It's been a while since I released any PHP code for working with the RETS system. If you've worked with RETS, you know how difficult and frustrating it is. Hopefully, my code will be of some help.

I rarely work outside of the CakePHP framework anymore. Since that is the case, I this code release will be a RETS model for use with CakePHP 1.2. It handles an initial download of all active listings and stores them in the database. It will also handle a CRON job for periodically getting newly added, updated, or deleted listings from your RETS provider.

Please review [Read More]

I can remember the day well. I was in fourth grade and my art teacher had mentioned to my parents that she thought I might be colorblind. My mom walked me down Pine Street in Rolla, Missouri and into an eye doctor's office. Shortly thereafter, I was looking at a small book with white pages and groups of colored circles. Some of the pages held numbers hidden in the colored circles, some didn't.

Little did I know how much that day would become the start of a long and interesting journey down the path of being categorized as color bind. I've looked around the internet and nobody [Read More]

Leandro Pinho wrote a great jQuery lightbox plugin. I have made a slight modification to it to restrict the navigation, Next and Prev links, from the lightbox.

Downloads: jquery.lightbox-0.6.js

Another issue I ran into after reinstalling NuSphere PhpEd was that when configuring SFTP connections for uploading files. The standard permissions level for uploaded files via an SFTP connection is 0750 and 0640 for folders.

I spent 30 minutes trying to determine why CakePHP was throwing Come to find out, it was all because of the default permissions settings for uploaded files on a SFTP connection in NuSphere PhpEd.

I recently noticed that when I upgraded Vista from 32bit to 64bit, I must have chosen to install the 64bit version on a second hard drive. Unfortunately, Windows felt it was necessary to leave system files on the first drive, effectively tieing up both drives. I wanted to pull one of the drive to expand the storage in my Windows Home Server.

After reinstalling a new version of Vista on a single drive, I started reinstalling all my applications. One of the applications that gave me an issue was NuSphere's PhpEd. After configuring a project to use an ftp connection to sync [Read More]

If you've ever had debugging statements decimate a layout, then you need FirePHP. Like its brother-in-arms FireBug, FirePHP is a Firefox Add-on designed to help PHP developers cleanly debug code. FirePHP can also me used to debug CakePHP applications with only a few additional lines of code.

1. First, download and install the FirePHP add-on for Firefox.
2. Then download the FirePHPCore package. Extract FirePHP.class.php to '/app/vendors/FirePHP'.
3. Now [Read More]
   

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   Filed under: CakePHP, Web Development, FirePHP, FireBug

As a developer, I am always cautious about allowing a framework to automagically do things for me. When I was a web developer at Sporting News, our development staff spent a lot of time analysing different PHP frameworks and open source CMS packages. We were searching for a starting point, whether it was a framework or a CMS, upon which we planned on building the latest version of www.sportingnews.com.

After we settled on CakePHP, we knew out of the gate that it came with some things that we wouldn't be able to tolerate. The initial [Read More]

I wrote an article about how I think "content delivery" will be the next big thing on the internet. Today Google annouced, or maybe it was just discovered, that Google will be releasing their own internet browser, Google Chrome.

This falls easily into line with the ideas I outlined in the blog entry on blog.fluidesign.com. Google has a very vested interest in making sure content is delivered with relevant ads. I'd be willing to bet a [Read More]

While messing with a new website that I am working on, I find a slightly annoying issue with CakePHP that doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. I was trying to store a thumb up/down record in a tinyint(1) field. A thumb up would have a value of 1 and a thumb down would have a value of -1. CakePHP was kindly(sarcism) converting my -1 to a 1 every time.

It appears that CakePHP assumes that all tinyint(1) fields are actually boolean fields. Therefore, if anything other than false is set in the field, it will store a 1 as the value.

So, if you notice that [Read More]

One of the problems of using CakePHP with an Oracle database is that CakePHP does not utilize bind variables. One of the advantages of Oracle is that it can cache query results based on queries, as long as those queries use bind variables and not strings. An example of a query using binds looks like: When I first started working with Oracle, I was not aware of the [Read More]

During the development phase of a recent project, another developer and I spent a good amount of time trying to find a anayltics package to use on a new application. Our requirements were short and sweet, but it was difficult to find a package that did was we needed out of the box. We did not review any log analyzers due to the need for up to the minute stats.

Requirements:

• Collect stats via PHP (no javascript needed on every page).
• Work with Oracle, not just MySQL.
• We own the data (no hosted solutions).
• API available to access pieces of data.
• Handle stat collection for 2 million page views a day.

[Read More]

One of the major negatives of using Oracle 10g and PHP to build applications is the obvious lack of connection pooling.

Without pooling, frequent connection creation and destruction can be expensive and crippling to high scalability. Oracle's traditional middle-tier connection pools were not applicable to the multi-process PHP architecture. Caching connections within PHP removed connection creation and destruction costs but did not achieve optimal connection resource utilization, incurring unnecessary memory overhead in the database.

[Read More]

Looks like another company is joining in the fight to unseat the top two web browsers. Others have come before, all have failed. See Flock, Avant, and Opera.

Now comes Pogo, by AT&T (a very unlikely development powerhouse). Many people will be turned off by the "deathstar" logo, but spend a minute watching their demo video and you will be amazed. [Read More]