The British Columbia Lottery Corporation has an unpublished API that they use to pull data down for the flash application on their home page. The Zext PHP API exposes functionality to query the most resent winning numbers from the BCLC website, as well as retrieve current jackpot estimates for the main lotteries in this province.
There have been several tutorials outlining how to autoload Doctrine Models using the Zend_Loader_Autoloader. However, none of these have permitted Zend / PEAR style naming conventions for models. I prefer to use these conventions because, although it makes my model names longer, the “name-spacing” gives a certain degree of organization and order to the application.
Lately I have been writing Service API’s for Zext, my Zend Framework library extension. I plan on publishing some of the more useful ones over the next couple of months on my blog. The first of the series is the Epguides.com API.
First post in a while. I have been busy working on some large application and finishing up my Computing Science Degree. Now that the piece of paper is safely secured above my fireplace, I’ve been trying to find time to do a new post.
I have been building a large application and one of the requirements is to trigger a certain action when an event happens. For example, trigger the sending of an alert email when a database row is updated. Some programmers may be tempted to simply hard-code this functionality into the model class, however this doesn’t give very strict class encapsulation, and can quickly become un-maintainable.
Sometimes when you are building a web application, you want to use different layouts for different parts of the site. For example, in a content management system, you may want one layout for normal users and another, completely different layout for site administrators.
Today I was optimizing a site that uses heavy PHP and Ajax. I wanted to reduce the amount of data that was being sent from the server. To put this in perspective, if there were no cache hits in a page load there would be a total of 755 KB pulled down over 123 requests.
I have been using the Dojo toolkit as my Javascript library of choice since back in early 2006 when it was still around version 0.4. Since then, the project has made tremendous strides including the release of version 1.0 and 1.1 with 1.2 on the way. At the beginning of 2008 I started using the Zend Framework to build MVC PHP applications and, with the release of 1.5, it has become my PHP framework of choice.
To my delight, the Zend Framework and Dojo have recently announced a partnership which will lead to tighter integration of these two great open source frameworks.
Recently I have been playing with the dojox.dtl: the javascript port of the Django templating engine. So far I am quite impressed, not only is it fast and full featured, but by writing a wrapper class it is easy to make it behave like server side templating systems: you specify a template and pass it an object and it will render that object according to the template rules.
There are several Firefox plugins which allow the user to manipulate their browser cookies. However, most of these plugins force the user to manipulate cookies individually. This can become tedious if the user is simply “importing” cookies from, say, a wireshark dump.
The CookieInjector userscript simplifies this process, by allowing the user to copy-paste the cookie portion of the dump and have the cookies from the dump automatically created on the currently viewed web page.
This weekend I was working on some SFU community sites and I decided it would be nice to display the SFU ULife calendar on one website in particular. SFU ULife is a community building initiative which aims to increase the visibility of the community and events at SFU in a pledge to increase student involvement and awareness. Read more about ULife’s goals Here.