End Your If

Author: Jamie

  • Caching Queries in CakePHP

    If you haven’t noticed already, at times CakePHP can be a little slow loading!  The reason for this is quite simple.  Rapid Application Development.  To allow for RAD, sometimes we must give up something, in this scenario it’s a bit of speed when loading.  Don’t worry, CakePHP offers some excellent utilities to help with this.

    The one I will focus on today is caching our CakePHP query results.  The key to this is, we are caching the results, not the queries themselves.  If you know databases well, you may be thinking, “why do I want to cache queries, doesn’t my database server do this already?”  The answer to the question is, yes it does.  However, CakePHP still needs to call the database query and parse your results.  What I’m proposing, will avoid both of those steps and allow you to just retrieve the results.

    This process not only avoids excess load on the database, it also reduces PHP’s processing time that CakePHP has to do to provide you with such useful arrays. (more…)

  • Understanding group bys

    Yesterday, at work, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that something that comes so easily to me, does not to others.  I had tasked someone with, what seemed a simple task, to retrieve a list of users who have reached minimum payout.

    The payouts were stored in a separate table from the users and users could have multiple payment records prior to reaching payout, thus we would need to use a SUM() on the amount.  Because we also required other data, we need to use a group by to properly sum the amounts a user has.

    The task was handed back to me several hours later to review, it was quite evident that the main concept was “grasped”, but the understanding of group bys was not. (more…)

  • ActivityIndicator with a UIWebView

    Because you can never be sure how long it will take to retrieve content from a web page and have it displayed on the iPod/iPhone, it’s quite nice to provide the user with an indication that the content is being retrieved.

    The following article provides a nice and easy way to start and stop and animation indicator when the content is being retrieved and has been loaded. (more…)

  • Custom pagination query in CakePHP

    My pet peeve list seems to grow on a regular basis.  One of them is poorly optimized code.  Not only is the code I’m going to discuss poorly optimized, it’s from the documentation of CakePHP!

    If you search for creating custom pagination in CakePHP, you will find quite a few results, potentially this one.  The one that I would assume the best would be the one from CakePHP itself, but it’s not and let me show you why. (more…)

  • 3 Flaws to CakePHP’s AuthComponent

    Good Friday to all.  Over the past several weeks I have been working a lot with the AuthComponent in CakePHP and have learned a couple of lessons that I wanted to share with you all.

    The title calls them “flaws”, but I suppose this isn’t completely accurate, it depends how you look at it.  To me they are flaws because I assumed the AuthComponent worked one way, only to find out different. (more…)