This is an idea that has been growing in my mind, and I seem to finally have a handle on it. I have been a professional PHP web developer for the last 12 years, and have gone through the learning and transition cycles from learning a new language from Visual Basic 6 and MS Access […]
Display Contents of Different File Formats Word/Excel/Powerpoint/PDF/RTF as HTML
This is a typical problem which I also raised on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11061929/php-extract-text-from-different-file-formats-word-excel-powerpoint-pdf-rtf#comment14475398_11061929), but there seemed no single resource around the web to solve this particular problem, so since I have solved it I thought it would make sense to provide an approach and a solution, it can be refined better with time Problem: We have […]
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Doctrine 2 – Day 2 – Model Validation using Symfony Validator Service in Zend Framework
It is just Day 2 of my experiences in the trenches, regular work, had kept me from this but I managed to get some time to keep digging. As a followup to my Doctrine 2 – Day 1 – Commentary from the Trenches. The models are up and configured, and the unit testing is setup […]
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State of PHP Feb 2012 – Symfony 2, Zend Framework 2, IDE Support, MySQL
There is just too much going on so I thought I should put these thoughts down so that I do not lose my mind from the excitement and anticipation that comes from things moving very fast and innovation being spured at a pace which is mind boggling. PHP In my opinion the stabilization of PHP […]
Doctrine2 – Day 1 – Commentary from the Trenches
The new year is here so it is time to get cracking on infrastructure for the year’s development projects. There are a number of things we have been putting off, but now that a number of our client hosts support PHP 5.3, it is the right time to move up the stack for our ORM […]
PHP Wishes 2012 – Interfaces and Standard Web Application Project Layout
Since Santa is listening, below are my PHP wishes for 2012: Standard Interfaces like Java which are used by many projects so that developers and architects focus on implementation Standardized Web Application Project Layout just like J2EE Web Application Directory Structure (http://java.sun.com/blueprints/code/projectconventions.html) or Linux Standard Base (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base) I am learning Symfony 2 over the next coupla […]
Zend Framework Hidden Gems – Zend_Measure
Just had a bit of a problem today dealing with displaying file sizes of uploaded reports in an application we are upgrading using Zend Framework. When the files are uploaded, the file sizes are stored in bytes, but for display we need to show the sized in KB as the typical file size is between […]
Interfacing in the PHP World – Dictator Style
Seems that I have a radical approach to the need for PHP interfacing as suggested by Lucas Smith (http://pooteeweet.org/blog/2008/) then a rebuttal by Herman Radtke (http://www.hermanradtke.com/blog/please-do-not-interface-the-php-world/) and finally Lucas Smith again (http://pooteeweet.org/blog/2014) I think that the approach for PHP should be: 1) Interfaces in the main PHP tree therefore all have to abide or die, […]
Zend_Navigation Render the SubMenu for Active Menu Item using a Partial
One of the biggest problems with Zend_Navigation helpers is using partials to render sub-menus in order to achieve customized rendering especially when additional properties have been defined. The approach to the solution is as follows: // find the first active menu item $subnav = $this->navigation()->menu()->findOneByActive(1); // The finder methods return null for no matches so […]
Zend Framework – Page Caching
Well along the Zend Framework journey, the biggest issue now is performance, since the applications run on shared hosting accounts. We have caching enabled for the navigation menus, translation, and even Doctrine queries, however the pages still load slow. Well one of the caching front ends (http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.cache.frontends.html) is the Page front end. The configuration is […]