Tag Archives: Apache HTTP Server

Diving into Node.js – Introduction & Installation

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Why I Need Something Like Node.js?

First of all the use of some software is needed not because of itself, but because of the need of some specific functionality. In my case this was the need of real time news feed. Of course there is a way to make this without Node.js, as I’ll describe later in this post, but there are several disadvantages. However to begin from somewhere, let me explain what is Node.js.

Introducing Node.js

Perhaps the best way do describe what is Node.js is from its about page.

Node’s goal is to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. In the “hello world” web server example above, many client connections can be handled concurrently. Node tells the operating system (through epoll, kqueue, /dev/poll, or select) that it should be notified when a new connection is made, and then it goes to sleep. If someone new connects, then it executes the callback. Each connection is only a small heap allocation.

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In general Node is a program using the Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, which in turn is a program that can parse and execute code written in JavaScript. V8 is a very very interesting project itself. First of all from Google have developed this engine especially for one of his products – their browser Chrome. It pretends to be and by no means is one of the masterpieces of Google. It is fast and reliable engine, written in C++ and JavaScript, as Wikipedia’s page says. Actually this code is open source and can be embedded in whatever application written in C++. Thus you can have in your application a JavaScript engine. Continue reading Diving into Node.js – Introduction & Installation →

Custom Routes with Zend_Controller_Router_Route

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Rewrite The Url?

Actually this is really a common task to do. You’ve to rewrite the url to be more “user friendly”. To be more clear I’ll give you an example. Let’s imagine you have a index controller and an index action. Thus if you have to load an Id from the database at least with the build in Zend Framework capabilities, you’ve to use this link:

www.example.com/index/index/id/33949

This is not good. It’s really bad. It will be great if you can use something like this:

www.example.com/33949

The solution in Zend Framework is called Zend_Controller_Router_Route. In a short snippet this will look like so:

$frontController->addRoute("my-route", new Zend_Controller_Router_Route("/:id",
    array("controller" => "index", "action" => "index", 'id' => 1),
    array('id' => '\d+')));

Here as you can see id is set to be 1. But don’t worry that’s not a hard code. The real work is done by the last parameter where the id is matched against a number value. Thus www.example.com/3 will be OK, but www.example.com/3a won’t.

Important Note

Don’t forget to add this rewrite rule in the .htaccess file.