Connecting to my Amazon EC2 image (from which this site is running) from Mac Os X took ages to find out and turned out to be relatively simple with the correct information (isn’t that always the case). At first I didn’t think the builtin Mac OS X ssh could cut it so I started looking into various Mac OS X ssh clients (Fugu, RBrowser, CyberDuck etc ..) but none of those could handle the Amazon public/private key encryption. Then I started looking into using Putty on Mac OS X even though thats not available for Mac OS X (but with a little help from MacPorts). That bombed on problems with GTK1. Dang, what to do?
Archive for the ‘Featured’ Category
I’m happy to release my first public version of the NIST RBAC PHP API library. I’ve blogged a number of posts on this subject and I hope that the software is of use to you. The package can be downloaded from code.google.com.
The package contains the library, the data model in the form of MySQL DDL instructions, installation documentation and PHPDoc API documentation. It comes with three applications: a management application, a demo application and a test framework. The demo application shows you how to integrate the library with your own application.
January18
A Simple Front End Controller in PHP
A Front End Controller is part of an MVC pattern.
The controller receives input and initiates a response by making calls on model objects. An MVC application may be a collection of model/view/controller triplets, each responsible for a different UI element. MVC is often seen in web applications where the view is the HTML or XHTML generated by the app. The controller receives GET or POST input and decides what to do with it, handing over to domain objects (i.e. the model) that contain the business rules and know how to carry out specific tasks such as processing a new subscription.
January9
NIST RBAC Data Model
Media files in Django are served through the web server and they can be served with a different url than the Django content itself. By spreading requests across multiple urls you can speed up your site because the browser will execute requests in parallel. The rule of thumb seems to be a maximum of 2-3 hostnames otherwise the added DNS requests negate the speed up effect.
A good friend of mine asked if it was possible to log out of a Basic Authentication session. My first knee-jerk response was that Basic Authentication has no log out function and you should close the browser to safely log out of the session. After some days silence he came back with a script he’d found on the php.net site. The script used sessions to break the Basic Authentication behavior of the browser. It wasn’t a very successful script because it only worked in a limited set of browsers but it got me thinking about a better solution.
October2
Changes to this site
As explained in one of the first posts on this blog this site is basically just one big Atom feed that gets transformed into this blog by using a bit of Apache content negotiation and client side XSLT. Besides some issues with browsers ignoring client side XSLT in a feed and forcing their own rendition of my feed which was fixed by inserting 512 bytes of crud to throw of the feed sniffing this approach has worked fine for the last four years.
October2
A Query Engine for PHP
Looking at the code in the previous entry wasn’t exactly a pleasant aesthetic experience (sorry for that, bit of a botched job) so for my new project, an implementation of the NIST RBAC model in PHP, I decided to code a nice generic PHP query engine. The Query Engine takes a number of arguments like the SQL query, the arguments for the query (to be passed into prepared statements), the types of the arguments and whether the query is part of an overall transaction. The nice thing is that the QueryEngine function returns the results as an associative array using the database column names as the key value.
While working with my good friend Arnold Consten on his new PHP application we came across some nice learning points for dealing with mysqli transactions and prepared statements. It turns out that the order of events is very specific for transactions and prepared statements to work correctly together:
October2
Templates, template engines and PHP
In the process of developing Lilliput CMS I had to think about how to do templating with PHP. There’s a lot of material available regarding PHP and templating and most of it is really weird. Having had a look at the Top 25 PHP template engines I can’t for the life of me understand why I would want to use something like Smarty, Savant or phptal. Obviously a lot of love and attention has been poured into these solutions but I can’t escape the feeling that these template engines are recreating PHP and its innate templating function. This feeling was confirmed when reading the “Templates and template engines” article on the php patterns website.