Tag Archives: PHP programming language

Modyfing Response Headers with Zend Framework

web development, , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

micro tutorial, zend framework, , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Retrieving YouTube Channel’s Videos with Zend_Gdata_YouTube

micro tutorial, snippets, zend framework, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Zend_Gdata

Zend Framework gives you the possibility to interact with Gdata services, which are provided by most of the Goolge services. You can find more on the docs page of Zend_Gdata. The basic principle is that you can connect a service with you API key, given by Google. What I’m about to show you is how do connect such a service.

In theory Zend_Gdata depends on Zend_Http_Client and you’ve to connect it with an instance of this class.

// 1. setup API key
$apiKey = 'your_api_key_here';
 
// 2. retrieve videos via GData Atom
$client = new Zend_Http_Client();
$gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube(null, 'my-app', null, $apiKey);

Note that you’ve to replace your API key in the chunk above.

Now once that you’ve connected the YouTube service you can iterate through the entries from the video feed.

$videoFeed = $gdata->getUserUploads('username');
foreach ($videoFeed as $entry) {
    echo $entry->getTitle();
}

The thing is that you can modify a bit the code above. As ZF docs says if you don’t setup a Zend_Http_Client a default with default configuration, so you can omit this and simple write:

// 1. setup API key
$apiKey = 'your_api_key_here';
 
// 2. retrieve videos via GData Atom
$gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube(null, 'my-app', null, $apiKey);

PHP if-else-endif Statements

PHP, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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 ?>

Get the browser locale and language from Zend_Locale

zend framework, , ,

In a short snipped I’d like to mention the method of use in Zend_Locale:

$locale = new Zend_Locale();
$browserLocale = $locale->getBrowser();

it’s quite useful! Sometimes you don’t need to redirect user only by IP or domain name. Think about browser’s language!