Tag Archives: Computer programming

Modyfing Response Headers with Zend Framework

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Response Headers

You’ve probably seen that you can track the server response headers with Firebug – a wonderful extension to Firefox.

But have you ever asked yourself how to change a response header with Zend Framework.

header()

Typically this is done with the built in PHP function header, where you can setup the header the page must return, but how to make it with Zend Framework?

It’s pretty simple of course, it’s Zend Framework in fact. To be more precise I’ll post a snippet:

$response = $this->getResponse();
$response->setHeader('content-type', 'application/x-javascript; charset=utf-8');
$response->sendResponse();

JavaScript Snippets: IF Statements Optimization

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A “Typical Installation” …

As most of the desktop software gives us opportunity to choose from typical or custom installations, let me write what’s a typical IF conditional statement in JavaScript and … every other programing language.

if ( thisIsTrue ) {
    printMe("some message");
}

A “Custom Installation” …

The first thing you can improve from the code above is removing the brackets.

if ( thisIsTrue )
    printMe("someMessage");

Because in JavaScript everything’s on the client – every symbol matters. What if we remove as much as we can!

thisIsTrue && printMe("someMessage");

Javascript Libraries Popularity

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JavaScript and Market Share?!

It’s kind of strange to speak about JavaScript libraries and market share, so lets called it “popularity”. Have you ever been interested on which is the most famous JS library.

I’d guess everybody has the answer in his head, right? jQuery is becoming for the JS community something like Google for the web or IE6 on the browser’s market in the beginning of the century. How odd?!

However here’s a short list of who’s first.

1. Robert Nyman’s poll:

Note: original poll page’s here.

Clear enough jQuery rocks. As I personally use jQuery I still think that its success is based on his easy to start nature. However lets see another result chart.

2. Chris Coyier from http://css-tricks.com is showing almost the same result:

Note: original poll can be found here.

3. Finally Polldaddy’s hosting a poll, where the results are even more interesting.

Polldaddy

Note: original source of the poll.

From these results I get more surprised not so much from the jQuery big advantage, but more from YUI. It’s a really very very powerful JavaScript library, perhaps misunderstood maybe because of it’s native complexity, don’t know?!

PHP if-else-endif Statements

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PHP: if

A typical web developer knows exactly how a PHP if statement looks like:

   if ( expression ) {
      // if the expression was true proceed here
   } else {
      // there was a false expression
  }

HTML mess with PHP

When it comes to merge PHP and HTML the things are becoming ugly. Indeed most of the template systems as Smarty are improved and developed to overcome this issue, however when working with a native PHP code with no template system or with template system where the PHP code is allowed the things are really bad.

Let me show this in a breve example. Image you have to show different formatted HTML depending on a PHP expression. Something like that

<?php if (expression) { ?>
<div class="message">OK. Your registration is successful</div>
<?php } else { ?>
<div class="error">Something went wrong! Please try again later! </div>
<?php } ?>

Now you can see how difficult to maintain this code is when it doesn’t make use of only one code of HTML markup. Imaging you’ve to print differently formatted tables! Indeed the PHP curly brackets are different to follow.

PHP: the different IF syntax

So there is a PHP syntax that tries to help you manage this. You can write more human readable code like this:

<?php if ( expression ) : ?>
<div>message goes here</div>
<?php endif ?>

Thus you get the ENDIF instead of only one curly bracket. That’s indeed readable enough. In fact you can use this syntax with any conditional or loop statement in PHP:

<?php foreach($array as $key => $val) : ?>
<div class="message"><?php echo $val ?></div><br />
<?php endforeach ?>

To return in the previous example the code above should be transformed in that:

<?php if ( expression ) : ?>
<div class="message">some message here!</div>
<?php else : ?>
<div class="error">some error here!</div>
<?php endif ?>