PHP

• Evil evil update

  This update took me quite a bit more time than I initially expected. Anyway, I have done some refactoring work to the original code, and thought it would be nice to document the changes. Overall, most of the changes involved the refactoring of function names. I am not sure if this would stick, but I am quite satisfied for now.

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• My evil evil form and database library

  Writing a usable form and database library has always been a painful experience. So why bother re-inventing the wheel when there are so many to choose from already? I am writing one mostly for learning purpose. After numerous attempts, I finally get my form and database library in shape. It is nowhere complete, but nor it is perfect, but it is currently the implementation that is closest to my original design. I will keep working on it so it can be used in my personal projects in the future.

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• Redland for RDF Work

  Although my supervisor strongly recommend using JENA for RDF related work, but as I really don’t like Java (just personal preference), and wouldn’t want to install JRE/JVM (whatever it is called) at my shared server account, so I went to look for an alternative. After spending some time searching, I found this library called Redland and it provides binding for my current favorite language — PHP, so I decided to use this for my RDF work.

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• Mixing Non-array and Array in array_map()

  array_map function is a function that I use the most in my php scripts recently. However, there are times where I want to pass some non-array into it, therefore often times I have code like the snippet shown below:

  $result = array_map(
'some_callback',
array_fill(0, count($some_array), 'some_string'),
array_fill(0, count($some_array), 'some_other_string'),
$some_array
)

  It doesn’t look good IMO, as it makes the code looks complicated. Hence, after seeing how the code may vary in all different scenarios, I created some functions to clean up the array_map call as seen above. Code snippet after the jump

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• Hello World from Zend MVC

  This post continued from this post. Finally I have found some time to start developing my pet project using Zend Framework. After getting the controller to work the way I am more familiar (comparing to Kohana which I used at work) with, the next step is to get it to output some data.

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• Extending Zend Framework

  I like how Kohana 3 organizes the classes, and I thought the same thing may be applied to my Zend Framework experimental project. Basically what this means is that I can name the controller class according to PEAR naming convention, and deduce the location of the file by just parsing the class name.

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• Blending ACL and FSM-based Workflow

  After reading through the documentation, I find that the role based ACL and work flow can be more tightly integrated. Therefore I made all the transaction into many FSMs and my work flow component now consists of one work flow library and one work flow management model. As I am going a more normalized design (I use denormalized design in work as it deals with a lot of documents, however for a small project like mine, a denormalized design should do well).

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• MVC: Kohana vs. Zend Framework

  After comparing my own implementation of MVC with CodeIgniter’s, now I’m comparing Kohana’s and Zend’s. I have just shifted from CodeIgniter to Kohana recently in work and is currently learning on how to use Zend Framework to build my web-app. As everybody knows, Zend Framework is more like a collection of library classes than a framework a la Ruby on Rails, using MVC in Zend Framework would require one to begin from bootstrapping stage. However, in Kohana, just like other frameworks, bootstrapping is done by the framework itself so the developer will get an installation that almost just works (after a little bit of configuration).

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• Real Life Enterprise Class Website Development

  Recently I am involved in developing some small modules for a enterprise class website using CodeIgniter (CI). There was no restriction given on which framework should I use for the development and I chose CI as I learned a bit on it (when I was considering whether to shift my personal development project). Of course there are other reasons why I chose to learn CI, for example the superior documentation and screencasts available.

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• Working Life

  I didn’t realize that I have been working for 3 weeks until the Labour Day which was a public holiday. Many things happened in these few weeks and I am still struggling to catch up with it. My superior and colleagues have been very helpful and offered me some helpful tutorials and books. I was instructed to build a event scheduler application using codeigniter in the first week and then work on a side project that extends a form using DOM methods and properties.

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Random Posts

• Magic SQL

  Ever wanted to find the number of days between two dates without counting weekend (Saturdays and Sundays)? In PHP you typically needs to do a lot of calculation and a lot of factors needs to be considered. Therefore, in the end you will end up having a whole bunch of code that you will probably start asking yourself whether you are programming a web-calendar or something similar.

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• Understanding potree hierarchy file

  One of my recent tasks involving crawling a lot of geo-tagged data from a given service. The most recent one is crawling files containing a point cloud for a given location. So I began by observing the behavior in the browser. After exporting the list of HTTP requests involved in loading the application, I noticed there are a lot of requests fetching resources with a common rXXX pattern.

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• Self-hosted photo album

  My cloud storage is nearly exploding, and I am not in a good position to start subscribing for more storage (Yes, I am still #opentowork). Considering I just moved my domain settings to Cloudflare and started using Cloudflare tunnel, I figure I probably should just back up some of my photos, and host it on my workstation.

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• Adding a new settings applet for my daemon

  This is basically a small incremental update to my script published here. For some reason, the previous version of the script didn’t really work, so this release should fix the problem. Besides fixing the problem where the daemon did not actually launched at start up, I have added a settings applet for this script as well.

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• Imperfect Reimplementation of Lists in PHP

  Long long time ago when I was working with Prolog, I was introduced to list. Unlike arrays in most popular programming languages, we weren’t really able to access to a particular member directly. Every list is constructed in a chain-like structure.

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