Ramblings of a php coder
Over at BigBlueHat there is an interesting blog post about using the ?> at the end of php files. While personally I don’t use it on scripts that contain just php code, but I can see where both sides are coming from.
Check out the article and leave your feedback!
read moreIt seems that everyone is doing this so I will join in.
In short my year was this:
That’s right ZF 1.7.0 has been release and it features AMF support, JQuery support, and Twitter support, among numerous other offerings.
According to Matthew Weier O’Phinney:
For this particular release, we tried very hard to leverage the community. The majority of new features present in 1.7.0 are from community proposals, or were primarily driven by community contributors. For me, this represents a milestone: ZF is now at a stage where fewer and fewer core components are necessary, and the community is able to build off it and add extra value to the project.
I am happy to say that I the Twitter Component was my handy work. After ZendCon 08 Matthew passed the project off to me as he didn’t have time to complete it.
I also helped closed about 15 of thoes issues and I’m still working hard on closing more. I also look forward to keep working with the community as it’s one of the strongest framework communities on the web.
read moreWow it’s been a while since my last post but my life has been busy. I traveled with for work up to the IndyCar Series Race at Belle Isle Raceway in Detroit, Mi. It was a lot of fun as the race was a very good race and I was sitting about 3 feet away from the race track in the Timing and Scoring Booth.
The 2008 IndyCar season at chicagoland where Helio Castroneves beat Scott Dixon for the win by 0.0033 of a seconds which is the second closest finish in Series History. Scott still won the championship but Helio made it interesting going into Chicagoland.
Now that the IndyCar season is over with I’m going to be heading to ZendCon ’08 to learn and meet some of the people I talk with online all the time now. It’s going to be a blast and I can’t wait for it, but before I get to head out to sunny California we have to provide support the Inaugural Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix at the Speedway.
It’s going to be fun watching the motocycles go around the road course inside the oval of the track. They are saying that they will hit 200 mph while going down the front stretch and across the yard of bricks. I think it’s going to be a very fun weekend.
Stay tuned for some blogging from ZendCon ’08!
read moreSo part of my job at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is writing Admin Tools for our users to administer the sites with. There are a mix of older admin tools which don’t use any JavaScript and newer admin tools where the front end is completely based on JavaScript.
I was recently asked to build an admin tool to allow one of our users to maintain the drop down portions of the site navigation since they can change with each passing event that happens at the track. This presented the following problems:
What I started with was trying to figure out the whole svn integration thing as I had to figure out a way to make sure that the working copy was always current and that when the user saved the navigation it did a commit on the file to that way it would always be the latest version in the repository.
Problem 1: SVN does not allow you to checkout a single file to be a working copy. I found this to be a problem as I didn’t want the whole directory, I just wanted the navigation.xml file. I did some searching on the SVN bug tracker and found a perl script that David Kilzer wrote that allowed me to check out a single file. Problem 1 is solved.
Once I got the file checked out into the working directory on the server i preceded to write a shell script that updated the file via an svn up command that would be ran on my fetch script before I read in the XML file to pass it back to the JavaScript.
Now that I have the XML back in my front end i can display it. Here is what the admin tools looks like when you have selected which site you want to edit.
As you can see from the screen shot everything is layout in an easy to browse tree view. You can move the child nodes around to order then or place them in any parent menu that you like. There is a simple edit and add features. The adding also incorporates a feature from our Site Pages admin that allows you to select from a page in there so you don’t have to copy and paste a link from the pages admin to this admin.
Once the user gets done with any changed they may have they can select the save button and that passes it back off to the PHP backend where it writes out the xml file and then does an svn ci on the file which places it back in the SVN repository and also promotes it to production via a set of PHP and bash scripts to interface with the SVN repository.
All in all using the ExtJS Library and PHP to build the admin tools for the IMS sites has dramiticly cut down on the time it takes to do everything since I have a very good understand of how everything in ExtJS works and when I don’t there is a great documentation resource out there.
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My name is Jon and I'm a PHP Certified programmer, who likes to contribute back to the PHP community and to the Zend Framework Community. I am the maintainer of the Twitter, Amazon Ec2, Amazon S3 and Amazon SQS Components in Zend Framework and I'm currently working on bring more of Amazon Web Services to the framework.