Ryan Leland

Learning Cocoa. Again.

It’s been a long time since I did any Cocoa programming, and even what I have done in the past hasn’t gone much beyond a few tutorials here and there. The interface builder always intrigued me though, but I think what always was the killer for me was some of the subtle, and not so subtle differences between Obj-C, and C, and the insane differences between Obj-C, and C++. I sort of got the bug after downloading the iPhone SDK (Cocoa Touch), and seeing just how close it was to Cocoa. Also, the iPhone Simulator is fun to play with.

I’ve just finished building a few “Hello World” type apps though, and the difference between making those, and trying to do anything in Win32 is just insane. It honestly even feels easier than web development. At least the prototyping side of it, and getting the interface all plugged together. I just feels like such a a natural way to build an application. I kinda wish I could build websites in that way. Anyway, I really shouldn’t be learning Cocoa since I actually have a freaking website to finish (ack). But it’s sorta fun learning for now. If I make anything cool, I’ll try posting it along with the source code.

Some Nice Cheat Sheets

I just found this site while looking for phpDocs cheat sheet. Though this particular one lacks a phpDocs cheat sheet (I did find one), there is some interesting ones here, and all pretty high quality. Enjoy!

http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/

Uploading With Zend_Form

 I’m sooo glad I waited until I had learned more about Zend_Form before building any image upload stuff. This tutorial pulls everything together nicely, and provides a fairly elegant solution for uploading using Zend_Form within the Zend Framework MVC. I had read about some people having issues with file uploads, even without Zend_Form. I’m assuming it had something to do with the rewrite engine, or something in their bootstrap. Anyway, this example is real solid, and I hope to make good use of it.

http://akrabat.com/2008/04/07/simple-zend_form-file-upload-example/

It’s Official!

This is 11 days later than I had planned on officially announcing the launch date of you-vs-me.com, and all my wild plans for it, and the frameworks. It’s getting late though, so I will only be posting the link to the teaser/place holder page, and will be posting details on a regular basis regarding you-vs-me, the frameworks, and several other sites I have in the works.

Enjoy: http://you-vs-me.com

Zend Frameworks Ajax Controller

This is a kind of quick and dirty approach to making an ajax responder in Zend Frameworks. The more elegant solution would be to make a controller plugin to add support for auth, and acl, but so far it looks like this approach works just fine for simple things.

<?php
class AjaxController extends Zend_Controller_Action {
	private $ajax_output;

	function init() {
		if($this->_request->isXmlHttpRequest()) {
			//The request was made with JS XmlHttpRequest
			$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender();
			$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoController();
		} else $this->_redirect('index');
	}

	public function indexAction() {

		Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Json');

		$myArray = array('someData',
             			'moreData' => array(
                             			'hello'
                           			)
           	);

		$this->ajax_output = Zend_Json::encode($myArray);
	}

	function postDispatch() {
		echo $this->ajax_output;
	}
}

Tags: framework, php, zend

08.04.08

Today is significant. I have committed to releasing a site I have been working on for 2 1/2 years on 08.08.08 (Aug, 8, 2008), and today is 4 months from that date. Despite having a crazy amount of work left, I just committed rev 58, and have nearly 4000 lines of code that I’ve written in the last 4 weeks.

So despite having worked on this site for 2+ years, this is the 3rd complete re-write, and it is epic. I am so excitd to finally have a product, and officially be able to call myself a web entrepreneur.

If I had had more time I would have made an official announcement with some details, but I think this will have to do given my limited time, and unlimited tiredness.

My First Day of Work

Or rather, my first day being self employed again. It turned out to be fairly interesting. A good mix of struggling with Zend Framework, which is awesome in every way despite some often confusing documentation. The classes themselves are documented as well as one could hope for, but there are times when peicing the library together to make an actual framework takes some trial and error.

I also had some issues with SVN not quite working properly. My hunch is that the service I use, and the combination of my wireless network dropping packets like crazy, causing commits to time out, and corrupting my working copy. This technically should not happen, but it did. I had to create a new project, and create the directories manually, and copy over each file, and commit. All 53 files.

I  did get a lot done, and I plan on announcing my project within a few days in a fairly big way (at least that is the hope).

Coding All Nighter

I’m about to do something I haven’t done in years. I’m planning on building something tonight, and I’ll be staying up all night, because that is when my focus and drive is at its best. I have a thermos of herbal tea, some snacks, good music, and my MacBook.

I maybe haven’t had this much excitement for building a site since, maybe HighDriving.com (I still can’t believe I let that domain slide). What I’m working on is pretty much just a proof of concept at this point, but if things go well tonight I’ll be posting some more info by the weekend. I’ve done most of the night all nighters before, but have never before planned to do it. If this is a success, I hope it will become part of a fairly common practice of planning through the week, and pulling an all-nighter on the weekend to get as much off a TODO list as possible.

Also, I’m starting a new job next week, and I haven’t really done as much skill sharpening as I had hoped to have done this week. This will maybe serve to make up for some lost time.