Author Archive
Encoding Numbers as Base 36
A few days ago I went and registered the domain dashto.cc and created a really quick-n-dirty URL shortening site.
php|architect’s Guide to Programming with Zend Framework
One of the first books to be published on the topic of Zend Framework was php|architect’s Guide to Programming with Zend Framework (Amazon). If you’re looking for an “in” into ZF then — eh, well, skip this book.
PHP Certification
I get asked about this a lot. Why did I take the PHP Certification exam? What does it do for me? Was it hard?
Sounds, IE7 and Security Warnings
Some of you may know that the last few weeks I’ve been writing an AJAX chat application that plugs in to DeskPRO. One of the problems we ran into is playing sound notifications. The problem is that IE7 likes to pop up a security warning when you use the usual <embed> code. This was unacceptable. [...]
MVC With The Zend Framework
I’ve been using the Zend Framework a lot lately and have come to really appreciate it. Today I want to write about ZF and how to use the MVC components. This post will be all about ZF itself, how the MVC components work, and getting a simple example up and going. I will write another [...]
Basic Regular Expressions
Today I want to talk about regular expressions (usually referred to as regex or regexp). No matter what application you are creating, chances are you will need to parse text in some way. It might be for validating user input or for extracting information from a string of data in some arbitrary format. I have [...]
Auto-DST Detection
Online apps usually have a way to set your timezone so that all times are local to you. One common feature many end-users expect is some mechanism that automatically detects when DST is on/off and changes things accordingly.
Javascript Objects and Member Visibility
So many web developers know just a little about Javascript. Enough to use a library like jQuery somewhat effectively, but not enough to understand how to create properly structured applications. I’m not going to get into how objects work in Javascript, or how to use them, I’ll leave that for another day. I just want [...]
Cross-Site Request Forgeries (CSRF)
Today I want to cover a kind of security issue that is not addressed very often. Just about any book or article aimed at developers has some warning about XSS and SQL injection. Those two attacks are arguably two of the most harmful, but there are certainly other things to be weary of. In this [...]
Intro to the MVC Pattern
There’s a lot of talk these days about design patterns. The most talked about pattern in the realm of web development seems to be the MVC pattern, or the Model-View-Controller. It is this pattern that many of the most popular frameworks are built around. Frameworks like symfony, CakePHP and CodeIgniter enforce this pattern and offer [...]
