Posts

Checkout Emmanuel Nuyttens’ article on DataBindable Business Objects. It’s an interesting article, focussing on the other side of data binding that I wrote an article on myself for .NET magazine. “There has been, and still is a lot of discussion going around of what kind of technique a developer in general should use to represent the data from the DataLayer through the BusinessLayer to the Presentation Layer.

The new .NET magazine Belgium/Netherlands has been distributed to all subscribers. For the latest edition, #15, I’ve written an article on the basic principles and usage of NHibernate, an ORM-mapper for the .NET platform. It’s written in Dutch, so I must disappoint my English blog readers… A PDF version and example code can be downloaded on the .NET magazine #15 homepage. Comments can be posted on this blog post.

In my evening hours, I’ve been working on a set of PHP classes to create Offixe 2007 SpreasheetML documents (.xlsx files). I finished my first goals (some basic XLSX writing), and I want to share this set of classes to the community. Currently, the following features are supported: Each cell supports the following data formats: string, number, formula, boolean. Visual formatting is not implemented, but I’ll get to that later. An example of what can be achieved, can be found in this example XLSX file.

Today, I was once again testing the Zed Framework. One of the things I was trying to do, is creating URL’s in different languages. What I did was creating a controller ‘user’, with the action ‘edit’ (i.e. www.example.com/user/edit). Now, I want this to be available in Dutch too (i.e. www.example.com/gebruiker/bewerken). The trick is to add custom routes, which map back to the real controller and action. In my case, adding the following in my index.php did the job:

One of my former classmates, Bart Dekeersmaeker, has just created his own blog. He will be posting news from Chennai, India, where he currently resides for work. He is outsourced to KBC, and they asked him to go to India. Good luck on your mission, Bart!

A nice press release today at Microsoft: Microsoft and Zend Technologies Announce Technical Collaboration to Improve Interoperability of PHP on the Windows Server Platform. Both companies admit that PHP is often developed on Windows systems, but the final server environment is mostly *nix. With this collaboration, Microsoft and Zend will try to change that. The specific points of action in this collaboration: I think this is nice news! Looking forward to results of this collaboration…

Today, I discovered a nice PHP thing: Munin. This is a PHP version of Apache mod_security, allowing it to be run on IIS too. Munin performs rule based checks on HTTP headers, get and post data, … The standard rule set disallows some things like path traversal and possible fopen() attacks. In addition to these rulesets, one should add some more for filtering out SQL injection attacks, cross-site script loading, … These things should already be covered in your code, but an extra filter at the front door is always nice.

Everyone who has ever created a webservice in PHP, using the PHP5 native functions, NuSOAP, PEAR, …, certainly has cursed a lot while creating WSDL files for those services. Today, I found a nice helper class, Webservice Helper, which does a lot of tricks for you. Webservice helper creates the WSDL file for your service, and for related classes. Also, a basic authentication system is included. One necessary thing in your code is PHPdoc-style documentation. Webservice helper travels that documentation and uses reflection to generate class mappings. But normally, one should always document code.

A while ago, I was experimenting with the Zend Framework. At first, I tried running a small sample on top of IIS, but unfortunately, that did not work… On Apache, it worked like a charm. Very nice, but what do you do when your site runs on an IIS machine?

For those looking for a CruiseControl.NET configuration tool: I just stumbled on this one at CodePlex