Adding currency conversion to Zend_Currency
I recently needed to do currency conversion for a Zend Framework project, so a naturally turned to Zend_Currency. Sadly, Zend_Currency doesn’t feature currency conversion, rather it focuses on the localization aspects of currency. This is perfectly understandable as offering conversion would make this component dependant on potentially unreliable third parties that Zend would not be able to support.
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Installing CouchDB on CentOS 5
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I have been meaning to have a play with CouchDB for a while now, so this afternoon I finally had a go at installing it on my (32 bit) CentOS 5 box. Here is what I learnt along the way…
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The Applicator Design Pattern?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: design patterns, php, zend framework
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I have been learning more and more about Zend Framework over the past few months. The more I lean, the more I appreciate its loosely couple nature. For example, most ZF classes will work with minimal configuration out of the box, and any configuration that is necessary can be done by either passing in a configuration array (or Zend_Config object), or by using the object’s setter/getter methods.
PHP for Google App Engine in the works?
Ever since the launch of Google App Engine a little over two months ago there has been a lot of mumbling and grumbling over the lack of PHP support. I am sure that there are good reasons why Google chose to launch with Python but, even so, I expect that this raised several eyebrows (mine included) when App Engine was first released.
Feedback time! (plus some cool links)
I have been writing this blog for a bit over a month now and I thought that it would be good to get some feedback from the site’s readers – i.e. you folks!
Effective In-Function Caching With PHP5
At one stage or another most programmers have written some simple in-function caching. If you don’t know what I mean my in-function caching, here is a simple example:
Migrating Your Feeds to FeedBurner
One of the things that has been skulking around my todo list for some time now has been to start using FeedBurner to track subscriber statistics. I only have a very vague concept of how many people subscribe to this blog and it would be great to get a more accurate idea.
9 PHP Debugging Techniques You Should Be Using
Isn’t writing new code great? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if all were ever had to do is write software from scratch, not having to worry about methods of classes past? Unfortunately, we all know that this is not the case. In fact, estimates say that we spend around 80% of our programming time maintaining old code. So for this blog post will be trying to tackle that 80%, and I will see what I can do to make it less painful.
Future of Web Design 08 (and other things)
FOWD 2008 is now over, the contacts have been contacted and
the meetings made (well, planned, but it sounded better my way). I am now
sitting back after eight hours of emailing and phoning current clients, potential
clients and other freelances. Oh, and I brought a really sweet new mic, but more
on that later.
Google App Engine
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: database, frameworks, google
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As you probably know, Google has just launched App Engine. App Engine is a essentially a hosted application development platform that sits upon Google’s vast infrastructure. I could rattle on about this, but I think you should just watch the intro video from Google (at the end of this post).
The Hitchhikers Guide to PHP Load Balancing
There was once a time when running a big (or popular) web application meant running a big web server. As your application attracted more users you would add more memory and processors to your server.
Today, the ‘one huge server’ paradigm has been replaced with the idea of having a large number of smaller servers which employ one or more methods of balancing the load (known as ‘load balancing’) across the entire group (known as a ‘farm’ or ‘cluster’). This is partly down to the fall in hardware prices which made this approach more viable.
The Truth About PHP Variables
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: internal memory, performance, php
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I wanted to write this post to clear up what seems to be a common misunderstanding in PHP – that using references when passing around large variables is a good way save memory. To fully explain this I will need to explain how PHP handles variables internally. I hope that you will find this interesting and useful and that it helps dispel some myths around references and memory management in PHP. First off, lets cover the basics…
Working With UK Postcodes
I was recently working on a project which needed to match a user with a county based on their (UK) postcode. In the end searched over Wikipedia and made extensive use of Google to come up with a small table which matches the postcode prefix with the postal town, county, and region.
How to Avoid Freelance Cabin Fever
I have been working as a freelancer for a few months now and I have to say it is wonderful. It is great being able to work where, when and (to some extent) on what I want. When I first went freelance it was more the ‘when’ and ‘on what’ aspects that I found appealing and I wasn’t overly worried about the ‘where’. After all, I (and I suspect many other web freelancers) found their interest in the web by tinkering away in their room until some ungodly hour of the night.
Fuzzy Searching in PHP: Part 1
For a while now I have been working on a developing a wiki application, both for personal projects and for use by clients. As part of this I needed to implement a search feature, allowing users to search the content on the wiki. At this point there were a few options open to me. All the content was stored in a MySQL database, so I could simply use a ‘LIKE’ statement against all the stored content, but there are several problems with this method:
Fuzzy Searching in PHP: Part 2
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ai, database, php, search, sql
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In part two we looked at how we spider our content and how that content can be stored in way which allows it to be searched. In part 2 I will show you how to actually perform searches on this indexed data.
Port Eighty Eight Blog Launches
I chose the name Port Eighty Eight as I want this blog to be a little ‘alternative’ to the other offerings out there[1]. I am planning to cover the more advanced aspects of web development, but I am happy to take requests for any areas you would like to hear me discuss. I am also going to be looking for other developers who would be interested in contributing to this blog, as I would like to avoid it becoming too PHP-focused.
