Bev's News

I was writing about new features in the upcoming PHP version (5.4, 6.0?) before. Today's topic reads like this in the NEWS file:

- Added array dereferencing support. (Felipe)

Now you might wonder what this typical short entry means. when doing OO-style PHP you might make use of a sntax feature which one might call "object dereferencing" which looks like this:

<?php
class Foo {
    public function bar() { }
}

function func() {
    return new Foo();
}

func()->bar();
?>

So one can chain method calls or property access. Now for a long time people requested the same thing for array offset access. This was often rejected due to uncertainties about memory issues, as we don't like memory leaks. But after proper evaluation Felipe committed the patch which allows you to do things like

<?php
function foo() {
    return array(1, 2, 3);
}
echo foo()[2]; // prints 3
?>

Of course this also works with closures:

<?php
$func = function() { return array('a', 'b', 'c'); };
echo $func()[0]; // prints a
?>

And even though the following example is stupid I might accept this feature might make one of the few places where it is ok to use references in PHP:

<?php
$data = array('me', 'myself', 'you');
function &get_data() {
    return $GLOBALS['data'];
}
get_data()[2] = 'I'; // $data will now contain 'me', 'myself' and 'I'
?>

Wonderful, isn't it? If you want to test it please take a look at the recent snapshots for PHP trunk and send us your feedback! Please mind that all features in PHP trunk may or may not appear in the next major PHP release.

The Zend Framework team announces the immediate availability of Zend Framework 1.10.7, our seventh maintenance release in the 1.10 series. This release includes around 60 bug fixes. For those uses of Zend_Service_Twitter , please ensure you upgrade to 1.10.6 or 1.10.7 ASAP. These releases introduce a change in the Zend_Service_TWitter API that enforces the use of OAuth by default when using methods that require authentication. The change was introduced to help prepare Zend Framework users for the Twitter OAuthcalypse in mid-August. (If you cannot upgrade, there are other ways to integrate Zend_Oauth with Zend_Service_Twitter .)

Description

I finally sat down and started work on a sandboxed DOM API. Originally I was just going to develop a new framework because the DOM is messy but instead I decided it would be cool to have a safe simulated DOM instead and build a framework on top of that.

It isn’t complete yet and there’s still a lot of work to do but it’s working pretty good. I still need to run some tests on it and try to break it but I don’t have time at the moment as I need to do other stuff.

One of the problems making a DOM API is that IE doesn’t have setter support even in IE8 it doesn’t allow you to define setters on normal objects. Because I spend most of my time hacking stuff it was a fun challenge to make IE support setters on DOM objects and keep my sandboxed whitelists.

It’s quite complicated and quite ugly in parts but it works and I think it’s the only way to support legacy browsers like IE7.

How it works

I have to test for the various setter support including defineSetter, Object.defineProperty and revert to the legacy onpropertychange. Object.defineProperty works fine in IE8 when using a DOM object but I encountered problems when I needed to assign to a sandboxed normal object. Here it gets ugly, I had to create a DOM object for any styles used by a node, this way both Object.defineProperty and onpropertychange allow me to monitor any assignments to the fake style object.

var styles = document.createElement('span');
node.$style$ = styles;
Object.defineProperty(node.$style$, '$'+cssProp+'$', {});
document.getElementById('styleObjs').appendChild(styles);
node.$style$ = styles;
node.$style$.onpropertychange = function(){}

As you can see with the code sample above I have to append the fake style DOM object for onpropertychange otherwise it won’t be called on assignments.

You can see this working by using the following test code:-

document.getElementById('x').style.color='#ccc';

So I proxy off all these functions and make the root node any html object, I use CSSReg and htmlReg to sandbox each modification to a property. Finally where it got complicated was supporting events, currently I only support “onclick” as I’m still testing but what happens is because the code is already sandboxed I don’t need to perform a rewrite so I pass this to JSReg as it’s already been converted, I supply the “this” object as the html element this allows the triggered event to call “this” as the current element.

That’s it! I’ve donated the code to OWASP and it will be free to use in your projects, any help testing or suggestions are most welcome, enjoy the demo!

Sandboxed DOM API

We are currently working on an app that uses a number of technologies, including PHP, Python, and MongoDB. Recently, a need arose to use sequential identifiers for users, similar to an auto_increment column in MySQL.

First, create a sequence collection that you can use to determine the next identifier in the sequence. The following creates a collection called seq that has a single sequence in it (for users), but you can add as many as you need:

db.seq.insert({"_id":"users", "seq":new NumberLong(1)});

Before adding a new user, you need to increment the sequence by one and fetch the next identifier. Fortunately, the findandmodify() command provides an atomic way to do this. Using the MongoDB shell, the command would look something like this:

db.seq.findAndModify({
    query: {"_id":"users"},
    update: {$inc: {"seq":1}},
    new: true
});

Because I'm using Lithium, I added a method for fetching the next identifier to my User model:

<?php
 
namespace app\models;
 
class User extends \lithium\data\Model {
 
    static public function seq() {
        $seq = static::_connection()->connection->command(
            array('findandmodify' => 'seq',
                  'query' => array('_id' => 'users'),
                  'update' => array('$inc' => array('seq' => 1)),
                  'new' => TRUE
            )
        );
 
        return $seq

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2980 bytes)

Earlier this week, I spent most of a day tracing through code in search of the source of a bug that was causing part of our application to fail in strange ways.

In the back end, we have models that connect to CouchDB. These models implement the Iterator pattern to allow easy traversal of a record’s keys.

When I wrote the code to implement Iterator several months ago, I dutifully checked the PHP Manual and adapted the reference example that I found there:

<?php
class Record implements Iterator
{
    // (partial class, showing the iterator implementation only)

	public $_data = array();

	public function rewind()
	{
		reset($this->_data);
	}
 
	public function current()
	{
		return current($this->_data);
	}
 
	public function key()
	{
		return key($this->_data);
	}
 
	public function next()
	{
		return next($this->_data);
	}
 
	public function valid()
	{
		return (current($this->_data) !== false);
	}

}

Little did I realize that this implementation is very broken. I’ll explain why, below.

Over the past few years, I’ve implemented many iterators in this way, using PHP’s implicit array manipulation functions (reset(), current(), key(), next()). These functions are very convenient because PHP arrays are so powerful — arrays in PHP work like ordered hash tables in other languages.

PHP’s implicit management of an array’s iteration index (the value that is incremented by next() and referenced by key()) is indeed convenient, but the convenience can sometimes be offset by its very implicitness — the value is hidden from you, the PHP programmer.

In PHP, generic array iteration (without the implicit iterator) isn’t actually as simple as it sounds. Remember that arrays aren’t arrays in the traditional sense, but ordered hash tables. Consider this:

$data = array('zero','one','two','three');
for ($i=0; $i<count($data); $i++) {
    // yeah, don't calculate count() on every iteration
    echo "{$data[$i]}\n";
}

Output:

zero
one
two
three

This first example is easy to iterate — the array contains sequential, numeric, zero-based keys. It gets more complicated when using non-sequential, and non-numeric keys:

$data = array(
    'apple',
    'cow' => 'moo',
    'pig' => 'oink',
    'orange'
);
for ($i=0; $i<count($data); $i++) {
    echo "{$data[$i]}\n";
}

Output:

apple
orange
Notice: Undefined offset: 2 in - on line 10
Notice: Undefined offset: 3 in - on line 10

I could use foreach, but because a numeric loop illustrates the point more clearly, here’s how I might implement the above code so that it works:

$data = array(
    'apple',
    'cow' => 'moo',
    'pig' => 'oink',
    'orange'
);
$k = array_keys($data);
for ($i=0; $i<count($data); $i++) {
    echo "{$data[$k[$i]]}\n";
}

Output:

apple
moo
oink
orange

This brings us back to the Iterator implementation. Why isn’t the code above correct? Take a closer look at this:

public function valid()
{
    return (current($this->_data) !== false);
}

A value of false in the array is indistinguishable from a false value returned by current(). Using the above implementation with the following array would cause it to bail after orange (and subsequently might cause you to waste a day tracking down the cause):

array(
    'apple',
    'orange',
    false,
    'banana',
);

On Tuesday night, I updated the manual to use an improved Iterator implementation. It’s probably a bit slower (so you can use the internal-indexing implementation if you’re sure your arrays will never contain false), but my implementation is more robust.

<?php
/**
 * A mixed-key iterator implementation
 *
 * Note: these array_keys() calls are slow. The array keys could be cached
 * as long as the cache value is invalidated when $_data is changed.
 */
class It implements Iterator
{
	public $_data = array();
	protected $_index = 0;

	public function rewind()
	{
		$this->_index = 0;
	}
 
	public function current()
	{
		$k = array_keys($this

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 765 bytes)

About a month ago my good friend Lorna Mitchell put out a call for stories on how working with Open Source has influenced people's careers. Given that a lot of my recent career has been driven by my involvement in Open Source, I shared my story with Lorna. But I also wanted to share some of my story with everyone. So here is my story and opinion on how Open Source can influence your career in a positive way.

July was a month of talks and travel, including speaking at OSCON and user group talks to DCPHP and PDXPHP. For those who saw the “Micro Optimize This!” talk, you can download the slides here. For those looking for the “Five Tips To Make Good Object Oriented Code Better” slides, those are available here.

Just a heads up for all of those in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area – there’s a great one-day event coming up this Friday (July 31st) blending PHP, .NET, Java, new media, Joomla and WordPress into one packed day of sessions – Dallas TechFest 2010 at the University of Texas at Dallas.

I’ll be giving a session called “Building a Web Service API” from 10:30 – 11:45am in the PHP track. Here’s a summary of the session:

When is a web application more than just a web application? Hook up an API and you’ll see! I’ll walk you through the basics of what an API is and the concepts behind it as well as key pieces of technology you can use to create both the client and server. There’s a focus on PHP but other languages and tools will be touched on as well.

There’s still time to register for the event – tickets can be purchased for an early bird price (ending today) of $50 or $60 at the door. You can see the full list of sessions here.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my beer recipes are now online.

I've had several people ask me how this is done, so I think a post is in order.

While it's entirely possible to brew beer at home without any fancy gadgets, there are several tools I use (such as my refractometer) that make the process easier, more controlled, or both. Brewing software is one of the few instruments that I'm not sure I'd want to brew without. I use a Mac, primarily, so Beer Alchemy (BA) is the obvious choice for recipe formulation, calculation, and logging.

BA has its own html export mechanism for recipes, and I used this for quite a long time, but I was never really satisfied with the results. The markup was hard to style, contained a lot of clutter (occasionally useful, but often redundant information such as style parameters), and simply didn't fit well with the rest of my site.

You can also export from BA in PDF (not suitable for web publishing), ProMash's binary recipe format (a pain to convert, although there do seem to be some tools to help with this), BeerXML (normally the most accessible, but in my opinion, a poorly-designed XML format), or in BA's native .bar ("Beer Alchemy Recipe") format, which is what I chose.

The bar format contains a property list, similar to those found throughout Apple systems. Property lists are either binary or XML (but the XML is very difficult to work with using traditional tools because of the way it employs element peering instead of a hierarchy to manage relationships). Luckily, I found a project called CFPropertyList that allows for easy plist handling in PHP. (I even contributed a minor change to this project, a while ago.)

Once you've run the .bar file's contents through CFPropertyList, layout is very simple. Here's most of the code I use to generate my recipes:

<?php
$beerPath = __DIR__ . '/../resources/beer/';

$recipes = apc_fetch('seancoates_recipes');
$fromCache = true;
if ($recipes === false) {
	$fromCache = false;
	foreach (new DirectoryIterator($beerPath) as $f) {
		if ($f->isDot()) {
			continue;
		}
		if (substr($f->getFilename(), -4) != '.bar') {
			continue;
		}
		$cfpl = new CFPropertyList($beerPath . '/' . $f->getFilename());
		$recipe = $cfpl->toArray();
		$title = $recipe['RecipeTitle'];
		$recipes[self::slugify($title)] = array(
			'title' => $title,
			'content' => $recipe,
		);
	}
	asort($recipes);
	if ($recipes) {
		apc_store('seancoates_recipes', $recipes, 3600); // 1h
	}
}

In addition to displaying the recipe's data, I also wanted to show the approximate (calculated) beer colour. Normally, beer recipes declare their colour in "SRM" (Standard Reference Method). There's no obvious, simple, and direct way to get from SRM (which is a number from 0 to 40—and higher, but above the mid 30s is basically "black") to an html colour.

I found a few tables online, but I wasn't terribly happy with any of them, and keeping a dictionary for lookups was big and ugly. I like the way Beer Alchemy previews its colours, and since it has html output, I emailed the author to see if he'd be willing to share his algorithm. Steve from Kent Place Software graciously sent me an excerpt from his Objective C code, and I translated it to PHP. This might be useful for someone, and since Steve also granted me permission to publish my version of the algorithm, here it is:

<?php
/**
 * Calculate html colour from SRM
 * Thanks to Steve from Kent Place Software (Beer Alchemy)
 *
 * @param float $srm the SRM value to turn into html
 * @return string html colour (without leading #)
 */
public function srm2html($srm)
{
	if ($srm <= 0.1) { // It's water
		$r = 197;
		$g = 232;
		$b = 248;
	} elseif ($srm <= 2) {
		$r = 250;
		$g = 250;
		$b = 60;
	} elseif ($srm <= 12) {
		$r = (250 - (6 * ($sr

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 3023 bytes)

To bring CMS editing to the next level, the IKS project is working on a semantic html5 editor. This week we had a hackathon in Helsinki focusing on implementing our ideas with the Aloha Editor. In addition to enjoying the hot summer weather here, we accomplished quite a bit and in the end were able to present the whole pipeline of:

• Loading content from Midgard CMS to Aloha Editor
• Annotating our content with Google-compatible Person RDFa elements
• Saving the content back to Midgard
• ...and finally analysing the content with FISE to find more semantic information

The hackathon participants included developers from Nemein, Gentics, Infigo, Salzburg Research and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. Some screenshots:

Editing content with Aloha in Midgard

Annotating persons with the Aloha RDFa plugin

RDFa annotation created with the semantic editor

Additional semantic information suggested by FISE

All the relevant code can be found from GitHub (see also the FISE Midgard integration).

Publisha is new way to distribute your content across multiple platforms in one fell swoop. Alyssa takes it for a test drive. Related Posts

1. Hollywood Actors Want $759 per Day Residuals For Online Video Content
2. 13 Tools to Back Up Your Social Media Content
3. 5 of the Best Facebook Fan Page Apps for User Engagement

Forget megabyte-busting web applications - this new Microsoft-sponsored competition is about squeezing the most out of 10K. Craig looks at the challenge in more detail... Related Posts

1. For Sale: Web Application – Unused
2. Could you Build a Complete Web Site in 24 Hours?
3. Web-based graphics application: Picnik

This week, Patrick O’Keefe, Stephan Segraves, and Brad Williams interview Gregory Ng, the Frozen Food Master at Freezer Burns, a popular web video show focused on frozen food reviews that can be found at freezerburns.com, and Wayne Sutton, the Business Development and Marketing Strategist at TriOut, a geolocation based startup that’s focused on the Triangle area of North Carolina. Related Posts

1. SitePoint Podcast #10: The Rainbow of Social Media
2. SitePoint Podcast #37: Social Media: The Bad and the Ugly
3. SitePoint Podcast #59: Speaking of Fail

Jennifer looks at how to quickly and easily design and develop clever widgets using Wolfram Alpha's widget builder. Related Posts

1. Wolfram Alpha: Helpful or Hyped?
2. Data-driven Development with Flash Builder, Part I
3. Data-driven Development with Flash Builder, Part II

Alyssa looks at one of the biggest problems she has with email -- the distraction factor -- and shares her solution for taking back control and putting email in its place. Related Posts

1. Have You Reached Email Account Overload?
2. Tips for Managing Communication Overload
3. Webmail Security Breaches Continue

IT project estimates are notoriously bad, but who's to blame? Probably everyone. Craig explains further... Related Posts

1. How To Estimate Time For A Project
2. Has project management gone out the window?
3. Windows 7 Launch Marred by Software Pirates

For freelancers, the concept of media wastage reaches beyond the traditional view -- paid promotions -- to networking, personal projects, and more. Georgina explains the idea of media wastage can help you hone your promotions for greatest effect. Related Posts

1. Using Special Promotions to Generate Business
2. Choose the Best Invoice Payment Timeframe
3. 5 Holiday Promotion Mistakes to Avoid

James Mansfield spoke to three of the speakers from the upcoming UX Australia conference, to find out more about the emerging field of UX design: what it is to be a UX designer, how one becomes a UX designer, and what the future holds. Related Posts

1. Marking your own exam
2. Usability for Developers
3. Design with Intent Toolkit Released

While not every prospect call can be a success, it doesn't hurt to remind ourselves about some of the things we probably shouldn't do during a call. Alyssa shares her list of no-no's while on calls with prospective clients. What tops your list? Related Posts

1. Long Sales Cycles: How to Handle Prospects Who Won’t Agree to Move Forward
2. Lessons from an ineffective sales call
3. 8-Point Checklist for Qualifying Prospects

Ferrari unveiled a new logo for their Formula 1 team for 2011. Jennifer takes a look to see what's changed. Related Posts

1. Focus on Clients with Relationship Marketing
2. Fundamentals Of Logo Design Part 3: Type & Symbol Logos
3. 20 Logo Designs Featuring Animal Symbols

Rydell High's most famous graduating class is going back to school. A newly restored print brings the highest-grossing musical of all time, GREASE (1978), to the big screen as a sing-along. Join Danny and Sandy with your own crew of T-Birds and Pink Ladies for a carnival ride back to those amazing summer nights!

As a deadly battle rages over Jigsaw’s brutal legacy, a group of Jigsaw survivors gathers to seek the support of self-help guru and fellow survivor Bobby Dagen, a man whose own dark secrets unleash a new wave of terror...

In late 2007, filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost sensed a story unfolding as they began to film the life of Ariel’s brother, Nev. They had no idea that their project would lead to the most exhilarating and unsettling months of their lives. A reality thriller that is a shocking product of our times, Catfish is a riveting story of love, deception and grace within a labyrinth of online intrigue.

The Alamo Drafthouse and Levi’s® present the 2010 Rolling Roadshow free outdoor screening of ROCKY in Philadelphia, PA at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on August 19. Sylvester Stallone created the single most iconic working man in the movies. Rocky Balboa stands for a lot more than title bouts, busted noses and bruised sides of cold beef; he’s the symbol of hard work, rags-to-riches, tireless conviction and a whole lot of other things that get the fists pumping and the heart soaring.

The Alamo Drafthouse and Levi’s® present the 2010 Rolling Roadshow free outdoor screening of ROCKY in Philadelphia, PA at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on August 19. Sylvester Stallone created the single most iconic working man in the movies. Rocky Balboa stands for a lot more than title bouts, busted noses and bruised sides of cold beef; he’s the symbol of hard work, rags-to-riches, tireless conviction and a whole lot of other things that get the fists pumping and the heart soaring.

The Alamo Drafthouse and Levi’s® present the 2010 Rolling Roadshow free outdoor screening of ROCKY in Philadelphia, PA at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on August 19. Sylvester Stallone created the single most iconic working man in the movies. Rocky Balboa stands for a lot more than title bouts, busted noses and bruised sides of cold beef; he’s the symbol of hard work, rags-to-riches, tireless conviction and a whole lot of other things that get the fists pumping and the heart soaring.

The Alamo Drafthouse and Levi’s® present the 2010 Rolling Roadshow free outdoor screening of THERE WILL BE BLOOD in Bakersfield, CA at the Kern County Museum on August 8. One of the most celebrated releases of the past decade, THERE WILL BE BLOOD is acclaimed auteur Paul Thomas Anderson’s most epic film to date. Set in the uncharted Southern California of the turn of the 20th century, the film follows ruthless oil man Daniel Plainview as he rises from lowly prospector to cruel magnate and crushes all of the little people along the way. It also tells a version of the America myth, a rags to riches story through treachery and backstabbing that acts as a great metaphor for American industrialism. Add the grand narrative the unbelievable performances by Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano and THERE WILL BE BLOOD rises to the status of masterpiece.

The Alamo Drafthouse and Levi’s® present the 2010 Rolling Roadshow free outdoor screening of RED DAWN in Las Vegas, New Mexico at the Fort Union Drive-In on August 8. Shot in the expanses of New Mexico, RED DAWN imagines a small town in the grips of a full-scale invasion. A group of teenagers band together to defend their town and country from Soviet fources.

The Alamo Drafthouse and Levi’s® present the 2010 Rolling Roadshow free outdoor screening of ROCKY in Philadelphia, PA at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on August 19. Sylvester Stallone created the single most iconic working man in the movies. Rocky Balboa stands for a lot more than title bouts, busted noses and bruised sides of cold beef; he’s the symbol of hard work, rags-to-riches, tireless conviction and a whole lot of other things that get the fists pumping and the heart soaring.

The Alamo Drafthouse and Levi’s® present the 2010 Rolling Roadshow free outdoor screening of ROBOCOP in Detroit, MI at the Russell Industrial Center on August 14. The most adrenaline-inducing ’80s action, sci-fi opus on record, this thundering tale of bionic justice vaulted mankind into the 21st Century in a hail of bullets and splintered bone! In the not-too-distant-future, a newly transferred Detroit police officer named Murphy is remade into an indestructible cyborg cop after being dismembered by a gang of thugs in an abandoned warehouse. Reborn as Robocop he is programmed to serve and protect the citizens of Detroit and eliminate the rampant crime in the city streets.

Christopher Nolan's sci-fi thriller centers on the premise of corporate espionage by way of dream invasion.

Centers on a CIA officer who is accused of being a Russian sleeper spy.

The world's second-greatest villain (Steve Carell) meets his match in three little orphans.

A wizard (Nicolas Cage) trains a reluctant protege to help him fight a powerful adversary.

Woody, Buzz and the rest of the toys wind up at a day care center after Andy leaves for college.

Brings to life the adventures of young Ramona Quimby from the best-selling books.

Five friends learn that age and maturity do not necessarily go hand-in-hand.

Bella finds herself surrounded by danger as Seattle is ravaged by a string of killings. She is forced to choose between Edward and Jacob, knowing that her decision has the potential to ignite a struggle between vampire and werewolf.

The story follows the adventures of Aang, a young successor to a long line of Avatars, who must put his childhood ways aside and stop the Fire Nation from enslaving the Water, Earth and Air nations.

A group of elite warriors are hunted by members of a merciless alien race known as Predators.