Zend Framework in Action

I’m transferring the domain name of this site to a new registrar, so there may be a bump or two when the DNS transfers.

Posted by Rob on 27th September 2009 under The Book | Comments Off

Thomas Weidner has recently blogged about two new filters coming to Zend Framework 1.10:

• Zend_Filter_Compress and Zend_Filter_Decompress
• Zend_Validate_PostCode

As you’d expect Zend_Filter_Compress and its counterpart Zend_Filter_Decompress handle compression and decompression from a number of formats including bzip2, gzip, zip and tar. Usefully the format support is via adapters so more can be added.

Zend_Filter_Postcode is locale aware and can validate the format of postcodes from around 150 different countries. I don’t know about you, but building the regex for postcode handling is tedious at best, so this will be a very useful component for me at least!

Full details on how to use these new filters are on Thomas’ site.

Posted by Rob on 20th September 2009 under Around the web | Comments Off

Tom Graham has recently posted about a component that he’s written that notices when a login form is being brute forced and then adds a captcha element to the form. I really like this idea as it doesn’t inconvenience genuine users at all.

In his own words:

The easiest method of preventing such attacks is to implement some kind of rate limit. Twitter now does this on their login form by adding a CAPTCHA that the user must solve after a number of failed login attempts. The theory behind this is that even if the attacker does manually solve the CAPTCHA it would sufficiently slow them down to make the brute force method unfeasible. I had been doing a similar thing in one of my applications for some time, and eventually decided to move my code into a re-usable component.

He goes on to explain how to use it and how it works and has published the code on github.

I highly recommend checking it out.

Posted by Rob on 8th September 2009 under Around the web | Comments Off