I have created what I think is the most useless thing ever. I call it ‘Ajax Art’. Check it out!
When I was young I would always fail art class. I was good at building things, but I’ve never been able to draw. I just can’t do it. My handwriting is near illegible as well. I [...]
There has been a lot of talk lately about how prototype.js is bad. The discussion usually focuses around the fact that it is rather large (~50 KiB) and modifies some behavior that some people have used in their scripts for years. While some of these discussion have valid points, I still think that they miss [...]
I posted about it yesterday. I’ve thought about it some more. Wrote some code. And I’m happy! I can validate input without fuss again. Yay. I really did get tired from writing trivial form validation rules into my controllers time and time again. Allow me to demonstrate my new approach.
First, I think about what fields [...]
For years I have used PEAR’s HTML_QuickForm and loved it. I based my work flow around it. Basically, QuickForm lets you define a form, with all it’s elements, and attach validation rules to those elements. It could generate HTML for the form, so it was easy to integrate into templates. It had a simple interface [...]
I like this little project. I like the way it looks and how easy it is to work with. It’s fun to play with, and creating it was a lot easier than I expected it to be. So I enjoy working on it.
As a result I added a few new methods again. This time they [...]
I have updated my HTML charting engine introduced this post a bit. I now like it even better. It’s small, very web 2.0 while it renders fast. While it of course only supports a single data set with label/value pairs and can only draw bar charts, it’s usability factor is getting higher now. With the [...]
Charts are hot nowadays. There are plenty of implementations for the web 2.0 world out there. Most of them are either written in flash, or use some combination of the canvas tag and SVG for rendering. When I was experimenting with plotkit the other day it occurred to me that all it outputs is [...]
Because I noticed some people find it difficult to understand the routing process the Zend Framework uses by default, I decided to write a little explanation. It’s really easy once you get the hang of it, even though it may seem complicated at first.
The Zend Framework is based on the Model View Controller principle. This [...]
Like I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a great fan of using “decent” template engines, and try to avoid writing views in php. I don’t want to discuss the reasons behind this in detail right now. I just believe that limiting yourself to a small set of template tags makes you think more about structuring [...]
This article is very old. I’m keeping it here for legacy reasons, but if you’re looking for help setting up Zend Framework, google is your friend.
I would like to take some time to talk about setting up the Zend Framework. It’s a lot easier than you might think. I know there are quite a few [...]
Earlier today, I wrote a little extension to Zend_Db_Table that allows for “custom” fields to be added to it’s rows. When it was done some other ideas came floating up. Why wouldn’t I make my life even easier, by creating fields that don’t output their values directly, but in some meaningfully modified way.
Why would I [...]
Zend_Db_Table is a very, VERY handy class for working with databases. It has come up in numerous posts on this blog. But I’ve always felt that for a complete model implementation there was something missing. For me, the greatest advantage of defining my models away from the rest of the code is that you can [...]
In the first three parts of this tutorial I talked about designing your models and controllers. In this fourth part I’m going to take a look at views. Views are the final part of a MVC application. They contain code that will create the output of the application.
For most of you this will mean that [...]
The title for this post is quite descriptive. While working on my post on ExtJS grids it dawned on me that all I was doing was rewriting a model definition in JavaScript , for use with the grid. Writing a JSON reader for my Data Store was just mapping it to model fields. And as [...]
The life of a programmer has become easier and easier over the years. High level programming languages, decent development environments and good manuals all help. With the rise of the internet, sharing knowledge has become a lot easier. And because of that, people now share solutions to common problems.
Before I started this blog, a few [...]
While browsing I found this blog post by Greg Neutstaetter. I downloaded his code and tried to get it to work with the current version of the Zend Framework. There were only a few minor modifications that needed to be made for it to work, which tells you something about the stability of the framework. [...]
HTML is a markup language for producing static pages. When trying to present data to your end users that changes over time, that can be a problem. There are different ways to get around that. The whole Ajax hype floats on it.
Charts are a way of presenting information. Because they are images you need some [...]
In the good old days of HTML 4, making a link open in a new window was as easy as putting target=”_blank” inside the a (or A) tag. Apparently, you can’t take yourself serious anymore if you still output HTML 4. XHTML really is the way to go.
XHTML strict doesn’t support the target attribute [...]
When I started writing this tutorial I mentioned that I assumed you had the Zend Framework running on your server. I may have falsely assumed that you had a working bootstrap file for it as well. Writing a simple bootstrap file isn’t that difficult, but there are many things you can add to it, some [...]
I often need some random filler text when designing an application. Traditionally, designers use lorem ipsum as ‘random’ text. I have written a handy little class for use with the Zend Framework for this, though it should also function on it’s own.
I just wanted to share it with the you, it might come in handy. [...]