Archive for July, 2008
Over the past week I have been learning and working with Zend Framework on a new site im creating, 20DollarBanners.com. Everything has been working great all week on my windows machine, and I thought it was about time to upload to one of our live web servers for testing. As with most sites, as soon as I went from Windows to Linux all hell broke out. I got the following error, and couldn’t see anywhere in the code why it was happening.
exception ‘Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Exception’ with message ‘Invalid controller specified (index)’ in /home/username/library/Zend/Controller/Dispatcher/Standard.php:249 Stack trace: #0 /home/username/library/Zend/Controller/Front.php(914): Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Standard->dispatch(Object(Zend_Controller_Request_Http), Object(Zend_Controller_Response_Http)) #1 /home/username/public_html/index.php(54): Zend_Controller_Front->dispatch() #2 {main}
After a little playing around on my local machine, I managed to reproduce the same error, and found that it was a problem with the filenames of my controller files. I checked on the linux server, and everything looked in order apart from one small difference. The filename on the server was indexController instead of IndexController, the captial I made all the difference.
After googling the problem, all I found was a load of results with pages just showing the error message, so hopefully this blog post will be of use to anyone else who finds themselves in the same situation I did.
IE 6 is definitely the most painful browser for developers and designers to support – it’s seven years old and doesn’t even fully support the CSS 1.0 standard created in 1996. We are now in the age of Web 2.0; CSS, Ajax, JavaScript and Transparent PNGs are all becoming more popular and required to make applications function and look as customers should expect. It shouldn’t be any surprise that IE6 does not support anything as standard, and many people including myself have had to resort to writing custom CSS and JavaScript files just for this browser. There are a few scripts out there which can make things a lot easier, Dean Edwards came out with a script named IE7, which attempts to fix many of the issues with HTML and CSS in the browser. It’s not perfect, but if you start your application with the script, you will have a lot more success.
Internet Explorer 8 is now in Beta release and from the looks of it, its going to cause another bunch of headaches for developers. However, Microsoft, because they know that they are never going to get it right, added a great new Meta Tag ‘X-UA-Compatible’ This tag will allow you to force IE to render to the preferred IE Version, it even has ‘edge’ which allows you to risk your life with Microsoft and always render in the latest version. You can find more information about this latest Microsoft HACK on Aaron Gustafson’s blog.
I’m sure there will be thousands of people out there that think Microsoft should have done more to get users to upgrade their browsers, there are at least 16 people at Just Develop It that agree. We all look forward to the day where the % of IE6 users drops below the critical point and the browser is not supported as standard. 37 Signals has already posted a blog announcing the phasing out of IE6 on all their products. It’s the actions of the big players online that will eventually have users upgrading in the fear of being unsupported, and not Microsoft which many believe should have done more.
Keeping it traditional, I thought I would start my blog with the famous “Hello, World” text, the output many people produce from their first experiences with programming languages.
At the age of about 12 on a ‘Windows’ PC in my bedroom, I started my life on the web, playing about with space backgrounds in frontpage and horrible sounds and fonts. At the age of 16, I had my first hosting company. Back in the day when 100Mb was a lot of web space, I had 20meg.co.uk, which offered 20Mb of FREE Web Space (You can see the remains of it on the WayBack Machine here). 20Meg was, at the time part of the “Just Bring It Home Network!”, which all theses years on is still with me in the new “Just” network – “Just Develop It“.
I will keep my blog updated as often as I can with source code, life in the world of Just Develop It, my desire to burn all Apple Macs and upgrade all IE6 users to the world of the living.