What you should know already…

If you have been a developer for a while, chances are you’ll have come across the term DRY. It stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself, and it is actually a form of art. Keeping your code DRY ensures you have to think well before you start coding. Instead of randomly throwing code in your IDE, you should create the reflex of thinking how you can achieve what you want, without having to type too much code.

Not out of laziness, but because you’re smart. If you ever have to change your code, you’ll be glad you decided to write that particular bit only in that particular file. Sometimes it’s much easier to just copy/paste code from one class into another. But if you have to modify that piece of code, you’ll have to remember all the places that same code appears. Unless you kept it DRY of course.

Usually when an article talks about DRY, it will be in the context of Object Oriented Programming and model abstracts/inheritance/whatnot and making sure you don’t repeat the same code in different places. But the same principle can also be applied to other aspects of our code.

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Tom PHP, Programming constants, DRY, templates

For a recent project, I had to generate a PDF for a catalog. Since I’m using Zend Framework for my development, first thing that sprang in mind was Zend_Pdf. After some investigation, I found it too “difficult” to use. Flexible though that component is, I didn’t feel much for using coordinates to draw each and every line and text of that PDF. So I went to find another solution: DomPDF. DomPDF can generates PDF output, from HTML input. Exactly what I wanted and needed. It was however quite tricky to get it working. If you also have problems with this, read on!
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Tom Zend Framework autoload, dompdf, Zend Framework

In a series of posts, I will address the issue of authentication and authorization of users into your application. When you build a website with any form of back office, you will need to grant users access to the back office (authentication), and determine what actions they are allowed to take (authorization). The Zend Framework has two tools just for that job: Zend_Auth and Zend_ACL. In this first part, I will build a custom User class, that will allow the programmer to perform a simple authentication of a user. This User class will be integrated into a so called “code base” or “framework” that you can use for your own applications. As of this moment, that framework doesn’t exist yet. I will gradually build it as my blog posts are added. Please look for the tag “codebase” if you want all of these posts.
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Tom Zend Framework codebase, PHP, zend_auth

In my previous post “Security with Zend_AMF and Flex – Part 1: Theory“, I explained the theory behind securing your Flex-PHP calls. After the theory comes the practise. I will only provide snippets for the PHP side of this story, as I’m totally ignorant about Flex and ActionScript. I used Zend_AMF, written by Wade Arnold, to handle all the communications between Flex and PHP. If you need to know the basics, please read the documentation first.
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Tom Zend Framework air, flex, PHP, zend_amf

In a series of two posts, I will explain how to secure the communication between a Flex client and PHP server architecture. The first part will explain how I envision that security, and in the second part I will show snippets of PHP code for the practical implementation.

I’m currently working together with my friend and colleague Vic on a client-server application that involves Flex on the front-side, and PHP (Zend Framework) on the back. Since I’m the PHP guy, I’m in charge of creating the API for his Flex application. For the moment, the project will only be accessed locally from the client’s network. But there is a possibility that in a later stage, it might open up to the general public. One of my main concerns was how we could make every API call as secure as possible. This without making it too complicated, or involve too many service calls that might slow everything down.
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Tom Zend Framework chap, flex, PHP, security, zend

In PHP5, it is possible to loop through an array, and alter each item on the fly via the “by-reference” operator: the &-symbol. However, you should be on the lookout for unexpected behaviour.
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admin PHP bug, by-reference, foreach, PHP