06 Mar

DrasticDeals.com – A coupon search engine

Our Apps

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.

28 Feb

Killer Applications with CakePHP, JQuery and Adobe Air

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CakePHP, Latest Developments, jQuery

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");
}
});
}