Archive for June, 2006
PHP Developer - June 30th, 2006
Zend and IBM have announced the latest release of their Zend Cores for both IBM and for Oracle.
Zend Technologies has announced new versions of Zend Core for IBM and Oracle. Both Zend Core for IBM and Zend Core for Oracle can install Apache-2.0.50-Server and work with PHP 5.1.4. Further, Zend has extended database and PHP functionalities with both versions.
Updates to the IBM Core include updates to the DB2, Cloudscape, and Informix functionality as well as updates to the ibm_db2 extension.
Updates for the Oracle Core include changes to the oci8-treiber and support for the Instant Client web applications.
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PHP Developer - June 30th, 2006
The International PHP Magazine site has posted the results of their poll (still taking votes, by the way) about what some of the prerequisited of a good framework should be.
The International PHP Magazine conducted a poll last week, asking for your opinion on the ‘Pre-requisites of a good framework’. The options provided include:
- Strong separation of data
- Web 2.0 support and preferably libraries built in
- Strong naming conventions and smart English recognition
- Robustness (ability to handle large volumes of traffic and data)
- Rapid development features (scaffolding etc.)
- A great IDE (preferably Eclipse)
- Others
The results so far show that two options are neck and neck for users - the correct/strong seperation of data and the framework’s robustness for dealing with the loads. Pulling in close behind them is the need for rapid development, making it quick and easy to use.
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PHP Developer - June 30th, 2006
On the Cake Baker blog today, Daniel Hofstetter shows us how to update the contents of multiple div tags with a little help from Ajax:
This is a question which arises from time to time in the CakePHP google group. There is an example in the group, but I have to admit I didn’t understood it the first time I read it. So I try to provide a better example.
His example creates a view with the Ajax link and two divs inside to update - our containers. Next up is the controller, a simple matter of four lines to set which layout to use. And, lastly, they create another view, one to handle the actual updates to the two divs previously created. Using it is as simple as clicking on the link in the first view, populating the two divs with new information.
Be sure to check out the comments for other helpful hints and bug information (with Firefox).
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PHP Developer - June 29th, 2006
The OC Food Review blog has posted part one of a two part series covering the creation of a location-based search engine. They’re currently implementing it into their site and wanted to share the knowledge.
Conceptually, location based searching is pretty straight-forward: find out where you are, find out how far you’re willing to travel, and compare your location against the locations of all your choices. If the distance between where you are and what you’re interested in is less than what you’re willing to travel, add it to your results list. Simple, right? Right.
He talks more about the concepts behind the search and one of the keys to the entire process - geocoding. They opted to go with the Yahoo! Maps API to grab this information. There’s some sample REST urls and the output of the results after they’ve been unserialized.
They’ve even created their own class to make things even simpler. It does require that you have cURL installed with your PHP5 installation, but outside of that, there are no other dependencies.
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PHP Developer - June 29th, 2006
If you’ve been programming for any length of time, you know the “joy” of working with someone else’s code. When taking over a project, the first inclination I’ve seen with most programmers is to go in and format everything to what they’d like (or duplicate functionality). This is where the problem comes in, the trend that Michael Kimsal talks about in his new blog post - something he wonders about being an “antipattern”.
I was discussing things with my brother the other day and I came up with a problem which he helped name. I’m currently maintaining some code, and it’s quite a jumble. One of the things I can tell is that one of my predecessors began adding new sections of code to clean up the logic in other areas of the code. However, what never happened was the clean up of the old code, so now there’s two places where the same set of data is retrieved in different ways.
He proposes the name “Multi Master Data” for the situation - two different sources, living in the same code, doing the same thing. Of course, he also mentions a situation where this type of problem can cause real issues, especially when trying to track down a bug (a bang your head on the desk moment).
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