Resident Geek » Programming

No…I’m still alive!

Daniel Smith — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:53:30 +0000

So I haven’t posted in a while and I figured I should quickly post with a catch up. Work is going good, a lot of work to get done, but we are accomplishing a lot of really cool things over here. I have taken on a task of reviewing programming books, I have two books in my hands right now, I have finished one and am working on the other. Stay tuned for reviews on my site of them. Summer is nice, I actually missed the warm weather, but not getting sunburned. Florida Day was this past weekend, and it was really nice to see a lot of old friends and make some new ones. I sat out by the pool most of Saturday, and then on Sunday I went to the beach. It is not a good idea to get burned at the pool and then decide to goto the beach the next day. But it was worth it. It was a lot of fun and I am very happy that I went. With being so busy lately I haven’t had time to hang with some of my friends, but I promise that I am working harder to correct that.

On a slightly geekier note. I have been addicted to one computer game since I was really young. I love the Sid Meier’s Civilization series. I have Civilization 4 for Mac and play it regularly when I have some free time. I also enjoy playing Age of Empires 3 (thanks to my roommate). But the exciting news is that Civilization Revolutions is being released as a console game for XBox 360. So I am very excited to pickup a copy on June 8th. Yay!

Well I hope everyone is well. I hope to write something a little more geeky in the coming days!

Orlando PHP

Daniel Smith — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:19:20 +0000

I am pleased to let everyone know about an Orlando PHP Users Group. Some of us in the developer community have re-formed this group to help build a better PHP community and better the networking between us. The first meeting will on April 22nd on the campus of Devry University @ Millenia from 7 – 9 pm. Please visit the website orlandophp.org for more information. If you are a PHP developer in the Central Florida Area, or want to learn this is a great chance to hone your skills, or develop some new ones, and really network with other developers in the Central Florida Area. Look forward to seeing you there.

Zend Framework 1.5 Released

Daniel Smith — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:27:28 +0000

Zend has finally released the 1.5 version of their Framework. I have been using their Release candidates for a little over a month now and am very excited that they have hit this milestone. Check out http://framework.zend.com to download the framework, and read tutorials on setting it up and using it. They also have video tutorials. One bitt of advice after briefly reading their new Quick Start Guide. The author has us using ‘require_once’ on his controller class files, where instead we can better use the Zend_Loader which is instantiated in your bootstrap file, to autoload the classes, that way you call them anywhere in your project, without worrying about loading them.

Here is the original code:

IndexController.php

require_once 'Zend/Controller/Action.php';
class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    public function indexAction()
    {
    }
}

We can remove the ‘require_once’ line, and then we need to set up the Zend Autoloader which can be done in your bootstrap file as follows:

index.php

...
require_once 'Zend/Loader.php';
Zend_Loader::registerAutoload();
...

I am not saying that my way is the ‘right’ way, but this might help streamline the design of your project, and remove some un-necessary ‘includes’. You can also load a class using the Zend_Loader by calling:

...
Zend_Loader::loadClass('CLASS NAME');
...

All of the tutorials are great. Maurice Fonk has some great insight into ZF, and has a great article on Integrating Smarty Templating Engine into ZF. Rob Allen’s blog also has some great stuff.