marcus welz

It's fun to go back in time to look at things I've done. 10 Years ago I discovered Roger Wilco, a voice chat application aimed at gamers that would run in the background and work like a walkie-talkie, adding voice communication capabilities to any game. It was quite revolutionary at the time.
The other application that […]

While sessions come in handy for many things, I like to avoid them for the sake of scalability. PHP itself uses a shared-nothing architecture, with only sessions needing special treatment.
Once you've got more than one web server, your options are to either use a custom session handler, a load balancer with IP affinity, the commercial […]

There are various ways to update rows in a database table using the Zend_Db_Table components. You can use use Zend_Db_Table::update(), like so:

$table = My_Table();
$table->update(array('age' => 22), 'id = 1');

or retrieve the row, and update it:

$table = My_Table();
$row = $table->find(1)->current();
$row->age = 22;
$row->save();

The big difference between the two approaches is that by first retrieving the row, and […]

I have a Linux server with a system timezone of ET (US/Eastern). But I also have a web application that needs to run in a timezone of PT (US/Pacific). Of course that's not a problem at all. I just set the timezone in my web application's bootstrap:

date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles'); // Pacific timezone

Now I have another problem; the […]

There are all kinds of ways to expose APIs as web services. SOAP, XML-RPC, REST, JSON-RPC. Out of all of these, SOAP is arguably the most complex, but also one of the oldest ways to expose an API (I remember preliminary SOAP and WSDL support in Delphi 6, circa 2001).
Exposing an API as a web […]