Tag Archives: Web 2.0

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!

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!

Check YouTube Video Existence with Zend_Gdata_YouTube

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The Video Has Been Removed?!

Have you ever seen the famous message on YouTube: “This video has been removed by the user.”, but what if you’re trying to grab that video via the Zend_Gdata_YouTube?

That can happen when you’re reading the feed for a channel or a user’s list of videos. In the feed everything’s OK – once the video is uploaded it appears into the feed. After that the user removes the video and visiting the link from the feed you’ll get the message above.

Actually what happens when you try to read this “video entry” within a Zend Framework’s application. There must be some way to catch this message?

Trying to Catch

The answer is pretty simple! Zend_Gdata_YouTube’s throwing an exception and it can be easily cached. Here’s some source code:

$apiKey = 'your_api_key';
$client = new Zend_Http_Client();
$gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube($client, 'my-app', null, $apiKey);
try {
       $gdata->getVideoEntry($video_id);
} catch(Zend_Gdata_App_Exception $e) {
       echo $e->getMessage();
}

MySQL Expressions in Zend Framework

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If you’re a Zend Framework developer, you’d know the built-in Zend_Db_Table methods insert(), update(), etc.

However the general approach there is like is said:

$data = array();
$data['key'] = $value;
$model = new ModelName();
$model->insert($data);
 
// that's very basic example, but in general this is 
// the way it works.

What happens if one of the column have to be an MySQL expression!? In example you’ve a date field and you’d like to insert something like the MySQL’s method NOW().

The solution is simply call a Zend_Db_Expr.

$data = array();
$data['key'] = $value;
$data['date'] = new Zend_Db_Expr('NOW()');
$model = new ModelName();
$model->insert($data);
 
// now the date column will be NOWed :)

Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Regex – the Power of Regular Expressions

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I posted once of custom URLs within Zend Framework, but back than I wasn’t quite sure enough there isn’t a better, more elegant way to do this job. Of course as it appears, there is! With no need to is to use the power of regular expressions with Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Regex. Thus you can match dynamically the URL.

Let’s assume you’d like to have a link with something like www.example.com/3939-some-title-here. This is really very common. So to proceed you’d have to have some regex like:

$pattern = '/\d+-.*/;

So what about Zend Framework

Here the things are going naturally more OOP.

$route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Regex('(\d+)-?(.*)',
                       array('controller' => 'controller_name', 'action' => 'action_name'),
                       array(1 => 'id'));
 
$ctrl->addRoute('my-route', $route);