A few days ago I went and registered the domain dashto.cc and created a really quick-n-dirty URL shortening site. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
I get asked about this a lot. Why did I take the PHP Certification exam? What does it do for me? Was it hard? Read the rest of this entry »
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. So today I just want to briefly talk about how I solved the problem. Read the rest of this entry »
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 post later on some more advanced usage. Read the rest of this entry »
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 yet to work on any project where regex was not required. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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 to touch on the topic of member visibility (that is, private/protected methods and properties). Read the rest of this entry »
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 post I will talk about Cross-Site Request Forgeries or CSRF (“see-surf”). Read the rest of this entry »
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 tools to help make using it a breeze. Ruby’s famous Rails framework and Perl’s Catalyst also make use of the MVC pattern. So what is the big deal? Should you care? In this post I’m going to briefly try and explain the MVC pattern, why you should use it, and how. Read the rest of this entry »