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• Capitalizing on JavaScript's prototypal inheritance

  - by keithjgrant

  JavaScript has a class-free object system in which objects inherit properties directly from other objects. This is really powerful, but it is unfamiliar to classically trained programmers. If you attempt to apply classical design patterns directly to JavaScript, you will be frustrated. But if you learn to work with JavaScript's prototypal nature, your efforts will be rewarded. ... It is Lisp in C's clothing. -Douglas Crockford What does this mean for a game developer working with canvas and HTML5? I've been looking over this question on useful design patterns in gaming, but prototypal inheritance is very different than classical inheritance, and there are surely differences in the best way to apply some of these common patterns. For example, classical inheritance allows us to create a moveableEntity class, and extend that with any classes that move in our game world (player, monster, bullet, etc.). Sure, you can strongarm JavaScript to work that way, but in doing so, you are kind of fighting against its nature. Is there a better approach to this sort of problem when we have prototypal inheritance at our fingertips?

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• Structuring game world entities and their rendering objects

  - by keithjgrant

  I'm putting together a simple 2d tile-based game. I'm finding myself spinning circles on some design decisions, and I think I'm in danger of over-engineering. After all, the game is simple enough that I had a working prototype inside of four hours with fewer than ten classes, it just wasn't scalable or flexible enough for a polished game. My question is about how to structure flow of control between game entity objects and their rendering objects. Should each renderer have a reference to their entity or vice-versa? Or both? Should the entity be in control of calling the render() method, or be completely oblivious? I know there are several valid approaches here, but I'm kind of feeling decision paralysis. What are the pros and cons of each approach?

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• Make NetBeans automatically include newline at end of file?

  - by keithjgrant

  I just switched to NetBeans (6.8) and have noticed some of my files don't end with a newline. This has been a helpful option in other IDEs I've used, but I haven't been able to find it in the NetBeans options menus. Is it buried in there somewhere or is there any other way to make sure it always saves files with a newline at the end? I'm coding primarily in PHP, if it's available in any of the language-specific options.

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• PHPUnit - multiple stubs of same class

  - by keithjgrant

  I'm building unit tests for class Foo, and I'm fairly new to unit testing. A key component of my class is an instance of BarCollection which contains a number of Bar objects. One method in Foo iterates through the collection and calls a couple methods on each Bar object in the collection. I want to use stub objects to generate a series of responses for my test class. How do I make the Bar stub class return different values as I iterate? I'm trying to do something along these lines: $stubs = array(); foreach ($array as $value) { $barStub->expects($this->any()) ->method('GetValue')) ->will($this->returnValue($value)); $stubs[] = $barStub; } // populate stubs into `Foo` // assert results from `Foo->someMethod()` So Foo->someMethod() will produce data based on the results it receives from the Bar objects. But this gives me the following error whenever the array is longer than one: There was 1 failure: 1) testMyTest(FooTest) with data set #2 (array(0.5, 0.5)) Expectation failed for method name is equal to <string:GetValue> when invoked zero or more times. Mocked method does not exist. /usr/share/php/PHPUnit/Framework/MockObject/Mock.php(193) : eval()'d code:25 One thought I had was to use ->will($this->returnCallback()) to invoke a callback method, but I don't know how to indicate to the callback which Bar object is making the call (and consequently what response to give). Another idea is to use the onConsecutiveCalls() method, or something like it, to tell my stub to return 1 the first time, 2 the second time, etc, but I'm not sure exactly how to do this. I'm also concerned that if my class ever does anything other than ordered iteration on the collection, I won't have a way to test it.

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• REST, caching, and authorizing with multiple user roles

  - by keithjgrant

  We have a system with multiple different levels of access--sometimes even for the same user as they switch between multiple roles. We're beginning a discussion on moving over to a RESTful implementation of things. I'm just starting to get my feet wet with the whole REST thing. So how do I go about limiting access to the correct records when they access a resource, particularly when taking caching into consideration? If user A access example.com/employees they would receive a different response than user B; user A may even receive a different response as he switches to a different role. To help facilitate caching, should the id of the role be somehow incorporated into the uri? Maybe something like example.com/employees/123 (which violates the rules of REST), or as some sort of subordinate resource like example.com/employees/role/123 (which seems silly, since role/### is going to be appended to URIs all over the place). I can help but think I'm missing something here.

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• PHP forms from various frameworks - Strengths/Weaknesses?

  - by keithjgrant

  Looking around, there are plenty of options available for form management in PHP from several frameworks: Zend, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symphony, and probably several others offer solutions. All else being equal, which set of form classes do you prefer? What makes any of these better than the others?

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• Multiple records with one request in RESTful system

  - by keithjgrant

  All the examples I've seen regarding a RESTful architecture have dealt with a single record. For example, a GET request to mydomain.com/foo/53 to get foo 53 or a POST to mydomain.com/foo to create a new Foo. But what about multiple records? Being able to request a series of Foos by id or post an array of new Foos generally would be more efficient with a single API request rather than dozens of individual requests. Would you "overload" mydomain.com/foo to handle requests for both a single or multiple records? Or would you add a mydomain.com/foo-multiple to handle plural POSTs and GETs? I'm designing a system that may potentially need to get many records at once (something akin to mydomain.com/foo/53,54,66,86,87) But since I haven't seen any examples of this, I'm wondering if there's something I'm just not getting about a RESTful architecture that makes this approach "wrong".

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• Kohana input & validation libraries - overlap?

  - by keithjgrant

  I'm familiarizing myself with Kohana. I've been reading up on the Input library, which automatically pre-filters GET and POST data for me, and the Validation libary, which helps with form validation. Should I use both together? The examples given in the Validation library documentation use the unfiltered $_POST array instead of $this->input->post(). Seems to me it would be more secure to chain the two, but the two sets of documentation seem to make no mention of each other, so I don't know if this would be redundant or not.

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• Login with Kohana auth module - what am I doing wrong?

  - by keithjgrant

  I'm trying to login with the following controller action, but my login attempt keeps failing (I get the 'invalid username and/or password' message). What am I doing wrong? I also tried the other method given in the examples in the auth documentation, Auth::instance()->login($user->username, $form->password);, but I get the same result. Kohana version is 2.3.4. public function login() { $auth = Auth::instance(); if ($auth->logged_in()) { url::redirect('/account/summary'); } $view = new View('login'); $view->username = ''; $view->password = ''; $post = $this->input->post(); $form = new Validation($post); $form->pre_filter('trim', 'username') ->pre_filter('trim', 'password') ->add_rules('username', 'required'); $failed = false; if (!empty($post) && $form->validate()) { $login = array( 'username' => $form->username, 'password' => $form->password, ); if (ORM::factory('user')->login($login)) { url::redirect('/accounts/summary'); } else { $view->username = $form->username; $view->message = in_array('required', $form->errors()) ? 'Username and password are required.' : 'Invalid username and/or password.'; } } $view->render(true); }

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• Should a given URI in a RESTful architecture always return the same response?

  - by keithjgrant

  This is kind of a follow-up question to this one. So is having a unique response for any given URI a core tenant of RESTful architecture? A lot of discussion here tends that direction, but I haven't seen it anywhere as a "hard and fast" rule. I understand the value of it (for caching, crawling, passing links, etc), but I also see things like the twitter API violate it (A request to http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends_timeline.xml will vary based on the username given), and I understand there are times when it may be necessary--not to mention that a chronologically paged resource will also change as new elements are added. Should I strive for varied responses from the same URI to be eliminated altogether, or do I just accept that sometimes it isn't practical, and as long as I minimize its occurrence, I'll be in decent shape.

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• 404 header - HTTP 1.0 or 1.1?

  - by keithjgrant

  So why does almost every example I can find (including this question form about a year ago) say that a 404 header should be HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found when we've really been using HTTP 1.1 for over a decade? Is there any reason not to send HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found instead? (Not that it matters all that much... I'm mostly just curious.)

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• Using a "vo" for joined data?

  - by keithjgrant

  I'm building a small financial system. Because of double-entry accounting, transactions always come in batches of two or more, so I've got a batch table and a transaction table. (The transaction table has batch_id, account_id, and amount fields, and shared data like date and description are relegated to the batch table). I've been using basic vo-type models for each table so far. Because of this table structure structure, though, transactions will almost always be selected with a join on the batch table. So should I take the selected records and splice them into two separate vo objects, or should I create a "shared" vo that contains both batch and transaction data? There are a few cases in which batch records and/or transaction records. Are there possible pitfalls down the road if I have "overlapping" vo classes?

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• Single-letter prefix for PHP class constants?

  - by keithjgrant

  I've noticed many (all?) PHP constants have a single-letter prefix, like E_NOTICE, T_STRING, etc. When defining a set of class constants that work in conjunction with one another, do you prefer to follow similar practice, or do you prefer to be more verbose? class Foo { // let's say 'I' means "input" or some other relevant word const I_STRING = 'string'; const I_INTEGER = 'integer'; const I_FLOAT = 'float'; } or class Bar { const INPUT_STRING = 'string'; const INPUT_INTEGER = 'integer'; const INPUT_FLOAT = 'float'; }

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• How to SUM() from an offset through the end of the table?

  - by keithjgrant

  If SELECT SUM(amount) FROM transactions ORDER BY order LIMIT 0, 50 sums the amount field for the first 50 records in a table, how do a sum all records after the first 50? In other words, I'd like to do something like SELECT SUM(amount) from transactions ORDER BY order LIMIT 50, *, but that doesn't work.

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• "Special case" records for foreign key constraints

  - by keithjgrant

  Let's say I have a mysql table, called foo with a foreign key option_id constrained to the option table. When I create a foo record, the user may or may not have selected an option, and 'no option' is a viable selection. What is the best way to differentiate between 'null' (i.e. the user hasn't made a selection yet) and 'no option' (i.e. the user selected 'no option')? Right now, my plan is to insert a special record into the option table. Let's say that winds up with an id of 227 (this table already has a number of records at this point, so '1' isn't available). I have no need to access this record at a database level, and it would act as nothing more than a placeholder that the foreign key in the foo table can reference. So do I just hard-code '227' in my codebase when I'm creating 'foo' records where the user has selected 'no option'? The hard-coded id seems sloppy, and leaves room for error as the code is maintained down the road, but I'm not really sure of another approach.

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• Efficiency of PHP arrays cast as objects?

  - by keithjgrant

  From what I understand, PHP objects are generally much faster than arrays. How is that efficiency affected if I'm typecasting to define stdClass objects on the fly: $var = (object)array('one' => 1, 'two' => 2); If the code doing this is deeply-nested, will I be better off explicitly defining $var as an objects instead: $var = new stdClass(); $var->one = 1; $var->two = 2; Is the difference negligible since I'll then be accessing $var as an object from there on, either way?

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• Should I separate RESTful API controllers from "regular" controllers?

  - by keithjgrant

  This seems like an elementary question, but after a lot of searching around I can't seem to find a straightforward explanation: If I'm building a web application that is going to be accessed largely through a web browser, but that will also support some API requests in a RESTful way, should there be a large degree of separation between the two? On one hand, it seems a large amount of the functionality is the same, with identical data presented in different views (HTML vs. XML/JSON). But on the other hand, there are certain things I need to present to the browser that doesn't quite fit a RESTful approach: how to get an empty form to create a new instance of a resource and how to get a pre-populated form to edit an existing resource. Should these two different methods of accessing the system by funneled through different controllers? Different methods in the same controller? The exact same methods with a switch for view type?

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• Static variable for optimization

  - by keithjgrant

  I'm wondering if I can use a static variable for optimization: public function Bar() { static $i = moderatelyExpensiveFunctionCall(); if ($i) { return something(); } else { return somethingElse(); } } I know that once $i is initialized, it won't be changed by by that line of code on successive calls to Bar(). I assume this means that moderatelyExpensiveFunctionCall() won't be evaluated every time I call, but I'd like to know for certain. Once PHP sees a static variable that has been initialized, does it skip over that line of code? In other words, is this going to optimize my execution time if I make a lot of calls to Bar(), or am I wasting my time?

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• SQLAlchemy - loading user by username

  - by keithjgrant

  Just diving into pylons here, and am trying to get my head around the basics of SQLALchemy. I have figured out how to load a record by id: user_q = session.query(model.User) user = user_q.get(user_id) But how do I query by a specific field (i.e. username)? I assume there is a quick way to do it with the model rather than hand-building the query. I think it has something with the add_column() function on the query object, but I can't quite figure out how to use it. I've been trying stuff like this, but obviously it doesn't work: user_q = meta.Session.query(model.User).add_column('username'=user_name) user = user_q.get()

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• File/module structure in Python

  - by keithjgrant

  So I'm just getting started with Python, and currently working my way through diveintopython.org. The code examples are nice, but the vast majority of them are little four-line snippets, and I want to see a little more of the big picture. As I understand it--and correct me if I'm wrong--each '.py' file becomes a "module", and a group of modules in a directory becomes a "package" (at least, it does if I create a __init__.py file in that directory). What is it if I don't have a __init__.py file? So what does each "module" file look like? Do I generally define only one class in the file? Does anything else go in that file besides the class definition and maybe a handful of import commands?

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• MVC Pages that require the user to be logged in

  - by keithjgrant

  I'm working on a little MVC framework and I'm wondering what the "best way" is to structure things so secure pages/controllers always ensure the user is logged in (and thus automatically redirects to a login page--or elsewhere--if not). Obviously, there are a lot of ways to do it, but I'm wondering what solution(s) are the most common or are considered the best practice. Some ideas I had: Explicitly call user->isLoggedIn() at the beginning of your controller action method? (Seems far too easy to forget and leave an important page unsecure on accident) Make your controller extend a secureController that always checks for login in the constructor? Do this check in the model when secure information is requested? (Seems like redundant calls would be made) Something else entirely? Note: I'm working in PHP, though the question is not language-dependent.

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