Problems with Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP

I wanted to use the code from Quentin Zervaas's book for a website. There is a lot of good material in the book. Unfortunately, the development environment used by Quentin Zervaas must be very different from my development environment.

I could not get the code to work for days. I kept fumbling around and fumbling around trying to figure out what was wrong. The first problem was the index page code was crashing and leaving no log. It took me a while, but the problem was with the EmailLogger code bye Zervaas.

I am running on a Fedora 10 Linux development server. This is a minimally configured virtual machine running on my under powered VM server. This is not a production server. The first problem comes from the minimal configuration. Zervaas wrote the following code in the file "index.php":

$writer = new EmailLogger($_SERVER['SERVER_ADMIN']);

The code is simple enough it passes the "SERVER_ADMIN" name to the EmailLogger function. On a minimally configured system the value of "SERVER_ADMIN" is "root@localhost".

The EmailLogger function calls Zend_Validate_EmailAddress to make sure the email address is valid. The code is shown below:

$validator = new Zend_Validate_EmailAddress();

The default constructor for the Zend_Validate_EmailAddress only allows DNS hostnames. This means that "root@localhost" is not a valid email address using the default parameters when creating Zend_Validate_EmailAddress. This took a long time to figure out.

The solution is to tell the constructor to allow both DNS and local names. The code to do that is below:

$validator = new Zend_Validate_EmailAddress(Zend_Validate_Hostname::ALLOW_DNS | Zend_Validate_Hostname::ALLOW_LOCAL);

The support site for "Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP" does not document the problem with the email validation. The support site did document the next problem I ran into. This was extra slashes at the beginning of each URL. Instead of the URL being "/index" it was "//index". I tracked down the problem quickly. But every solution that made sense to me failed. The support site has two lists of errata for the book. One list is the old and unmaintained list. The other list is the new and maintained list. The new list does not contain the errata listed on the old list.

A more subtle problem is the wording of the errata. The old and unmaintained list of errata states, "When using Zend Framework 1.0.3 URLs will be generated beginning with 2 slashes." What the errata should have said is "When using Zend Framework 1.0.3 or newer URLs will be generated beginning with 2 slashes." I installed the Zend Framework 1.7.8.

I now have a problem with Captcha and image generation. This has been yet another learning experience.