Tag Archives: Computing

Vendor Prefixes in CSS

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Vendor Prefixes vs CSS3

Either are bad, because vendor prefixes work on specific browsers, while CSS3 is not implemented fully by those browsers. When talking about vendor prefixes in CSS, let me tell you in breve, what’s this. If you’d like to make rounded corner under Mozilla Firefox, you usually use a background image, but there’s another way to do it – with Mozilla specific CSS:

-moz-border-radius: 5px;

That’s bad because it works only on Mozilla based browsers, although there’s a webkit based similar syntax:

-webkit-border-radius: 5px;

Even after that our “favorite” browser MSIE until version 9 is not displaying any rounded corners.

In other hand CSS3 gives us the possibility to write the simple:

border-radius:5px;

which is not implemented in many currently used browsers, but it may be used for progressive enhancements.

In Breve …

Everybody’s talking about vendor prefixes after the famous post of PPK, but there are both opinions – pros and cons. However it’s good to use it, but very carefully, and think about what CSS3 may give you!

Send Mail with Zend Framework

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Simple, but Doesn’t Work!

It may sound strange, because all this is quite well documented in the Zend Framework documentation. Indeed it’s very very simple and all is done only by few lines of code.

$mail = new Zend_Mail();
$mail->setFrom('sender@example.com');
$mail->setBodyHtml('some message - it may be html formatted text');
$mail->addTo('recipient@example.com', 'recipient');
$mail->setSubject('subject');
$mail->send();

Even it look simple though, it may not work on your localhost while you’re trying to make it work! Because you’ve to have sendmail setup. And in Zend Framework sendmail is the default transport protocol for sending mails.

What You Have to Do to Make it Work?

Actually you’ve simply to add a transport protocol, just like that:

$tr = new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp('smtp.example.com',
                    array('auth' => 'login',
                             'username' => 'username',
                             'password' => 'password'));
Zend_Mail::setDefaultTransport($tr);

Where Did I Get These?

Well look at your favorite mail account you probably use every day. It may be hosted in GMail or wherever, but there are some configurations you have to port under Zend’s code and everything will be just fine until you develop the app!

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();

Read Remote File Content-Type with Zend_Http_Client

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Check an Image on a Remote Server

This is a common task. You’d like to know whether the image on the remote server exists. Zend Framework gives the answer of this question and in particular this can be completed with Zend_Http_Client.

Content-Type and Content-Length

The little problem is that checking for content-type is not always correct, because it will return an image content type even when the image does not exists, so it’s better to check for content-length.

Code

The simple way to check this is like that:

$client = new Zend_Http_Client('http://remote-machine/image.jpg');
$response = $client->request('head');
if ( NULL == $response->getHeader('Content-Length') )
    // do whatever if the image does not exists.

In fact here, in this example I don’t check for GET request, because is way to slow than the HEAD method, but you should be aware of incorrect responses when using HEAD. In fact if you request the HEAD of a FLV video it will be returned text content-type, while using GET everything’s working fine but slow though.

PHP: Mobile Devices HTTP_USER_AGENT Strings

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So You’re Going Mobile

It’s nice that at least you’re moving your site to mobile device. It’s really important. Now if you’re using PHP the question is how to detect the mobile browser.

HTTP_USER_AGENT

Every PHP developer knows that $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’] string optionally contain the browser that access your site, but what are the possible values of this string?

The Answer is …

in that really really full list of user agent strings: http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html