You sometimes see people asking why the Zend Framework (or some others) don’t provide a library for the Model part in MVC. While ZF provides data access classes in the form of Zend_Db and related components, it doesn’t provide any concrete examples of how you would implement a model class. This often confuses especially beginners. Providing a common base model, …
Packageizer is fixed
The packageizer had some problems determining the dependencies for the newly added Zend Framework 1.7 packages, but the problem is now fixed. The packageizer source-code has also been updated with the patch.
Scraping HTML with Python
Have you ever had to write a script that scrapes data from an HTML page? Was the page horribly bad HTML too? If so, you probably know how annoying and time consuming it can be to write a script that reliably fetches data from such a mess. I was recently asked to write a script that scrapes an ASP.NET page …
Thoughts on unit testing and application design
Here are some thoughts and observations regarding application design and unit testing in the quiz-project I recently wrote about. When I was writing the Amazing Programming Language Guessing Script, I didn’t first write any unit tests. Partially because I just wanted to test something quickly, partially because I didn’t think there was any point in doing it. When I later …
Programming language guessing game
Some of you asked me about the “quiz” thing that showed up in one of the screenshots in my NetBeans review… Well, here it is: During that weekend when I was trying out NetBeans, I wrote a small Zend Framework + Doctrine application which attempts to guess a programming language the user is thinking of, based on a set of …
Food for thought: utilizing models in MVC
“What is a model” and “Is Zend_Db_Table a model” seem to be asked once in a while on #zftalk. Frameworks say they have a full model available, thus they are MVC frameworks ORM libraries say they generate models. It seems the ActiveRecord pattern has become somewhat synonymous with model. Pádraic Brady wrote an excellent post on how models are misunderstood, …
First Opera 10 alpha out
Those who are following me on Twitter probably already saw this, but this deserves a post here as well: The first alpha release of Opera 10 is out.
Common widget design patterns
I’ve worked on quite many widget projects, and very often they have certain patterns that keep appearing. I’m calling these “widget design patterns” – let’s take a look at a few.
NetBeans 6.5 review
During the weekend, I tried out NetBeans 6.5 and its new PHP related functionality. I had earlier seen some quick shots of how the support was, and it seemed like a good contender for big names like Zend Studio. What features does NetBeans 6.5 have for PHP developers? How does it compare against Zend Studio for Eclipse?
Generating Sudoku puzzles using JavaScript
While I’m not the biggest fan of Sudoku puzzles, I wanted to make a sudoku widget for the Opera x-widgets challenge. This required me to study the algorithms used for generating sudokus, which was actually a quite interesting challenge. While there are some examples of generating sudokus online, such as this interesting approach, it seems there’s only one “true” way: …