PHP: Change UTC time to local time

Did you know that you can quickly change UTC time stamps to Local time by doing the following:

//make sure your time is set
date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');

$datetime = '2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00';

//convert the given datetime string to time
$newDatetime = strtotime($datetime);

//re-contruct to format
$newDatetime = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', newDatetime);

It’s so obvious, but I only wished, I knew this before trying all sort of crazy stuff.

Unit Testing your AJAX requests with Zend Framework and PHPunit

I ran into a problem yesterday, when trying to create a couple of unit tests using PHPunit along side the Zend Framework.

If you want to unit test an action in a controller that checks the request to see if is an XML HTTP Request using the isXmlHttpRequest() method provided by the Zend Framework, then you will definitely run into a problem.

isXmlHttpRequest() pretty much checks to see if the $_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] is set with ‘XMLHttpRequest’, if not, then returns FALSE. I thought that by setting the server variable with XMLHttpRequest directly will allow me to bypass the check.
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Zend Framework: Internalization and Translation

This week I set myself to lay the ground work of translation on the application we are doing at work. In our application we are using Zend Framework, so I decided to take a look into the Zend_Translate component to see if it was easy and something that could work in our current environment.

After reading the reference guide on Zend_Translate I decided that we were going to use “gettext” as our translation adapter. PHP has support for gettext right our of the box, and with the Zend_Translate it’s easy to change adapters, if you decide that you want to use a different adapter.

Assuming that you already have the latest version of Zend Framework (1.10.*) installed in your server, I’m going to explain and guide you guys on how I got it all working.
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