Getting started with Doctrine 2 in ZF2

Using Doctrine as an ORM to persist your data significantly lowers your overhead in managing your database. However, if you're just getting started with Doctrine, you'll have to invest in moderate time to overcome the learning curve. Here are some of not so obvious tricks you'll have to learn as a beginner to utilize Doctrine.

CSS Specificity - Which CSS Rule to apply?

Each CSS selector has a specificity value and the more specific the selector is the higher precedence it has. If multiple selectors apply to a single element, the highest specificity CSS rule applies to the element. Have you had an experience where you define a CSS rule for an element, and it doesn't work? You probably have a CSS rule that has a higher specificity value which causes your newly created CSS rule to not apply.

Getting started with composer (composer.phar)

I am kicking off a new PHP project with the Zend Framework 2 (ZF2) and chose to use Doctrine as the persistence layer with ORM capabilities. Knowing that I need two Zend modules for Doctrine support, I've cloned the two modules (DoctrineModule and DoctrineORMModule) from GitHub to enable doctrine support in my ZF2 project. Oops, just installing those two Zend modules from GitHub do not make doctrine work! What am I doing wrong? Do I need a core Doctrine library from doctrine-project.org installed in addition to those two modules in order to make this work in ZF2? After a careful review of documentation, the preferred installation method was using "composer" not "git clone".

SuiteCloud Developer Tools

I've had a chance to listen in on a condensed version of the webinar that discusses developer tools for the SuiteCloud platform. I have personally worked in the Netsuite platform for about a year and have worked with SuiteTalk and SuiteScript development tools to integrate a standalone e-commerce application into Netsuite. Although I do have administrative privileges, I have not thoroughly explored the available development tools that are offered by Netsuite.

jQuery anonymous and callback function declarations

JavaScript enables you to create anonymous functions to be executed immediately or when the document is ready, and also allows you to freely pass functions around to be executed at a later time. The default short-hand notation for jQuery wrapper is $, and unless your webpage has a conflict with other javascript libraries you may freely use $ to wrap any jQuery scripts. Since there are many variations of anonymous function calls, they are worth mentioning here.

How to change MySQL user and root password?

We have been using the DirectAdmin control panel for a number of years, and each time we set up a server it is necessary to change the root password. By default, Direct Admin creates a MySql superuser called "da_admin" with a preassigned password, but we do not know what the root password is. Since we use both DirectAdmin and command-line to manage our server, it is essential that we have a proper MySQL root password assigned.

Android ROM explained

There has been a lot of talk about Android ROM and how to flash it with a custom ROM to bring new features to your smartphone. People are also talking about rooting an Android OS and installing aftermarket firmware on it. In the world of Android, the word ROM which stands for Read-Only Memory is being misused. A better term would be "firmware" where the binary image of Android OS is installed. Let's start out by defining a few terms used in the Android world.