Brenton Alker's Deprecated Behaviour

The Silver Lining of the ReadWriteWeb/Facebook Login Debacle

Brenton Alker — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 04:11:13 +0000

The furor surrounding the amusing chaos that ensued following ReadWriteWeb’s article on Facebook Connect has been interesting, in that it brings attention to developers assumptions about the way users interact with their products. There have been articles debating who is the cause of the confusion; whether it’s the Developers or the Users that need to [...]

Bootstrapping the Doctrine 2.0 Autoloader in Zend Framework

Brenton Alker — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:03:53 +0000

Please Note: This post was based on the Alpha release of Doctrine2. They have since added Doctrine\Common\IsolatedClassLoader which (among other things) doesn’t automatically register itself so we no longer have to unregister it, making things much easier. Doctrine 2.0 looks like it might finally be the ORM framework I have been seeking for PHP. While [...]

Dependency Injection Container Resource in Zend Framework

Brenton Alker — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:00:51 +0000

A good dependency injection container is a godsend when it comes to managing the dependency tree of even a moderately complex domain model. As such, it comes as no surprise there has been much discussion about them of late in the PHP and Zend Framework communities. Based on the Yadif and Benjamin Eberlei’s recent look [...]

Building a Modular Application in Zend Framework – Part 2

Brenton Alker — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 04:43:35 +0000

Welcome to part two of the series exploring the modular application structure in Zend Framework. With the basic application set up in part one, we can get down to actually creating our first module. We’re going to refactor the official quickstarts guestbook. This will let us focus on the modular structure without getting bogged down [...]

Building a Modular Application in Zend Framework – Part 1

Brenton Alker — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:45:29 +0000

This is part one of a series exploring modular application development in Zend Framework. In this entry we’ll look at downloading and installing Zend Framework, especially Zend_Tool, on a Linux environment. We’ll start from the beginning so that future posts can build on a known environment. Throughout this post, the code snippets are copy/paste ready, [...]

Re-sequence a column in MySQL

Brenton Alker — Tue, 26 May 2009 03:13:24 +0000

When you have an "position" column in a table, to allow the user to select the order of elements in the table or as an optimization for pagination. They always seem to get out of sequence at some point—ending up with gaps in the sequence. This is something I run into not quiet often enough [...]

Following hashtags on Twitter

Brenton Alker — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 04:24:59 +0000

The hashtags service allows you to see some interesting information, such as popular tags and a graph of a particular tags usage over time. It also offers the ability to follow a tag by providing an RSS feed, but I don’t believe it can provide a single feed of multiple tags. While I was at [...]

PHP Quebec Wrap-up from a Conference Newb

Brenton Alker — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:02:09 +0000

As I am in Canada for only 3 more weeks, and we don’t get too many PHP conferences in Brisbane, I took the opportunity to attended my first ever PHP conference. I thought I would share my thoughts, and maybe those more experienced can help me do it “better” next time. After flying across the [...]

Converting a flat array with Parent ID’s to a nested Tree

Brenton Alker — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 01:37:32 +0000

Storing hierarchical data in a tabular data structure such as a database is not uncommon in many applications (eg. threaded comments on a blog entry, or a navigation menu structure). The “Adjacency List” method; probably the most common, involves storing a reference to the parent in each of the children. Here is a snippet for [...]

Environment specific bootstrapping for Zend Framework

Brenton Alker — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:40:05 +0000

When you build an application, it is often deployed to a number of servers each with a different set of configurations. The development and production servers, with different debug, logging, and database details is an obvious example. Many approaches I have seen to dealing with this, including Anis uddin Ahmad’s post that inspired this one, [...]