Category: Zend Framework

Introducing Mismi – Amazon Price Comparison for Norwegian Customers

My main project in December was Mismi – a service that compares the total price of items from Amazon.com and from Amazon.co.uk for Norwegians. The solution is built on top of the Zend_Service_Amazon class (with a few extensions of my own).

The reasoning behind making the service is that there are several factors that are in play when deciding whether to order a product from the US or from the UK: the exchange rate for GBP and USD, the shipping cost, the delivery situation for the item and whether the item is sold in the store at all.

The user enters a list of the URLs to the products they’re considering purchasing from an Amazon-store, press submit and get a list back of which items are in stock, where the item is the cheapest and what the total sum of an order placed at the store would be. In addition I added a alpha stage feature just before Christmas which will also tell you the “optimum” set of items for the orders – “order item 1,4,7,9 from .com, item 2,3,5,6,8 from .co.uk”. This took quite a bit of hacking – you also have to consider the initial price of shipping, shipping for each item and other fun things.

Feel free to play with it over at mismi.e-mats.org. It’s in Norwegian, but it should be easy to understand anyhow with the description above.

Patching Zend_OpenId To Maintain Error Messages

To help anyone else in their quest to implement Zend_OpenId in their code, I’ve created a small patch against trunk which adds error internal error messages in most places where there’s a return false;. This should help when debugging your code, both if you’re implementing an authentication service and use Zend_OpenId as a consumer or if you’re implementing just the consumer part of the equation.

I’ve uploaded the diff: Consumer.php.patch (Consumer.php.patch.txt).

The only thing that seemed a bit weird was that one of the error messages that were present in 1.6.0 had been removed in trunk:

if ($status != 200) {
    this->_setError("'Dumb' signature verification HTTP request failed");
    return false;
}

I’ve readded this message in my patch, but I feel that the error message should be something like:

$this->_setError("The server responded with HTTP status code: " . $status);

instead.

Oh well. Hopefully someone will find this useful.

Christer Goes Bug Hunting

Christer had the pleasure of hunting down a bug in Zend Framework a couple of days ago, and he has just posted a nice article about the bug in Zend MVC Components and how he debugged it. If you’ve never used a debugger before, this article is probably also going to be a bit helpful, and it gives a little insight into how the Zend Framework MVC-components work.

Using Objects with Zend_View’s PartialLoop Helper

Christer has obviously been having a good day today too, as he’s actually made yet ANOTHER blog post about something related to Zend Framework: Using Objects with Zend_View’s PartialLoop Helper. This time he’s examining why some methods suddenly has disappeared in his PartialLoop. I’m a bit surprised his father hasn’t helped him with his view scripts, tho. It’s probably just something he’s saying to don’t appear too incompetent.