Web Punk

Zend-Framework Maintenance Plugin & Search Engines

Christian — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:18:24 +0000

Under Construction

A few months ago, I wrote an article about how to implement an “under maintenance” plugin using Zend Framework plugins. This plugin allows you to easily redirect users of your website to an “under maintenance” in case of a planned downtime. Simply set a flag in your application.ini and that’s it. In this post we will extend this plugin.

A meaningful extension for this plugin would be to inform web crawlers & search engines that this downtime is temporary. Basically, all you have to do to inform Google, Bing and Co. about the status of your website is to set the correct HTTP status code. For our maintenance plugin, this would be 503 “Service Temporarily Unavailable”. According to W3C this status code is defined as: “The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.”

Furthermore, you can tell the web crawler when you expect your website to be up and running again by setting the ‘Retry-After’ status. In our example, we tell Google that it may retry crawling our website in 3600 seconds. Alternatively, you could also set a date, e.g. ”Sun, 22. Jan 2012 23:00:00 GMT”.

Both can be done in your maintenance Action by simply adding the following two lines of code

$this->getResponse()->setHttpResponseCode(503);
$this->getResponse()->setHeader('Retry-After', '3600');

Hope this helps…

“scoops.co” is finally online

Christian — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:13:44 +0000

It’s finally done. The project that I’ve been working on during the last couple of months is online. Basically, Scoops is a Semantic Web application that enables you to… well, maybe it’s easier if you simply have a look at it ;-).

Some technical notes: the project has been implemented using Zend Framework on the server-side and jQuery on the client-side. The backend (the process that crawls the web, analyzes & organizes text, and calculates a relevance for each user) uses dozens of free or commercial web services.

Customising your website: is it worth it?

Christian — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:44:26 +0000

This site offers a range of information about how customise a website using various examples of coding, and other web development techniques. However, there are still a good number of people who rely on templates and pre-set themes when putting together a website. Often this can offer a quite a easy option when it comes to web design – but it is worth putting in the time and effort to create something more original?

In fact, there can often be a number of advantages to creating an original website design. Often, it can be particularly beneficial to those who are looking to develop their own brand or image. Whether you’re creating a games sites, like party poker, or developing a new email client, similar to hotmail, developing a recognisable brand image can prove crucial By designing your own sites, complete with unique features, you can help to ensure that the products or facilities which you are offering have their own unique image. If you are hoping to match up to your biggest competitors, then this is something which can be of a huge advantage.

As well as helping to make sure your site stands out from the crowd, customisation options can also help to make sure your web pages are as user-friendly as possible. Whilst pre-set layouts and designs may look impressive, they rarely cater for a site perfectly. Added features – such as an image gallery, for example – can be the perfect way display a product or theme, and can make all the difference to your site as a whole. With step-by-step web development guides available online, there are certainly a number of benefits to be had from including relevant examples of web coding within your overall site design.

(Programmer) Hell and Back Again

Christian — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 07:17:22 +0000

The last months were frantically bussy. I’ve been working on a Web 3.0 (yes, I really mean Web 3.0 and not Web 2.0) project and finishing and debugging this web portal took more time than expected. This project is currently in closed beta. I’ll let you know as soon as we are online.

Anyway, I’ve just wanted to let you know that web punk is not dead. I’ll publish some (hopefully) interesting posts within the next days.

PS: I’m still looking for co-authors. If you are interested, please contact me…

ZIDS V 1.0.1: Zend Framework Intruder Detection System

Christian — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:59:01 +0000

Version 1.0.1 of ZIDS (Zend Framework Intruder Detection System) has been released. You may download the source code here (Google Code).

If you don’t know yet what ZIDS is, or want to know how it works, please have a look at the manual

QA Tools for PHP

Christian — Mon, 16 May 2011 18:40:14 +0000

Just in case you missed the webinar of Michelangelo van Dam: have a look at his excellent webinar on QA (Quality Assurance) Tools for PHP. Michelangelo presents some really useful tools like PHPUnit, PHP_CodeSniffer, PHP Mess Detector and so on.

You’ll find the webinar here…

Zend Framework Advanced Error Controller – The Developer Day

Christian — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:39:02 +0000

Žilvinas Šaltys has written a very nice article about how to extend the default Zend Framework Error Controller

The main disadvantage of the default error controller is that it does not notify developers of the errors that occurred and instead silently logs them. Many enterprise web applications will find this unacceptable and will try to implement their means of solving the issue. In this post I’ll try to show how a more advanced Zend Framework error controller could be implemented to help developers tackle errors quickly.

via Zend Framework Advanced Error Controller – The Developer Day.

Autoload Doctrine and Doctrine Classes

Christian — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 08:32:11 +0000

If you read my post regarding how to integrate Doctrine using the Zend Framework, you might also be interested in this post written by Matthew Weier O’Phinney on how to autoload Doctrine and Doctrine entities using the Zend Framework.

Smart Google Translate Wrapper for PHP

Christian — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:40:34 +0000

Sameer Borate published his version of a Google Translate Wrapper for PHP on his blog and on Google code. Actually, Sameer’s class pretty much does what I expected it to do, i.e. translating text. The only thing I didn’t like was the fact that – as Google’s API only accepts text up to 5000 characters – it simply creates chunks of text by chopping the text using a dumb str_split($text, 5000). So here is a smarter version of Sameer’s Google Translate Wrapper.

This version of the Google Translate Wrapper makes sure that whole sentences are send to Google’s API. So instead of chopping a text like “Imagine that this text has nearly 5000 characters. And here is the next sentence” into two chunks “Imagine that this text has nearly 5000 characters. And he” and “re is the next sentence” it will create two chunks “Imagine that this text has nearly 5000 characters.” and “And here is the next sentence“. Beside that, the wrapper has a built in Google Language Detection that works with longer texts.

Okay, it’s not rocket science but it will create better results ;-).

Download the package here…

It’s pretty straight forward to use the wrapper. If you want to detect the language of a given text, use something like:

$gdl = new GoogleTranslateWrapper();
$gdl->detectLanguage("A simple text written in english.");
if ($gdl->isSuccess() === false) {
   echo "something went wrong. Error-Message: " . $gdl->getLastError();
} else {
   if (! $gdl->isDetectedLanguageReliable()) {
      echo "Detected language for this text is NOT reliable. Language detected = " . $gdl->getDetectedLanguage();
   } else {
      echo "Detected language for this text is reliable. Language detected = " . $gdl->getDetectedLanguage();
   }
}

Translating for instance a German text into English can be accomplished with:

$gdl = new GoogleTranslateWrapper();
$transText = $gdl->translate("Das ist ein deutscher Satz.", 'en', 'de');

Again, you might want to use isSuccess() and getLastError() to check if an error occured and, if so, which error. And make sure, that you read and understand the terms of use and how to display attribution for Google’s API.

PHP and Microsoft’s Azure

Christian — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 07:24:10 +0000

Are you an excellent PHP programmer? Wanna win a ride to MIX 2012 in Las Vegas, a Windows Phone 7 or a Kinect device? Here is your chance…