Giga Promoters Blog

Captcha Validation with 2 lines in CakePHP

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 01:39:48 +0000

Just wrote a captcha validator tool - behavior & a helper to implement captcha quite fast. Here's what you'll do to add captcha verification:

In your controller, lets say I need captcha in registration form.

users_controller.php

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

Function register()
{
$this->pageTitle ='User Registration';
// goes on…
$this->User->enableCaptcha(); // this function will initialize the captcha code
}

In the view, register.ctp

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

echo $form->create('User', array('action'=>'register', 'enctype' => 'multipart/form-data'))?>
echo $form->input('first_name');?>
echo $form->input('last_name');?>
echo $form->input('email');?>
echo $form->input('password', array('type' => 'password'))?>
// line below will generate the image and the input field as well ?>
echo $captcha->show($this);?>
echo $form->submit('Register');?>

After data is posted through the form, it goes to beforeSave() of my behavior which takes care of the validating and showing up the error in case.

This is the part of my UserContent behavior which will have some more cool shortcuts. Will post them in a while..

- Abhimanyu Grover

Experimental Searchable Behavior in CakePHP

admin — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:06:59 +0000

I always have bad time writing code for search in any new project. So, I decided to write a quick Searchable behavior in CakePHP so as to avoid doing it again and again in any project.

Please note: This only handles text based searches, and it's a very basic version, written in less than two hours.

Here's how it works:

In the model which you want to be searchable, just add:

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
1. var $actsAs = array('Searchable' => array());
Now in controller you can use function called Model::stringSearch()

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
1. // here your $keyword can be something like ‘nicole scherzinger’
2. $videos = $this->Video->stringSearch($keywords, array('title', 'description'));

Algorithm behind its functioning (inside Model::stringSearch()):

Search procedure 1: Consider $keywords as phrase, and fetch ids based on this phrase from the passed fields. So if you have passed on :

$keywords = 'nicole scherzinger';

$videos = $this->Video->stringSearch($keywords, array('title', 'description'));

It will be treated as "nicole scherzinger", the results returned here will be marked as highest relevant results.
Search Procedure 2: Find 'nicole' and 'scherzinger' together in given fields. Relevancy --
Search Procedure 3: Find 'nicole' or 'scherzinger'. Relevancy decreased again.
Now it combines all the ids returned from all 3 types of searches, in the same order of their relevancy. Then fetches records using findAllbyId() and returns them to caller.

Download it here. Hope you people like it.

P.S. My girlfriend will be angry when she will see Nicole scherzinger here… So, if you're reading it, I'm sorry I was just working on this MP3 and Videos project, you know?? hehe

- Abhimanyu Grover

Designing for Reusability: Taking advantage of Plugins in CakePHP

admin — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:03:12 +0000

Do you ever wanted to accomplish a better reusable CMS which helps you do things faster? If yes, you definitely need to know more about CakePHP Plugins. This manual about plugins is not just enough, there are many cool things you can do with them.

In this post, I will explain you, how to create a reusable Backend Plugin, which can easily fit in with any of your project. Although, I've written a tutorial before on how to create an administrator panel, but that is not so RAD approach.

Creating necessary files for plugin:

/app/plugins/backend

Ok, now comes interesting part:

Telling Plugin about our Admin Links

We will need our other controllers to tell Admin plugin about all the admin URLs/function. For this, we will create two new class variables called $admin_links and $admin_menu_order in all our controllers.

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

Class ClientsController extends AppController
{
Var $name = ‘Clients’;
var $adminLinks = array('add' => 'Add New Client, 'index' => 'Show all clients); // add points to admin_add() and ‘Add New Client’ corresponds to the anchor of link.
var $adminOrder = 1; // Ordering inside admin panel
// functions etc goes here..
}
?>

Add these variables in all necessary controller files.

Plugin Connectivity to the rest of system

Since our plugin needs to look each and every controller present in system. I decided to create BackendController::cacheAdminLinks(),this function will get all admin links as specified in controllers, then store it to a temporary cache file. This way, all controllers need not to be loaded in every call.

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

class BackendController extends BackendAppController
{
var $name = 'Backend';
var $uses = array();
function cacheAdminLinks()
{
$adminLinks = array();
$ControllersPaths = array(); // to store all controller paths
// collect all controller paths to find backend links from
$allPaths = paths();
$appControllers = $allPaths['Controllers'];
// find controllers of other plugins
$folder =& new Folder(APP.'plugins');
$plugins = $folder->ls();
$ControllersPaths = am($ControllersPaths, $appControllers); // merge app with all paths
foreach($plugins[0] as $plugin)
{
$pluginControllers = $allPaths[Inflector::camelize($plugin)]['Controllers'];
$ControllersPaths = am($ControllersPaths, $pluginControllers); //add plugin controllers path
}
$controllers = array(); // to store all controllers here
foreach($ControllersPaths as $path)
{
$folder->cd($path);
$controllerFiles = $folder->find('.+_controller\.php$');
$controllers = am($controllers, array_map(array(&$this, '__controllerize'), $controllerFiles));
}
$controllers = array_unique($controllers);
foreach($controllers as $controller)
{
App::import('Controller', $controller);
$className = $controller."Controller";
$controllerInst = &new $className();
if(isset($controllerInst->adminLinks))
$adminLinks[$controllerInst->adminOrder] = array('name' => $controllerInst->name, $controllerInst->adminLinks);
}
// reorder & reform admin links in better form
$tmp_adminLinks = array();
foreach($adminLinks as $adminLink)
{
$reformedLinks = array();
$links = $adminLink[0];
foreach($adminLink[0] as $funcName => $link)
{
$tmp_reformedLink = array('url' => $this->_getAdminUrl($adminLink['name'], $funcName) , 'title' => $link);
$reformedLinks[] = $tmp_reformedLink;
}
$tmp_adminLinks[$adminLink['name']] = $reformedLinks;
}
$adminLinks = $tmp_adminLinks;
if (Configure::read('debug')==3)
$cacheExpires = '+5 seconds';
elseif (Configure::read('debug')==1 || Configure::read('debug')==2)
$cacheExpires = '+60 seconds';
else
$cacheExpires = '+24 hours';
cache(LINKS_CACHE_FILE, serialize($adminLinks), $cacheExpires);
exit;
}
function _getAdminUrl($singular_name, $funcName)
{
return '/'.Configure::read('Routing.admin').'/'.low(Inflector::pluralize($singular_name)).'/'.$funcName;
}
function __controllerize($file)
{
return Inflector::camelize(r('_controller.php', '', $file));
}
}
?>

Setting up $layout & $admin_links at every admin call

Now, this is a bit tricky part – for every plugin you create in your app, you wouldn't want to add custom hacks anywhere throughout your app for every plugin. This is where you can utilize plugin hooks, as introduced by Felix in this post. I wouldn't go too deep to explain how it works, but it just basically allows you to create a file hooks.php inside your plugin folder. You can attach these hooks with your app, in this case just attach it to AppController::beforeFilter()

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

function beforeFilter()
{
callHooks('beforeFilter', null, $this); // you need to have this function defined somewhere – I guess bootstrap.php in best place
}

In our hooks.php, we will create following function:

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PHP:

// this function will be called by AppController::beforeFilter() on every HTTP request
function BackendbeforeFilterHook(&$controller)
{
// if its the administrator/manager - change the layout
$pos = strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'admin');
if($pos == true)
{
$controller->plugin='backend';
$controller->layout='admin';
$adminLinks = unserialize(cache(LINKS_CACHE_FILE, null));
$controller->set('adminLinks', $adminLinks);
}
}

As you can see, an instance of controller is being passed to this function, and you can modify it as per your needs. So, we just overwritten the layout to admin.ctp inside app/plugins/backend/views/layouts and as also set our admin links to view from cache (saved by BackendController::cacheAdminLinks() )

Create admin.ctp

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

"content">
"menu">
foreach($adminLinks as $title=>$adminLink) { ?>
class="admin_box">
=$title;?>
foreach($adminLink as $link) { ?>
"url($link['url']);?>">$link['title'];?>

                 } ?>

         } ?>

"admin_content">

        if ($session->check('Message.flash')):

                $session->flash();

        endif;

?>

     echo $content_for_layout; ?>

This plugin gives you a nice looking basic backend panel, by just dropping a folder. [except you have to have callHooks() in your bootstrap.php, however this function is not just for this specific plugin, it will be utilized while working with other plugins as well]

I think the idea of connecting plugins with hooks is amazing, I just realized that it can increase reusability greatly. Just drop folders to your app, and add up a new functionality instantly. There was a project called SpliceIt started in Feb 2006 – which was fully based on plugins, but its not active anymore.

Hope you liked this idea and tutorial. I would like to thank my friend Jacob Mather, he originally inspired me to implement reusability this way.

- Abhimanyu Grover

Getting into Semantics with Semantic Hacker

admin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 03:41:58 +0000

Just came across a different type of API just now… It's the world's first API for semantic discovery. From long time back, I used to dream about the API or some Web service which could easily understand the context and classify information using its special intelligence, today its reality. Yes guys, check out Semantic Hacker they have released API today itself. This API can return you the context / Semantic Signature of any information you enter.

See it yourself in action, I just pasted one article from my blog (tips for Indian service providers) [Right now it limits upto 2000 chars only – so that's okay…]

And press submit

You can see how smartly, it has given out the categories to which this topic belongs. Even google search is not capable of doing that as of now, so I can confidently say that something like this is going to change the way of search. No more punishments of using wrong keywords, and no more would web stay as old boring thing – you would actually start interacting with it, like you do with other humans (in future..).

SemanticHacker offers API free of cost, which can be found here. Some of examples and tools here.

If you like to learn more about semantic web, you could start by this book called Programming Collective Intelligence by O'Reilly. I've already purchased a copy a month back but not started yet. I'll post a review whenever I'm done with it. This is really nice book though from what I've seen in first few chapters.

-Abhimanyu Grover

BullsCash.com – India’s First Finance News Aggregator

admin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:58:30 +0000

We have just launched BullsCash.com, a new finance news portal which collects news from almost 80-100 different sources and aggregates them together. It can be said to be first Indian Finance news portal in its own kind. It aims to help people in collecting quality information in lesser time. How much time would you spend daily reading news about shares, Mutual funds, IPOs etc from 100 sources?? And how many of them would be irrelevant or not important for you? BullsCash tries its collective approach to fetch all news from different channels and then estimates it worth…

How BullsCash helps?

Time Saver: BullsCash reduces time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates. People under finance sector in India spend hours in reading irrelevant/unimportant news. It lets you go through important news only – that too in min. time.
Web-Based: No need to run any software or configure anything. You can just start using it as your source of information.
Filtering & Ranking: BullsCash crawlers checks news links for their popularity and vote them accordingly.

BullsCash crawls majorly following news portals as of now:

Money Control
Multiple Channels on Economic Times
Multiple Channels on Business Line

We are targeting for more advanced and smart crawlers which are capable to cover even more and more sources online and vote automatically based on the popularity of a particular link.

Features for Future:

More sources to be covered
Better Algorithms to mark important news
Personalized approach for different people
Source suggestion

We hope this application will help people in finance industry. Once this website start gaining members and traffic, we'll soon work out on our plan for its expansion and will also schedule the features.

Abhimanyu Grover

Book Review: Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers

admin — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:14:24 +0000

Michael Schrenk demonstrates some nice web bots and spidering techniques in his great book called Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers. Spidering is a subject which is least discussed on internet and you could not find any good libraries on it easily. A lot of examples and techniques are provided throughout the book. Author has also provided some demo libraries using which you can start almost instantly.

This is a kind of essential book if you're a newbie and looking to get your hands on new fields.

Now in the age of Web2.0, Most of our projects involve building spiders, crawlers and other type of web bots.
Developing a webbot involved whole new mindset.
Once you start learning, you will automatically get new ideas for your clients and your own processes.
Learn from the author's 11 year career of writing webbots and spiders.
Helps implementing Automation in your life.

This book has certainly lot more to offer than what I wrote… Highly Recommended!!

- Abhimanyu Grover

How Indian service providers can survive new downfall in Indian Outsourcing Industry…

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:42:30 +0000

There are number of reports which claim that Indian Outsourcing industry is coming to its end. This might not be the case, but you can expect a great downfall in coming years.

The report analyzed the rolling out of global delivery centres by the UK's 20 largest IT services suppliers – Accenture, Capgemini, IBM and HP among them - and found that of the 21 centres opened since January 2007, just two were in India. Findings that offer further evidence of the threat to India's traditional dominance.

Source: http://blog.europeanleaders.net/procurement-blog/2008/3/11/indian-offshoring-dominance-under-threat.html
At this point, people associated with this industry are likely to have some sufferings. However, you can do something to help your career and minimize the effect of this downfall. Here are seven things which small companies or freelancers should consider:

Select an Industry & Business domain to serve.
Indian Outsourcing was growing since last a few years, and it is pretty matured by now, but there are more countries like China, Morocco and Hungary, which are joining this global market and they might even have lesser prices than where we stand right now. This would result us in failing to compete over price. You can no more expect yourself to serve in multiple business domains or technologies, rather you'll have to check for the market imbalances and then exploit them. A PHP developer might be easily available in other countries, but if you present yourself as an experienced Python developer – and if there is a demand, then you can charge your regular prices.
Public Exposure of your skills.
This might be obvious; you might not have got time to write or blog about your technical expertise. But now as more competition enters the market, you'll need yourself to differentiate from others in some way. People like to buy from an expert not a follower. You need to show how your expertise can help them or their businesses. If you follow the point above, and target to selected industry only – that might even produce better results.
Develop passion or leave the Industry.
If you are not passionate about the industry, just quit and search for another Industry. Get yourself involved into an open source and let other people benefit from your passion. In long run, you will be the one who gets more benefits and success.
Stretch your skills to your limit.
I see a problem with many Indian programmers – they are not willing to learn new things. Many programmers I've worked with are satisfied with their present skill-set and don't want to grow skills. They are happy with the pay-checks and increments they are getting. Some of these increments, if we look into depth are because of the boost in industry, not because a particular guy started working better or effectively. When this boom goes down, you will get lesser than what you are getting now. By continuously growing your technical skill-set you can survive.
Automate Automate Automate.
In order to work more effectively, we have to work more effectively than ever. To do so, you cannot increase time in a day – but what you can do is take advantage of the automation. Write your own code generators, reusable classes, or focus on automating and task you would do repetitively. If you spend even 1 hour daily on this – chances are you will achieve more for your clients in less time.
Start some side projects.
This might be a difficult one for many teams or individuals, but developing a side project (like a web app) can be turned as your asset – which should provide you not only money but the value to your customers. If you can create success from your own app, then you surely can help them out. Think building your services as a famous brand.
Learn to communicate with your clients in their own words.
Being too technical with clients sometimes helps, but when you learn their businesses and talk in their business terms it makes them more comfortable in dealing with you.

Why you need to do all this?

The cost advantage for offshoring to India used to be at least 1:6. Today, it is at best 1:3.
As the 1:3 cost structure becomes 1:1.5, it will soon become inefficient to use Indian labor.
Jobs that are low value-added and easily automatable should and will disappear over the next decade.
The Indians don't do the thinking. The customers do. India executes.
India's $30 billion IT/ITES services industry, meanwhile, is slowly and surely losing its competitive advantage.
Assuming a 15% year-to-year salary hike rate, and a 2007 cost advantage of 1:3 in favor of India, if U.S. wages remain constant, India's cost advantage disappears by 2015.

- According to a report by Sramana Mitra

Still need another reason..?

- Abhimanyu Grover

jQuery Issues with IE – “Operation Aborted” errors

admin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:58:34 +0000

If you have some old applications using jQuery 1.1 or lower versions, you might be loosing visitors who use IE, because of a nagging "Operation Aborted" IE dialog. After wasting 2-3 hours on the same subject, I've been able to fix it quickly after I updated to jQuery 1.2.3

I didn't have time to jump into the depth of this error, but looks like jQuery did a good job in solving the bug. So, don't forget to update to the latest version here.

DrasticDeals.com – A coupon search engine

admin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:04:49 +0000

We recently launched a website for our client called DrasticDeals.com. This website is built in CakePHP and includes a data scrapper which looks for coupon codes from multiple places. This is what it makes the application special, at the time of launch, this website had great database of coupons – amazingly 25,000+ coupons. This search engine has already proved as a great success for our client in very first week. You'll be seeing some more enhancement in this project soon.

Killer Applications with CakePHP, JQuery and Adobe Air

admin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:34:14 +0000

Have you ever wished to program desktop applications for your own web app? If you are like me, that is, most of the lazy web programmers… you never put your hands on any desktop language. Even though all of us knows what flexibility can be given to a web app if we develop its desktop based client.

I came across a new development framework, Adobe AIR, which lets you build cool desktop based application simply with web technologies. If you are good at HTML and AJAX you can easily start with this new framework. I was surprised to see that there are so many applications already using this. After just 3 hrs of experimentation with this, I started loving this new tool. It is very cool. Some advantages which impressed me are:

Real Fast: I built a stock market monitoring tool in just 3 hrs. It didn't look like I had to learn something new, everything went smooth. It was like developing AJAX enabled HTML pages and testing them in browser. Once you're done, you simply create xml configuration files, copy a JS from framework, compile it, and you're done.
Use your favorite JS Library: This is an amazing feature. My personal favorite is JQuery and I use it in almost every project. Please note: you have to have the latest version of JQuery to get it working with Adobe AIR. They recently patched for Adobe AIR only. I already wasted 30 minutes in solving security issues.
Cool CSS Extensions: Check this out.
Easy Debugging: Any errors/exceptions appear in command window.
Easy Drag and Drop: Super-easy functions like dragstart, drag, dragend, dragenter, dragover, dragleave, and drop.

Check out my stock market tool, just a basic version:

Everything is linked to a backend application which runs on CakePHP. Login function (UsersController::login) returns session_key to the desktop application if login is successful.

PLAIN TEXT

JavaScript:

function process_login()
{
$("#status").html("Logging in...");
user=$('#user').attr('value');
pass=$('#pass').attr('value');
$.get("http://localhost/StockBack/users/login/"+user+"/"+pass, function(session_key){
if(session_key=='false')
{
$("#status").html("Unable to login");
}
else
{
$("#status").html("Logged in successfully");
$("#login").hide("slow");
$("#panel").show("slow");
}
});
}

(Sorry for posting code like this but my code editor in wordpress sucks – if anyone knows a good one, please recommend me)

To start learning, some important links are:

Developing Adobe AIR Applications with HTML and Ajax

Adobe AIR Quick Starts for HTML

Adobe AIR Language Reference for HTML Developers

The Adobe AIR HTML documentation set (a ZIP file) is available for download here:

http://www.adobe.com/go/learn_air_html_docs