Just a quick post here. Not a lot of time to do anything really earth shattering in this post. I have recently purchased a book to help me start to code some apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I am starting out slow, then going to work my way…
Here is a topic that has really flustered a lot of developers. Regular expressions is a concept that can be hard to get a real handle on. PHP has a couple of functions that can help do regular expressions. The one I focus on most is using the function:
preg_match()
This is a very useful tool, and if you look at the PHP manual for ereg(), it states that the function “preg_match” is a faster alternative to “ereg()”. Now while I am not going to get into the details of the speed and response times for both functions, as there will always be someone with a different opinion or case that shows how their way is better, and that is fine. What most people have a hard time dealing with is getting the actual match to do what is needed. There are times when It is just easier to do a Google search and get some code that someone else has already done and plug it in. But the real power is knowing what you are doing first, that way you can build your own.
For this example, we can take a look at CakePHP’s own little validation object. When you set up a model and add some validation to it, it calls this object. Based on the data that this going into the tables, it will call one of these functions. The way these functions work is by checking the input for a specific character list/set that should be contained in the text. If the entry does not match up, then it is not validated. The way CakePHp does this is by using the preg_match() function.
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I have caught myself doing this often, and need to always regroup and figure out what is a better way to do these types of things. I am speaking of coding in absolutes. What does this mean? Coding a type of block that is hard set to do something exactly. Like for an example, let’s say that there is a calendar application. In this calendar application, there are four languages to select from, so a code block does something like this:
// Controller file
$eng = $this->Users->Select("language", "English");
$spn = $this->Users->Select("language", "Spanish");
$gmn = $this->Users->Select("language", "German");
$fre = $this->Users->Select("language", "French");
**Note this is not using any kind of construct in CakePHP, Symfony or any particular framework, just an example of a User class with a function called Select passing in 2 variables.
As an example, the view of this same code may be something like:
// Controller File
$this->set('lang', array($eng, $spn, $gmn, $fre);
Now while this may work for the time being, it could cause a hassle later on if there are more languages that the application will need to support.
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There are many frameworks out there that have a good deal of uses to them. In this post, the focus is on CakePHP vs Symfony. Does this mean one will be a winner over the other? Not really. I will only present what I have come to find in each of these frameworks and how I have used them in different ways.
Since this will be a comparison, most of the ideas will revolve around the tutorials that each camp has created. Plus, I will be only looking at the latest stable versions, so they are:
CakePHP: 1.2.1.8004
Symfony: 1.2
Each have their own tutorials, and they are at the following:
Symfony: Jobeet Tutorial, using Propel.
CakePHP: CakePHP Blog
First off, about the tutorials.
I really do think that Symfony has a better tutorial. It is a lot more intensive and sometimes confusing, which means it also goes more in depth about what this framework can do, and how to do it. This tutorial also brings in a good deal of real world dilemmas.
CakePHP’s blog tutorial is just a standard blog tutorial, which everyone seems to have anymore. It is a good tutorial, and it does show off some real good aspects of the framework, but it really does lack some of the “gotchas” that would really happen in the real world.
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We all get to a point in the coding process where there needs to be "non-code" code. This does not have the same type of structure or verbiage as the construct of PHP, C# or anything else. This is our own little distinct code. It may seem like I am…
With checking ACL’s, the code I use is as follows:
$info = $this->Member->read(null, $id);
// Check for permissions to edit this account
if ( !$this->Acl->check(array('model' => 'Member', 'foreign_key' => $this->Auth->user('member_id')), $info['Member']['username'], 'update') ) {
$this->Session->setFlash(__('You are not allowed to edit this user. -- ' . $this->Auth->user('member_id'), true));
$this->redirect(array('action'=>'index'));
}
While this works and is not that bad of an idea at all, there is a way to centralize this check and put it in the main app_controller.php file.
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After doing a few posts on Access Control Lists (ACLs), the need to look further into the implementation of ACLs in a CakePHP project could be helpful. If there are questions on setting up the ACL tri-table in the database, you can review the previous postings, or check out the CakePHP documentation. But now that you have the ACL tables set up, how does it actually work?
First, the ACL happens after authentication. So whether or not you are using the Auth component, you will still need to authenticate the user some how, some way. Then once the user is authenticated and logged in, that user will have permissions to do different thing. Let’s say one of those things is to edit accounts. If it is a regular user, he should be able to edit his own and no one else. If the user was a “site admin” he should be able to edit his own and any account that is not a “super-admin”. If he is a super admin then he should edit everyone’s account. However, the first part of this is setting up the initial ACL permissions.
In some applications on the web, you are required to log in to view content, post content, or any other sort of thing. With this, there will be times when a member of the site/application/whatever will forget the password they used, and it will have to be reset for them. So there are different methods of doing this, and different ideas behind what should make this work. I am going to give you one that I use, which will use a close to random method for resetting the passwords.
Another quick post. This has some info on the “intrawebs” but there is also bad data out there. Say you have a form, that has some info on it that requires a good amount of data to be input by the end user. If the user leaves the form to go to another page, or closes the window, all of that will be lost. So there is a couple ways you can combat that.
1. You could make everyone create an account to save any data on a smaller scale and come back later and submit the form
or
2. You can create an alert message when the user no longer wants your page to show.
There are different reasons to do one or the other. If you had a long form for something like a scholarship or a detailed personal profile, that would be the case for the account to save the data in smaller chunks. However, lets say you have a form with many fields that requires some data input and alot of options to parse through. That would be a case for an alert message. But since HTTP is stateless, how would one accomplish this?
It is finally October and I have not posted one thing yet. I was in California last week though. However that should not be an excuse for the lack of posting I have made. I really wanted to be able to post at least once a week, trying for twice a week. However, that has not happened.
So a quick post about security in a site. I will not claim that I know everything about security, but I have always been about the common sense stuff of a site. Some of the things to keep in mind: