What if you have to add a simple CAPTCHA for a web form asking the user to sum two numbers. Will you prefer to use rand() to generate those two numbers? Some may say this is too predictable!
Tag Archives: Computing
Debugging in Zend Framework
Perhaps “debugging” is a bit too strong. However when you’re dumping an array in PHP, you’d probably prefer the print_r or var_dump.
echo '<pre>'; print_r($array); echo '</pre>'; |
But did you know that in Zend Framework there’s a built in Zend_Debug?
Zend_Debug::dump($array); |
Does pretty much the same thing!
Why mb_strlen() Doesn’t Return the Correct Lenght
It’s strange to notice that mb_strlen() doesn’t return always what you expect. The problem of course is in you, not in mb_strlen(). That’s because you probably doesn’t specify encoding.
echo mb_strlen($str, 'UTF-8'); |
Now that’s another case!
Zend_Date::setOptions and format_type in Zend Framework 1.10.3
I recently upgraded from the old Zend Framework 1.9.5 to the latest – 1.10.3. Everything just looked to be working quite fine, except the date formatting. Although I had the same date formatting and options in the old version it seems to be not working.
I had the format_type set to PHP and even though I formatted the dates with a Zend Framework specific format: “d MMM yyyy”.
Zend_Date::setOptions(array('format_type' => 'php')); // ... $date = new Zend_Date($somedate); echo $date->get('d MMM yyyy'); |
Now as it appears format_type php in 1.10.3 is giving completely different result, and the correct format is date() like format in PHP.
Zend_Date::setOptions(array('format_type' => 'php')); // ... $date = new Zend_Date($somedate); echo $date->get('d M yy'); |
Inline Scripts with Zend_View_Helper_InlineScript
Once I’ve posted about Zend Framework and script injections into the view of the app. However back than I didn’t mentioned the way the scripts can be injected on whatever place into the markup. This job’s done by Zend_View_Helper_InlineScript and that’s only an abstraction over the HeadScript.
However thus the PHP code goes quite clean and maintainable.
$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript(); $scripts->appendFile('/scripts/production.js'); |
This is quite interesting because in the case of multiple scripts you can chain them into this:
$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript(); $scripts->appendFile('/scripts/production.js') ->appendFile('/scripts/development.js') |
But that’s not everything. Although it looks very pretty and clean, PHP gives you the correct syntax of something like this:
$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript(); $scripts ->appendFile('/scripts/production.js') ->appendFile('/scripts/development.js') |
And that’s particularly good when it comes to fast switching between production and development scripts includes.
$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript(); $scripts // ->appendFile('/scripts/production.js') ->appendFile('/scripts/development.js') |
You’d ask why I’d to comment my script includes. Because as it appears to be fashionable the JavaScripts are concatenated and compressed. This gives you performance benefits on the client side when downloading and executing the script. So it’s usual to have one compressed/minified and several development scripts. That’s why this commenting strategy is very useful.