Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
Monday, October 20th, 2008
I've been reworking the ModelForm class for ZF a bit. Earlier this year, I discussed porting it to use Zend_Db_Table with Matthew Weier O'Phinney, for using it with Zend Framework. I initially had done some checking on Zend_Db_Table, and some small code changes to modify the class to use it ...
Posted in Programming | 10 Comments »
Thursday, October 16th, 2008
CSRF, or Cross-Site Request Forgery, is a vulnerability very common in websites. In short, it means that if you have your site at foo.com, and an attacker at badguy.com can display a form similar to one of your site's, and make users on his site submit the forms on your ...
Posted in Programming | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
I've heard some inexperienced PHP programmers say that Zend Framework is confusing to them. Until today, I have agreed: Zend Framework has a lot of classes and some of them are quite complex (such as Zend_Form). But does that actually make it more difficult for inexperienced programmers than other frameworks?
Posted in Programming | 11 Comments »
Friday, October 10th, 2008
This seems to be a relatively common question on #zftalk nowadays, so here's a quick wrapup!
The traditional plain-PHP way
$file = file_get_contents('some.zip');
header('Content-Type: application/zip');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="some.zip"');
header('Content-Length: ' . strlen($file));
echo $file;
The Zend Framework controller way
//this is inside an action in one of your controllers:
$file = file_get_contents('some.zip');
$this->getResponse()
->setBody($file)
...
Posted in Programming | 8 Comments »
Monday, October 6th, 2008
Did you ever want to use just a single component from Zend Framework, but couldn't figure out which files you needed?
Well, here's a solution: Zend Framework packageizer script! Just pick the class you want, and you'll get it and all its dependencies in a nice zip file for you to ...
Posted in Programming | 16 Comments »
Saturday, October 4th, 2008
There are some expensive libraries that you can use to generate PDF files... but why bother with them, when there are good free alternatives like Zend_Pdf?
In three steps, you can generate a fancy report:
Create a PDF template
Insert data to template with Zend_Pdf
Profit $$$
Since this is a quite repetitive task, let's ...
Posted in Programming | 3 Comments »
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
At The Group, we're developing some web applications that needed to use the same user database. The applications were originally being developed with separate login for each, but I decided it would be better to share the login code across them.
I investigated some ways to achieve sharing a single login ...
Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »
Saturday, September 20th, 2008
I think a good programmer should know at least three languages:
English
C or C++
A scripting language with dynamic typing
Why?
Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
Today while reading PHP::Impact's refactoring guideline post I was reminded about collections.
As you probably know, arrays are very flexible in PHP and probably a good choice for many data storing tasks.
Strictly typed languages usually use "generic" collection classes instead of arrays. They are kind of like PHP arrays which ...
Posted in Programming | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
When working on a project, I sometimes find myself stuck - thinking about some implementation detail, such as how to tell my admin-module which other modules are installed in my CMS (but that's another story) - and being stuck, unable to get anything done, just thinking of the problem at ...
Posted in Programming | 2 Comments »