braindump

Spell check with Zend_Json_Server & pspell

An application I’ve been working on has had a desire for spell check capabilities for some time now. As most browsers provide native methods for this, it has remained on the back burner until now.

I decided to use Zend_Json_Server for a few reasons:

1. I wanted to avoid the overhead required to bootstrap and route requests in my MVC Zend_Framework app
2. I wanted to tinker with Zend’s easy to use JSON-RPC magic
3. I try to avoid XML (and thus XML-RPC) as much as possible

Requirements

Your server requires the following for the JSON-RPC server to work:

• Zend Framework = 1.7
• pspell

To use the javascript client (optional):

• Prototype = 1.6

Files

SpellCheck.php

This class exposes three methods via the JSON-RPC interface: check, suggest, and checkText. As you can see, check and suggest are simple wrappers for pspell_check and pspell_suggest respectively. They each operate on only a single word.

The checkText method combines the features of both check and suggest, and works on strings consisting of an arbitrary number of words. It also returns an object detailing all the spelling errors found, as well as the top five suggestions for them.

json-rpc.php

This is the wonderfully simple class that sets up our Zend_JSON_Server and handles requests. I love that Zend_Json allows me to do this in only 20 lines of code.

spellcheck.js (optional)

Usage

The usage examples will assume you are using the Prototype client shown above, though any client could be used. They also assume you have firebug installed, and thus can use the console.log() method.

Example 1

This checks if the word ‘sevne’ is a properly spelled word.

Output

The output shows that the result is false, it is not a correctly spelled word.

Example 2

sc.suggest('sevne');

Output

In this case the result is an array of the forty most likely substitutes for this word.

Example 3

This is likely the most useful usage of all, as it avoids the need for multiple calls to the server.

Output

The result in this case is a slightly more complex JSON Object than the other examples.

I’ll do my best to explain this clearly.

• result is a JSON Object with a single property ‘c’ (corrections).
• result.c is an Array of corrections
• each correction is an Object with the following properties

The syntax of the checkText method was inspired by Google’s spell checkAPI that is part of the Google Toolbar. My thanks to Paul Welter for reverse engineering it and posting the results.

Conclusion

This wraps up my fun, though admittedly simple, example of Zend_Json. (I think I spent more time on this blog post than the actual code).

Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug gotcha

A few weeks ago I found a gem of a class called Zend_Log_Writer_Firebug within Zend Framework. It really is a must have when it comes to debug logging.

However, a few weeks ago something bizarre happened that caused all of my FirePHP logging to break. I scoured the web for bug reports to find issues similar but not quite the same. I wasn’t using AJAX calls, I could see the FirePHP headers in the response headers of FireBug, but I couldn’t see the formatted output.

I finally got fed up today. I hate var_dump’s and wanted my FirePHP logging back. After a near flying knee to my computer screen, I figured it out.

It appears that I was using FirePHP v0.1.2, and the latest was 0.2. For reasons beyond my knowledge, Firefox wasn’t detecting this as needing an upgrade.

After upgrading to 0.2 my FirePHP log messages worked again! I hope this shaves a few days of someone’s frustrations.

Model validations with Zend & Doctrine

Post removed.

This is deprecated.

PhpGhettoDoc - Document your PHP w/ ruby?

In a moment of boredom I decided I needed a simple way to document a giant batch of PHP files with skeleton PhpDocblocks. PHP not being my first language, I decided why not do it in ruby. I find ruby scripting to be quick, fast enough, and it has lots of great easy to use modules (e.g., Find).

That said here she is: