While possibly a great help and a way to speed development up, are database access classes like Zend_Db and others making people forget about SQL? ActiveRecord, Table Row Gateway and whatnot, are people trying to constrain their thinking inside the bounds given by these implementations?
Java based IDE = Very bad IDEa
Have you ever used Eclipse or any Eclipse-based IDE, such as Zend Studio Neon or Aptana Studio? All fine tools, but they have a big problem: Java Note: this post is a bit old (late 2007), and IDEs have gotten better since then. For example, NetBeans 6.5 is a personal favorite of mine now. If you still want to read …
Are spammers masking themselves with innocent posts?
I had recently been getting increased amounts of spam comments and I was wondering why. You probably hadn’t noticed this, though, thanks to WordPress’ excellent spam detection which has so far made a very good job in detecting suspicious comments. Up until today. Today, a single spam comment got through the detection. I had received comments exactly like this one …
Is targeting a single browser okay?
When I encounter a website which is broken in Opera, my browser of choice, I hate it. I know that Opera is perfectly capable of displaying any site Firefox or Internet Explorer can. It makes me feel like lecturing whoever made the site about cross-browser compatibility, valid XHTML, valid CSS, you name it. But if you think about it, is …
What are the controller and model in MVC?
A lot of people seem to be slightly confused about what the M and C, Model and Controller, of MVC are, in regards to web applications. What does the Model do? What does the Controller do? View is what everyone seems to know, though… I wonder why is that so? What is so confusing about Models and Controllers?
Quick introduction to using Zend_Layout
Lately, the Zend_Layout component has been a very popular topic on #zftalk. It is indeed a very useful component, but a lot of people are having trouble understanding how it works. Adding to the confusion is the outdated documentation regarding the component proposal and the equally outdated articles about Zend/Xend_Layout. Let’s demonstrate the usage of the current Zend_Layout implementation, which …
Localize your site in 3 easy steps
Internationalization and localization means making your site usable in more than one languages. Well, to be honest, you could call a site that’s only in english localized to english visitors too, but in any case… These two are also known as I18N and L10N. Can you guess where these acronyms come from? The first and last letter from each word …
The mythical HTTP protocol
The HTTP protocol is what powers todays web. While not useful for most people, knowing how HTTP works is important for those who work with dynamic web sites. Still, it seems that the protocol is mostly a mystery to a lot of developers and some features of the protocol, such as the accept-language header, aren’t really used.
Geek humor
Sunday morning, 5 AM… – Hi – Haven’t seen you in a while, but I have seen you in a foreach! Proof against homosexuality: You can’t connect two male cable connectors. note: I have nothing against sexual minorities, the above is just a funny fact ;) ) Camel-casing is fundamentally flawed You know how camelCasingWorks, right? Well, I think it’s …
Routing and complex URLs in Zend Framework
We were talking about routing on the #zftalk IRC channel. One of the users mentioned that rather than using routes, he was using the __call method in the IndexController. I then asked him why is he doing that, as I knew routes would be more than a good choice for most kinds of URLs. I found out that he was …