rvdavid: A Web Developer's Blog

A periodical blog of experiences from the angle of an autodidactic, paranoid and narcissistic web developer…

Archive for the ‘Web Development’ category

Subversion Tip: Managing SVN Properties with text files

May 21st, 2010

Here’s a quick SVN trick I use for managing my svn:ignore and svn:externals properties for my projects.

One of the first things I do for newly checked out projects is to add a externals.txt and ignore.txt files. Then I just populate these with the property values I require for the project.

I know, it’s a no brainer when you think about it right?

The thing is, I didn’t think of doing it until the past few projects and actually had to rely on ide integrated / gui tools to do it prior to this year. I came across a couple of examples and did it a couple of times in a rush without noting it down, but thought I’d make a post about it on my blog so that I have somehwere easy to find.

4 comments »

Posted in Web Development

Is it important that Views pull data from Models on their own?

January 22nd, 2010

In my recent post regarding the Model Service layer, there was one query about me mentioning that the View is configured by the Controller which goes against the grain of traditional MVC idea of “Views Should handle their own Models / data”.

There is nothing wrong with Views being able to handle their own models, I’m not suggesting that this shouldn’t be the case. You can also do it this way. That is the “traditional MVC” way of doing things and it works fine which is why I’m questioning why I’ve moved away from it. I’m just typing as I go so hopefully by the end of it, we’ll have something that makes a point.

I used to Really love this sh*t!

I used to trumpet the sh*t out of this because I had it figured out and it made me feel smart . I thought hey, I can adhere to the traditional MVC way of things and make the View select it’s own Model (or models) and gather information on it’s own – all I need is a View Helper. Further along came the question “What about the times when the Model needs to be used by the Controller?” well I got a plan for this too, then there’s the “What about when the Controller and View need access to the same model?” case. I needed to create a strategy to make sure that the Model isn’t instantiated twice in these cases.

19 comments »

Posted in Zend Framework

Tags: mvc php Web Development Zend Framework

My Zend Framework Model Layer: Part Service, Part ORM

January 20th, 2010

The Model Layer of the MVC triad: I’ve been thinking this over for the past few months since using the Doctrine ORM and I think I’ve finally made some progress to get this issue licked. In the past, I’ve agonised over this issue and blogged about my progress. Some weeks or days later I tried to probe the community on what they would do, Now I think I’d have an idea on what I would do.

After some more thought and lots of research on the subject, I’ve come to a solid point where I actually have something to try out which seems semantic aside from the naming of the class (Service Class) – but this is derived from what some people are talking about in ZF circles starting from Matthew Weier O’Phinney who was coining it as the “Gateway to the Domain” from early on, then later changing it to “Service Class”.

37 comments »

Posted in Zend Framework

Tags: mvc php service layer Web Development Zend Framework

Zend_Navigation makes writing Navigation for ZF Sites Very Easy

January 15th, 2010

Today, has been a very productive day for me. Part of it was spent on picking up Zend_Navigation which, thanks to Jon Lebensold’s Zend Cast on the subject of using Zend_Navigation to create menus, sitemaps and breadcrumbs, was easier than I had expected.

Zend_Navigation makes the management of a web site’s navigation very easy as it allows you to programmatically create the navigation bar by specifying either the URI or Controller, Action and Module properties of a Zend Navigation Page.

To use Zend Navigation, all I had to do was the following:

Add configuration entries for navigation in the application.ini file.
Initialise and attach an instance of the Zend_Navigation container class to the navigation helper via the view in the bootstrap.
Display the navigation bar with Zend_View_Helper_Navigation::menu() or the BreadCrumbs with Zend_View_Helper_Navigation::breadcrumbs() in your layout.phtml file.

4 comments »

Posted in Zend Framework

Tags: Fast 15 php Zend Framework

Started Draft Post on Zend Framework, Doctrine & PHPUnit Setup

January 13th, 2010

Today as I unit tested my view scripts using asertXpath() via Zend_Test, I was thinking how far along I’ve come from writing notes whilst reading books on what the difference between Aggregation and Composition is, then posting confused questions on the Advanced PHP forum at SitePoint. People are very generous with information and happily help out – they just give and give.