Category Archives: micro tutorial

Use Zend_Translate to Translate Your Web App

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There are some really good reasons to use Zend_Translate for your multilingual site instead of some other technique. Actually you can definitely simulate something like this Zend component with and array or ini file, but here are some good things to mention.

1. Write a human readable source file

In fact you can do this even without Zend_Translate. Image you’ve an ini file with some pairs like:

lblMyLabel = "My Label"

Nobody says this cannot be “more” human readable – like so:

My Label = "My Label"

Than you can support several files i.e. en.ini, de.ini, etc. where you can translate this label. The problem is that once you read the ini file you’ve to deal with those white spaces into the labels, while with Zend_Translate you can simply call them with:

$translate->_("My Label");

2. Default values for missing labels

Zend_Translate forces you to define a source file. Which is really great, because you always have a default value. Assuming that you don’t have a specific label translated in one of the ini files, you’ll get the default value from the source file, and defining source and other files is as easy as:

// en.ini
My Label = "My Label"
 
// de.ini
...
 
// while the locale is de_DE you'll have 
// the default value returned
$translate->_("My Label"); // will return My Label from the en.ini

3. Locales

It’s really great that you can directly setup a locale for this module. Thus you have more flexibility when switching between languages and you can benefit from the power of the framework when reading some browser specific locales. Here’s some code:

$translate = new Zend_Translate('ini', 'en.ini', 'en');
$translate->addTranslation('de.ini', 'de');
 
// than when you setup the translation locale
$translate->setLocale('en');

4. Cache

One of the greatest things about Zend_Translate is the native support of cache. It’s so cool! Actually the labels of a large web system are pretty static and don’t change every day. In other hand in large scale systems there are lots of labels, and the load time will be faster with cache.

$frontendOptions = array('lifetime' => 600, 'automatic_serialization' => true);
$backendOptions  = array('cache_dir' => 'path_to_cache_dir');
 
$cache = Zend_Cache::factory('Core', 'File', $frontendOptions, $backendOptions);
 
Zend_Translate::setCache($cache);

It’s a great advantage to use Zend_Translate after all this. Actually I have finished projects without any use of it, but I really can’t imagine how I’ll work now without it!

JavaScript array.pop() – Get The Last Item

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Let’s assume there’s a little, simple JavaScript array:

var a = [3,2,4,5,2,4,5,8];

If you pop() an element from it – what element will be taken? The answer is a bit frustrating, but logical – the last one:

var b = a.pop();
alert(b); // this will result in 8

Friday Algorithms: Quicksort – Difference Between PHP and JavaScript

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Here’s some Friday fun. Let me show you one sorting algorithm, perhaps the most known of all them – the quick sort, implemented both on PHP and JavaScript. Although the code look similar between both languages, there are few differences, that show the importance of the syntax knowledge!

1. PHP

<?php
 
    $unsorted = array(2,4,5,63,4,5,63,2,4,43);
 
    function quicksort($array)
    {
        if (count($array) == 0)
            return array();
 
        $pivot = $array[0];
        $left = $right = array();
 
        for ($i = 1; $i < count($array); $i++) {
            if ($array[$i] < $pivot)
                $left[] = $array[$i];
            else
                $right[] = $array[$i];
        }
 
        return array_merge(quicksort($left), array($pivot), quicksort($right));
    }
 
    $sorted = quicksort($unsorted);
 
    print_r($sorted);

2. JavaScript

var a = [2,4,5,63,4,5,63,2,4,43];
 
function quicksort(arr)
{
    if (arr.length == 0)
        return [];
 
    var left = new Array();
    var right = new Array();
    var pivot = arr[0];
 
    for (var i = 1; i < arr.length; i++) {
        if (arr[i] < pivot) {
           left.push(arr[i]);
        } else {
           right.push(arr[i]);
        }
    }
 
    return quicksort(left).concat(pivot, quicksort(right));
}
 
console.log(quicksort(a));

Note that the first conditional statement is quite important! While in PHP the count function will return 0 either on a NULL value or an empty array and you can substitute it with something like count($array) < 2

if (count($array) < 2)
	return $array;

in JavaScript you cannot use that because of the presence of the ‘undefined’ value when an “empty” array is passed as an argument. Thus you’ve the conditional above:

// this will result with an error
if (arr.length < 2)
        return arr;

Coming Up Next …

An iterative version of the algorithm next Friday!

JSON and Zend Framework? – Zend_Json

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That’s really a good Zend Framework’s class that help you do the encode/decode job very easily. First of all it escapes everything for you and second it prints a correct/valid code. Note that sometimes if you have a trailing whitespace after the closing PHP tag – ?> that will result in an error.

Here’s some code:

public function jsonAction()
{
	$data = array(3,4,'test', 'my-name' => 3,4);
 
	echo Zend_Json::encode($data);
 
	$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
	$this->view->layout()->disableLayout();
}

and the result is:

{"0":3,"1":4,"2":"test","my-name":3,"3":4}

Note that all integers are printed without double quotes – which saves some space!

Bind Zend Action with Non-Default View

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Action – View

You may know that every controller’s action in Zend Framework has to be bind to a view. Normally you can disable the view for a specific action, but how about “forking” an action to render different views?!

In example when some _GET parameter is set redirect to another view? That’s rather strange and perhaps there’s a clear and yet full MVC solution! First of all you can setup all of the view variables simply in the “parent” action.

<?php
 
class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
	public function indexAction()
	{
		$this->view->title = 'This is the default action!';	
	}
}

Than the view file will contain something like:

// index/index.phtml
<h1><?php echo $this->title ?></h1>

Than whenever you have the given _GET set you can _forward to another action (perhaps with no code at all) and only a different view. Thus you don’t setup twice the view variables.

<?php
 
class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
	public function indexAction()
	{
		$this->view->title = 'This is the default action!';	
 
		if (isset($_GET['my_param'])) {
			$this->_forward('another');
		}
	}
 
	public function anotherAction()
	{}
}

And there are two views practically for one action:

// index/index.phtml
<h1><?php echo $this->title ?></h1>
 
// index/another.phtml
<h2><?php echo $this->title ?></h2>