Category Archives: zend framework

Extending the art & spirit of PHP, Zend Framework is based on simplicity, object-oriented best practices, corporate friendly licensing, and a rigorously tested agile codebase. Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services, and consuming widely available APIs from leading vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr, as well as API providers and cataloguers like StrikeIron and ProgrammableWeb.

Protect Your Web Forms with Zend_Service_Akismet

web development, zend framework

Akismet

If you’re a typical WordPress blogger you have definitely heart of Akismet, tool that gives you a real spam protection, but what is really really cool is the possibility to integrate Akismet via Zend Framework.

It’s pretty simple. There’s a service by Zend_Service_Akismet, which helps you a lot when integrating the Akismet in your Zend app.

That’s for now, but I’ll be definitely writing more and more on the topic.

Send Mail with Zend Framework

PHP, zend framework, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Simple, but Doesn’t Work!

It may sound strange, because all this is quite well documented in the Zend Framework documentation. Indeed it’s very very simple and all is done only by few lines of code.

$mail = new Zend_Mail();
$mail->setFrom('sender@example.com');
$mail->setBodyHtml('some message - it may be html formatted text');
$mail->addTo('recipient@example.com', 'recipient');
$mail->setSubject('subject');
$mail->send();

Even it look simple though, it may not work on your localhost while you’re trying to make it work! Because you’ve to have sendmail setup. And in Zend Framework sendmail is the default transport protocol for sending mails.

What You Have to Do to Make it Work?

Actually you’ve simply to add a transport protocol, just like that:

$tr = new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp('smtp.example.com',
                    array('auth' => 'login',
                             'username' => 'username',
                             'password' => 'password'));
Zend_Mail::setDefaultTransport($tr);

Where Did I Get These?

Well look at your favorite mail account you probably use every day. It may be hosted in GMail or wherever, but there are some configurations you have to port under Zend’s code and everything will be just fine until you develop the app!

Read Remote File Content-Type with Zend_Http_Client

micro tutorial, zend framework, , , , , , , , , , ,

Check an Image on a Remote Server

This is a common task. You’d like to know whether the image on the remote server exists. Zend Framework gives the answer of this question and in particular this can be completed with Zend_Http_Client.

Content-Type and Content-Length

The little problem is that checking for content-type is not always correct, because it will return an image content type even when the image does not exists, so it’s better to check for content-length.

Code

The simple way to check this is like that:

$client = new Zend_Http_Client('http://remote-machine/image.jpg');
$response = $client->request('head');
if ( NULL == $response->getHeader('Content-Length') )
    // do whatever if the image does not exists.

In fact here, in this example I don’t check for GET request, because is way to slow than the HEAD method, but you should be aware of incorrect responses when using HEAD. In fact if you request the HEAD of a FLV video it will be returned text content-type, while using GET everything’s working fine but slow though.

Retrieving YouTube Channel’s Videos with Zend_Gdata_YouTube

micro tutorial, snippets, zend framework, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Zend_Gdata

Zend Framework gives you the possibility to interact with Gdata services, which are provided by most of the Goolge services. You can find more on the docs page of Zend_Gdata. The basic principle is that you can connect a service with you API key, given by Google. What I’m about to show you is how do connect such a service.

In theory Zend_Gdata depends on Zend_Http_Client and you’ve to connect it with an instance of this class.

// 1. setup API key
$apiKey = 'your_api_key_here';
 
// 2. retrieve videos via GData Atom
$client = new Zend_Http_Client();
$gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube(null, 'my-app', null, $apiKey);

Note that you’ve to replace your API key in the chunk above.

Now once that you’ve connected the YouTube service you can iterate through the entries from the video feed.

$videoFeed = $gdata->getUserUploads('username');
foreach ($videoFeed as $entry) {
    echo $entry->getTitle();
}

The thing is that you can modify a bit the code above. As ZF docs says if you don’t setup a Zend_Http_Client a default with default configuration, so you can omit this and simple write:

// 1. setup API key
$apiKey = 'your_api_key_here';
 
// 2. retrieve videos via GData Atom
$gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube(null, 'my-app', null, $apiKey);