Programming

There was recently a nice posting from PHPDeveloper.org linking to an article by Florian Eibeck, where on his blog he discusses some solutions to these extremely fun situations.

http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/342-Multilingual-Websites-with-PHP.html

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Disclaimer: These are primarily notes for myself as I get accustomed to CakePHP's (v1.2) authentication and ACL. I've been building a website and wanted to finally make use of CakePHP before I start using it for the library's CMS. A CMS is a large undertaking and I don't want to go into it "cold-turkey", so I came up with some side-project to help me understand the framework a bit better. All in all, it truly is an extremely rapid development tool.

I decided not to go with ExpressionEngine or Drupal simply because I'd still have to take time to learn those systems and make modules or extensions within those languages - and there's no guarantee I'd be able to do what I'd need to do with them. If I build it myself, it would take just about the same amount of time with Cake. Anyway, to continue...

Continue reading "CakePHP Auth Component"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Those of you looking towards "widgets" and cross-platform application development, but are primarily web developers with some background (or none) of programming with a desktop application, perhaps you should take a look at Adobe AIR (formerly known as Apollo). It allows you to create rich, cross-platform applications using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript! ...and, technically, I suppose you could leave out the CSS and JS part of that and it would still run...but what's the fun in that? It can be integrated into a Flash application, or a Flex application - but it does not have to be.

If you're seemingly interested in the technology, I went through and found some interesting links on the subject (read: tutorials) that will hopefully help to get you (me) started. Okay...so I did it because I'm interested and this blog can serve as an access point for me rather than using my Bookmarks as a temporary storage medium. Whatever. I was looking for simple tutorials, so I ignored anything with an "adobe.com" or "ibm.com" (developer works) domain, so if you'd like more when you dive head first, you might want to look to those resources instead of the ones I've provided below.

1. Pete Freitag - newest one (by published date) that I could find
2. NOT A TUTORIAL - Get the AIR SDK here
3. Jonothan Snook on 2007's 24 Ways: Christmas is in the AIR - a simple to-do list tutorial
4. AOL Developer Network - Part 1 of a Series - Simple "Hello World" type page with a self-signed certificate
5. Jonathan Snook (again) releases Snoto Foto source code to help you learn! - No tutorial, but I'd imagine it's commented well

Enjoy! I hope I will!

Update: Make sure you've updated to the latest Sun Java JRE package or you might get some really, really odd and weird undocumented errors when trying to compile!

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

While using PHP5, almost everyone knows that SimpleXML is the easiest class to utilize when absorbing data from an XML source (be it XML, Atom, RSS, etc...). But, there are instances where things aren't as smooth as one would hope. I was reading in some RSS feeds from WeatherBug the other day, and was all fine and dandy, until I came to an annoying little snippet of code within the feed.
<![CDATA[ <description><img src="http://deskwx.weatherbug.com/images/Forecast/icons/cond077.gif" align="left" hspace="7" vspace="2" alt="" /> Winter storm watch in effect from late Thursday night through Friday evening. <br /><a href=" http://web.live.weatherbug.com/forecast/forecast.aspx?zcode=z4641&zip=12866&units=0"> 7 Day Forecast</a> <br /></description> ]]>

When I got to that data, SimpleXML couldn't retrieve it. When I did a dump of the entire feed, SimpleXML expressed the description tags as being empty. Ok...so how the heck can we get at it?

It's much simpler than one would expect. You forcibly convert the value of that field to a string. That's it.
$desc = (string) trim($feed->channel->item[0]->description);

The annoyingly difficult thing about this, is that I knew I wouldn't be able to figure it out on my own, and the PHP docs didn't help with that one. I went to Google, and that took a few tricky searches to find what I needed too!

Source: Using SimpleXML to Parse RSS Feeds

Tip: That link also shows how to traverse different namespaces, just in case your RSS or XML sources use namespaces, which the last time that happened I used a DOMDocument object, which was a little more work than necessary. I wish I knew this back then!

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Google Labs has not given up on their little endeavors, and one of the recent additions to the host of services is the Chart API. By using a series of GET variables in a web request, one can have a dynamically generated chart returned for them. The following chart is the "Hello World" example they give using the following code:
<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World" alt="hello world chart" />

Continue reading "Google's New API: Google Chart"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski