Realm of Zod
Programming and Technology
-
Get Geo Coordinates from Google Maps in PHP
Posted on February 5th, 2010 No commentsGoogle maps offers a rich api for getting a lot of information as you are probably already aware. I’ve written a few locators in the last couple of years involving the use of google maps and doing radial searches based on zip codes. The difficult part for me was getting the geo coordinates of the queried zip code to use as a reference point for doing the radial search. I ended up writing a nice simple class to encapsulate converting zip codes into geo-coordinates.
Read Entire Article
-
Why HipHop is Hype and Facebook Looks Foolish
Posted on February 4th, 2010 No commentsThe twitterverse has been in a flurry of hype over Facebook’s latest abortion: HipHop. For those who don’t know, HipHop is Facebook’s answer to scalability problems on their platform. Since everyone and their dog (literally) is on facebook, their platform responds to millions of requests each day, meaning they need serious hardware and software that can handle this brutal, unrelenting onslaught every second of every day. Facebook is written in Php which is suitable language for most applications on the web however when you push it as hard as facebook has, it starts to split at the seems like any runtime that was not designed with enterprise in mind. You can extend its life with the use of load balancers, smart caching, and good development practices but sooner or later it will fail you.
Read Entire Article
-
Double or Triple Your Ipod’s Capacity With High Efficiency AAC
Posted on February 3rd, 2010 No commentsI got my first ipod two months ago and in fact it was my first mp3 player ever. Shocking for hard core geek right? Well I bought my wife her own ipod a number of years ago but was never able to really afford a second one so I became victim of ‘what cd do i want to bring with me today?’. Over time many of my cds became scratched and dirty from piling up in the center console of my car and I longed for my own portable music device that I could carry around my entire music collection without worry. When the device of my destiny arrived in the mail from my parents for my birthday you can imagine my excitement to immediately cram as much crap on it as I could. I was having a blast until…. I ran out of space. I had only gotten maybe a third of what I really wanted on there but it was all that 8 gigabytes could stand. To put this into perspective I have a 500Gb usb hard drive which houses my archived collection so you can imagine cherry picking that down to 8Gb is an excercise in futility.
Read Entire Article
-
jQuery.imageLoader 1.0 Released
Posted on February 3rd, 2010 No commentsA while ago I wrote an article on how to dynamically load images using jquery. This has turned out to be one of my most popular posts and I got a lot of feedback on it. As a follow-up I decided to package it up as a real-life jquery plugin and release it into the [...]
Read Entire Article
-
Dynamically Manage Models with Zend_CodeGenerator
Posted on January 19th, 2010 2 commentsThe holidays have passed and at last I’ve gotten enough of my obligations out of the way to begin to innovate on some new code as well as play with some of the new offerings in the latest versions of the Zend Framework. I’ve been most interested in particular with Zend_CodeGenerator since I have spent a lot of time in the last year writing boilerplate code for various projects. I find that the bulk of my time is spent prototyping models so I figured it would not be hard to build a model scaffolding script not unlike the ‘rake’ command in ruby on rails and similar commandline tools offered by the many application platforms out there. Rather than killing my wrists pounding out models, their various attributes and associated mutators/accessors, I decided that my time would be more efficiently spent describing my models using a short hand format (preferably xml) and then having a script translate that into actual classes and files. The Doctrine ORM allows you do this very thing translating YAML into Doctrine Models. This was very interesting to me but I chose to take it a step further and have it build all of my Domain Model infrastructure while it was at it (This includes the models, the gateway classes, and the DAO classes).
Read Entire Article
Development, Doctrine, PHP, Zend Framework Doctrine, models, php, scaffolding, scripts, xml, Zend FrameworkRelated Topics
-
Domain Model ORM Adapters
Posted on November 24th, 2009 1 commento I’ve had a series of articles that focus on domain model programming methodologies and most of my examples have demonstrated implementations using the Doctrine ORM (Object Relational Mapper). Given the nature of domain model programming I’ve held to the assertion that models built using this method are truly ORM agnostic and it should be effortless to swap out Doctrine for the ORM of your choice. Well I like to put my money where my mouth is by showing how easily this has been done by showing off adapters that I have written, one for Doctrine, and the other for Zend_Db. The beauty of this system is that both support the same ORM agnostic query syntax demonstrated in my recent post about creating complex sql queries using associative arrays. This means that no modifications are necessary in the models, controllers or views when switching ORMs. Developer’s utopia.
Read Entire Article
Development, Doctrine, PHP, Zend Framework Design Patterns, Doctrine, Domain Model Programming, ORM, SQL, Zend FrameworkRelated Topics
-
Google lays down the gauntlet with ChromeOS
Posted on November 20th, 2009 No commentsWe all knew it was coming. There were rumors and flat out denials from Google so of course it had to be true. It was the logical path for them and anyone who paid attention to the types of software they’ve been releasing could clearly see the writing on the wall. Every time Google made an announcement or released something new, the was the immediate response… why? Every app, framework, website, tool, they have ever released is a piece of a puzzle that when assembled shows you Google’s over-arching strategy. You just have to step back a little bit to see
Read Entire Article
ChromeOS, Operating Systems, Search, Tech, Web Browsers apple, chrome, google, microsoft, Operating Systems, webRelated Topics
-
Load Your Ads Last
Posted on November 19th, 2009 1 commentNobody likes ads but we can all agree they are a necessary component of doing business online. I recently had some experience dealing with adify, a aggregating ad platform which pipes in banners from a multitude of sources some with questionable practices in regards to loading performance. I had just launched a beatifully crafted website that employed all the tricks in the book for quick page loads and it was snappy… until we embedded the ad code. I like to load my images asynchronously and I like to execute javascript only once the document has finished loading so imagine the pain of patiently watching little animated gif spinners swirling away for as long as 6-30 seconds because the browser is choking on javascript from the banner ads in the middle of the page. Normally the solution would be to fix the javascript, but being a third party ad network, the embedded code was far beyond my control, so clearly this needed rethinking. I needed to figure out how to load the ads asynchronously as well.
Read Entire Article
-
Queued, Concatenated, and Gzipped Assets with the Zend Framework
Posted on November 18th, 2009 1 commentLinking assets to your templates and layouts is always a mine field. Every person has a different way of doing it and if it is done poorly, it can adversely affect the load time of your website, particularly if you have lots of websites. It’s helpful to understand how the http protocol fetches things like stylesheets and javascript files while it’s loading your page. In order to alleviate traffic for any individual server, a browser is limited to only so many concurrent requests to the same host. I do not recall what that limit is on each browser but I’m sure google does but in any case, if your site is of significant scope, chances are, you are going to need more assets than your browser can pull in at once. If you don’t believe me, install the yslow extension for firefox and run it on a page with many assets and you will see what i’m talking about.
Read Entire Article
-
Doctrine, Complex SQL Queries, and Paginators
Posted on October 7th, 2009 No comments
Read Entire Article
In my efforts to build web applications using domain model programming I’ve encountered some interesting technical hurdles for keeping my implementation details away from my models. The most problematic issue that has come up time and time again has been that of using paginators. It’s very difficult to keep your paginator class in the dark about database implementation details and have it be able to handle complex use cases. Over the last few months I have slowly evolved a sophisticated way to describe a complex sql query using nothing more than an associative array which can be passed to a clueless paginator which talks to the database through a predefined interface to a model gateway. Yeah the mad scientist is me because that’s how I felt when I looked back on the pure genius of this method.
Development, Doctrine, PHP, Zend Framework Doctrine, Domain Model, DRY, Pagination, php, SQL, Zend FrameworkRelated Topics
Sponsored Links
