December 2008 Archives

There have been other articles around about the usage of the Dojo editor element in Zend Framework. The solution by Weier O'Phinney has been to write a view helper and use the editor in this way.

I have also started to use the Dojo components for my application and have been wondering how to access the editor, since I wanted an editor for my article bodies. So I looked a little bit around but found only the solutions which required to write own Javascript-functions and needed additionally hidden textareas to store the content respectively to access the content.

My girlfriend recently told me that her home city, Kreuzlingen has a new homepage, since a few weeks, to be more exactly since the 5th of Decembre(see the press release), and that she does not like it. She requested me to have a look on the page and maybe write my opinion into my blog. And here I am, writing about the new homepage of Kreuzlingen.

To be honest, at the first look this homepage looks nice. By the way it has been implemented by a local web and advertising agency. So what images and layout is concerned, are they pretty good, I like the layout. Nice colors, fonts are easy to read and clearly structured welcome page, with a big search engine entry field on the lower left side.

When we look at the second page (to reach when clicked on the "Weiter" hotspot-area in the top-image of the startpage) we see again a clearly structured site, with a big tag cloud. Again a nice feature originating from the Web 2.0 trend. And again the big search engine field at the top.

At the beginning of this term at the university I have subscribed to a project about the Semantic Web and Service Sciences. A really interesting topic, indeed. But this is not the main topic of this article, even though this course led me to think about how to crawl the web with a Java application (because the project leader, in other words the professor, has already had some code written in Java).

So then, I started with my basic skills of Java coding, to look around. Fortunately I already knew a little bit about crawling and that regular expressions are key in this area from my experience with PHP and libcurl.

Looking around in the web I (or should I say Google has) have found a good point to start with from Osborne (a unit of McGraw Hill) where the Book "The Art Of Java" from Herbert Schildt and James Holmes has been published. So I started to read the article Crawling The Web With Java.

The previous article on this blog was about the dynamical select list with the Zend Framework and some introductory material (mainly tutorials).

Two weeks later I am still working with the Zend Framework and now the tasks getting a little bit advanced. So I had again to crawl the web a little bit to find a solution for my problem. The problem was to look up related values from a fetched row and display the complete results.

Normally I have done this in PHP with a Join in the Where condition(s) and could then, since I most of the time look that my column names are unique, access the values directly via the mysqli-object. You could also do the Join statements with the standard Select object in the Zend Framework, but I was not sure how then the result array should be accessed or if it would work the same way as in standard PHP. So I had to have a look into the documentation. But I have to warn you, the introductory example is so scattered in the whole documentation that you need quite a little time to have the complete example together. So I had another look into Zend Framework in Action from Rob Allen and Nick Lo (2007), where the example was nicely illustrated with an ERM.

As soon as I had gathered all informations and get the principle of how the relationship is represented in the framework, I could implement my solution into my existing application.