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First an announcement: During 2008, CodeUtopia had about 120 000 visitors! I think that’s amazing, and I want to thank everyone who has been reading the blog. I’m going to try and keep posting interesting things for you to read this year too. :D Now, to the post: Back in 2003 I wrote a game called GroupFight. The idea started …

Using models as criteria objects for querying the database

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If you have written a model layer which separates database access from the rest of the code, you probably know that you may end up with lots of methods like findByName, findByTitle or such, for cases where you want to find records based on specific criterias. You could also use arrays, for example findBy(array(‘title’=>’something’)). However, these are easy to type …

What would make template engines actually useful?

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Probably all of us have used template engines in one form or another. Some might even like template engines for whatever reason, but let’s think about it for a moment: are they actually making our lives easier? Most template engines simply wrap PHP (or some other language’s) syntax into their own syntax, and maybe they look a little bit cleaner …

Dealing with configuration files in Subversion

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Here’s a quick tip on how to deal with configuration files when working with Subversion. This probably applies to other VCS’s too like CVS or Git. You probably have noticed this: you have a configuration file or such, and you need to keep it in SVN, but committing it would be a problem as updating it on other machines would …

Vim user? You’ll love NetBeans

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Here’s another reason to like NetBeans: the jVi plugin. It changes the NetBeans code editor to Vim, which is in my opinion much more powerful text editor than the standard one in NB. What makes jVi even better is that you actually get all the code-assist and other features present in NetBeans’ normal editor! I’ve used some Vim plugin for …

Another idea for using models with forms

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Matthew Weier O’Phinney wrote about using Zend_Form with models. His approach puts a form inside a model, which then uses the form to validate itself. While this idea is not bad, I find it being upside down – I think the form should use the model to validate itself, not the other way around. But how would you utilize a …