Seva Lapsha at Work

Shame on me! I’ve discovered that wordpress.com provides syntaxHighlighter functionality just today. So I hurry to report that the only 2 posts in this blog, which contain code snippets have been immediately converted:

<a href="http://sevalapsha.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/copy-nodes-xml-documents-java-dom/">
    Copying nodes between XML documents with Java DOM
</a>
&amp;
<a href="http://sevalapsha.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/prototype-google-analytics-javascript/">
    Prototype styled Google Analytics javascript snippet
</a>

BTW, isn’t it weird I don’t have one snipped in PHP yet?

Today was the 1st day of me working in the new company (yes, my dear friend, I bid farewell to Nielsen Online) – EasyToBook GmbH – as Software Architect. Unfortunately I’ve got no chance to either design any architecture or to develop any software yet, but succeeded to meet nice and talented people and spent some sweet time reading the documentation.

About 2.5 years passed since I posted the development activity comparison of major PHP frameworks. Since then I’ve got about 4.5k hits from search engines, which IMHO is not such a bad sample to summarize people’s interest in each of them.

Again, no conclusions – just pure numbers

http://tr.im/lnXq:

Recently I’ve created a prototype styled javascript snippet to enable google analytics on one of my sites. Save this code in google.analytics.js file and include it from the head tag of the page just after including of the prototype.js:

gaTrackerId = 'ss-ddddddd-d'; // insert your tracker id here
document.observe('dom:loaded', function() {
    var gaJsHost = (
        'https:' == document.location.protocol
            ? 'https://ssl.'
            : 'http://www.'
    ) + 'google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var script = new Element('script', { 'src': gaJsHost});
    var gaTrack = function() {
        if (
            !script.readyState
            || /loaded|complete/.test(script.readyState)
        ) {
            var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(gaTrackerId);
            pageTracker._trackPageview();
        }
    };
    script.observe('load', gaTrack);
    script.observe('readystatechange', gaTrack);
    document.body.appendChild(script);
});

I never mentioned here, but in my pre-previous developer’s life I was working in a small adult internet company. Right now one of my collegues called me on IM to ask a question about an error he suddenly got fro one of the sites he affiliates to. This is the error:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Zend_Db_Adapter_Exception’ with message ‘SQLSTATE[00000] [1040] Too many connections’ in /www/zt/root/library/Zend/Db/Adapter/Pdo/Abstract.php:129

Stack trace:

#0 /www/zt/root/library/Zend/Db/Adapter/Abstract.php(216): Zend_Db_Adapter_Pdo_Abstract->_connect()

#1 /www/zt/root/library/Zend/Db/Adapter/Pdo/Abstract.php(204): Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract->query(‘????SELECT?????…’, Array)

#2 /www/zt/root/mvc/models/User.php(490): Zend_Db_Adapter_Pdo_Abstract->query(‘????SELECT?????…’)

#3 /www/zt/root/mvc/models/User.php(91): User->attachVideosByIp()

#4 /www/zt/root/bootstrap.php(35): User->__construct()

#5 /www/zt/root/index.php(7): require(‘/www/zt/root/bo…’)

#6 {main}

thrown in /www/zt/root/library/Zend/Db/Adapter/Pdo/Abstract.php on line 129

Warning: Unknown: write failed: No space left on device (28) in Unknown on line 0

Warning: Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/var/lib/php/session) in Unknown on line 0

BTW, the site (it was Zoo Tube) is not really bad (according to Google cache) and even seems to be a clone of another Web 2.0 porn site – Red Tube, which makes me think ZF is really becomes a trend in real world and and real money projects. Isn’t it amazing?

In contraversal with what it might seem, I won’t compare features of the mentioned projects. For that purpose you may just read this nice article by Dennis Pallett.

Instead, I will share you what I learned with help of [in]famous Ohloh project – the codebase, activity and participants dynamics comparison of the mentioned projects.

Well, I’ll not make any conclusions – just observe the facts.

Codebase:
(lines of code)

  Zend Framework   CakePHP   Symfony

  Zend Framework   Seagull   WACT

  Zend Framework   PRADO   TRAX

  Zend Framework   eZ   CodeIgniter

Activity:
(commits)

  Zend Framework   CakePHP   Symfony

  Zend Framework   Seagull   WACT

  Zend Framework   PRADO   TRAX

  Zend Framework   eZ   CodeIgniter

Participants:
(active committers)

  Zend Framework   CakePHP   Symfony

  Zend Framework   Seagull   WACT

  Zend Framework   PRADO   TRAX

  Zend Framework   eZ   CodeIgniter

Enjoy.

Last two days I’ve worked on implementing an example of integration of Zend Framework’s MVC and Prototype’s Ajax for HTML Forms submission and validation.

The solution consist of 2 parts:

1. There is a new View Helper to create an Ajax-enabled form.

This part mostly consists of JavaScript code, which alters default HTML Form behavior to submit the input element values to the action’s URL with Ajax, if form’s method is set to ‘ajax’.

In addition the form itself listens to submission result events and (by default) marks input elements if they are invalid.

2. There is a new customized abstract base Controller which replaces default ViewRenderer with a new one, which:

a) detects whether the request was received from Ajax.
b) if true, will not render the view, but instead will output with the input validation information, if either.

Well, the development is not really over yet, but what I originally wanted to say is I’ve just realized how I miss writing good old JS.

By the way, I need to repeat [ad:start] how happy I am to have PHP, HTML and JavaScript editors in one powerful standardized environment (Eclipse) – what I never had in the past, before PDT, WST & ATF came to the picture [ad:end] ).

Yesterday me and Roy had a brainstorm session on future Zend Neon (Commercial version of PDT) and ATF integration and “occidently” found a way of debugging of an URL with both Zend’s PHPand Mozilla’s JavaScript debuggers in one session.

Surprise! It’s possible with neither patching nor hacking. I’m not going to show the exact steps of this, but the idea is very simple:

As you probably don’t know, to debug URL on a server which has Zend Debugger installed it’s enough to pass several simple parameters with the HTTP request (either in the query string or as cookies), like client IP and port, debug type etc., to start the debug session. Afterwards the debugger contacts the client machine, where a Neon’s Debug Daemon listens for incoming connections. The Daemon then raises up a new Launch Configuration.

When Neon’s Debug URL action is executed, it just appends the needed debug parameters to the passed URL and sends the updated URL either to the browser. Just grab this URL and start Mozilla JavaScript Debug Launch with it!

As the result 2 simultaneous launch configurations will start; the first activated session will be PHP’s one and then, after the browser will start receiving content from the server, JavaScript’s one will come into the picture.

Voila!

Moreover, if you enabled all-pages (cookie based) PHP debugging, it will go further with your AJAX (AJAH/AJAJ) requests!

Now the only problem is you cannot set breakpoints of both PHP and JavaScript types in the PHP source file, since it doesn’t match the final responce which will be passed to the browser, so you should enable the option to suspend the JavaScript execution immediately after it starts to add breakpoints to the responce HTML source.