AppFog is quite a popular polyglot PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider and it comes with a generous free plan for the developers. With the free plan, you can host as many apps as you want with 2GB ram limit, database from 100 to 1GB limit and so on. I’ve been using AppFog since the beginning and I must say that I really love their service.
Recently, I was looking for a solution on how to host a Zend Framework based application in AppFog. The main problem was that the url must point to the /public folder inside the app and from there it is initialized. After searching for some time, I found the clue in AppFog’s doumentation which is you’ll have to redirect all the traffic from the parent domain to the /public/index.php file using the URL rewrite rules. Here is the content of the .htaccess file that you will have to keep in the application root directory.
This is mainly it. Once you have placed the .htaccess file in the root folder of your application, it will work flawlessly.
Shameless Plug
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Public/private key based encryption is very popular because of the strength it sets in encryption, specially above 1024 bits. Now there are external library to encrypt data using RSA encryption like RSA in phpclasses.org – the fun is we were also using this library in one of our ZF based project. But last week I’ve found that there is a hidden gem in the Library/Zend/Crypt folder (Zend_Crypt_Rsa) which can do the same thing using openssl library. The bad thing is that there is no official documentation on how to use this library 🙁 Thats why I’ve decided to write a blog post to show you how to use Zend_Crypt_Rsa and encrypt your data with your public/private key and decrypt to get it back in original form.
Step 1: Create your RSA public/private key using ssh-keygen
[sourcecode lang=”bash”]
cd /path/to/keyfolder/
ssh-keygen -t RSA
[/sourcecode]
When it will ask for the path of the key file, input “./id_rsa” . It will then prompt for passphrase which actually works like a password and you cant retrieve your data if you forget this. So input something like “MySecretWord” – This will output something like this
[sourcecode lang=”bash”]
ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/hasinhayder/.ssh/id_rsa): ./id_rsa
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in ./id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in ./id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
c8:dc:cd:a8:90:98:67:42:65:45:20:f8:58:39:74:66 [email protected]
The key’s randomart image is:
+–[ RSA 2048]—-+
| oo.E+o |
|. +B |
| +.. |
|…o + o + |
| + = + S o |
| + . . |
| . |
| |
| |
+—————–+
[/sourcecode]
After a while you will see that there are two files in the same directory named “id_rsa” and “id_rsa.pub”. First one is your private key and the second one is the public key.
Step 2: Encrypt data using your public key
As we have our RSA public and private keys in our hand, its time to start playing with these. We will now encrypt our data with our public key. In that way you can only decrypt it with your private key. I hope it is clear now that why we should encrypt using public key only? If now, let me clarify it a bit more. Your public key is “public” to the world. Now if you encrypt your data with your private key, anyone will be able to decrypt it with your public key – so that’s plain meaningless 🙂
[sourcecode lang=”php”]
public function encAction(){
$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender();
$this->_helper->layout->disableLayout();
$zrsa =new Zend_Crypt_Rsa(array("passPhrase"=>"MySecretWord","pemPath"=>"/path/to/your/keyfolder/id_rsa")); //thats the path to the private key file
$string = "Yeah, this is my SECRET MESSAGE";
$enc = $zrsa->encrypt($string, $zrsa->getPublicKey(),Zend_Crypt_Rsa::BASE64);
echo "Secret Message: {$enc}";
}
[/sourcecode]
In the code above, we are generating output in BASE64 format, because that is readable to everyone 🙂 – after you execute this action in your browser, you can see something like the following (it will differ based on your key)
Now it will output the original message “Yeah, this is my SECRET MESSAGE” 🙂
So here is everything together 🙂
[sourcecode lang=”php”]
public function encAction(){
$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender();
$this->_helper->layout->disableLayout();
$zrsa =new Zend_Crypt_Rsa(array("passPhrase"=>"MySecretWord","pemPath"=>"/path/to/your/keyfolder/id_rsa")); //thats the path to the private key file
$string = "Yeah, this is my SECRET MESSAGE";
$enc = $zrsa->encrypt($string, $zrsa->getPublicKey(),Zend_Crypt_Rsa::BASE64);
echo "Secret Message: {$enc}";
echo "<hr/>";
$dec = $zrsa->decrypt($enc, $zrsa->getPrivateKey(),Zend_Crypt_Rsa::BASE64);
echo $dec;
}
[/sourcecode]
Hope you’ve enjoyed this article. I just wish that the documentation team of Zend Framework would have added this in the manual of Zend Framework for the rest of us 🙂
Shameless Note 🙂 : By the way, if you are looking for a beautiful Admin Panel Theme for your PHP based projects/web-applications, you may want to check out Chameleon Circuit, which is developed by our Themio Team 🙂
Miproapps—The newest service around, Miproapps allows users to design a fan page by simply dragging & dropping elements to the center of the page. I found it to be one of the best services I’ve tried so far because it really is very easy to use, and it only took me a few minutes to create an interactive fan page.
A chart on that page will help you to quickly understand how each of these services differ from others. I am sad that MiproApps missed a quick point on “Custom Tab” which actually is there in MiproApps, just the process is not automated. It is possible only by request. All you have to do is open a support ticket and our engineers will take action as soon as they are in office.
We are working on this issue to make this process fully automated.
Facebook is changing all their page width to 520 px from 760px, effective from today. So if you haven’t worked on your page, it is your chance to get your hands dirty 🙂
Note: MiproApps is developed using PHP on top of Zend Framework, Memcache and External web services. Right now we are providing a whooping collection of 35 widgets in total, which you can add instantly on your facebook fanpage and they will work from your pages without any problem. The drag-n-drop style designer will make your job even easier 🙂
Supported Widgets (categorized):
1. Static Content category Static Images, Static Text, Link Builder and Contact-us form
2. Blogs category Posterous, WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger
3. Status Services category Tiwtter and Google Buzz
4. Video category Youtube, Vimeo, UStream, Any external video in flv format
5. Photo sharing category Flickr and Picasa
6. File sharing category Box.net
7. Audio category Last.fm and any externally uploaded mp3 audio
8. Facebook tools category Comments, LiveStream and Invite-Friends
9. Bookmark services category Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Reddit and Technorati
10. Miscellaneous category Paypal Donation, Google Maps, External flash file, RSS feeds, IFrame, Poll, Image Slider (carousel) and SlideShare
Hope you will enjoy MiproApps, a nice application developed using Zend Framework :). MiproApps has been brought to you by my small startup Leevio
It started in a funny way rather than a typical project plan, and finally turned into an important project for us in Leevio. Everyone in our team was so much excited to release our first flagship product, a web based service (mashup you can say) we called MiproApps. It is a visual designing tool for Facebook fanpages.
MiproApps
Facebook fanpages are popular media to publish your company information, portfolio or upcoming events on Facebook. To make your product outreach a massive amount of users, it is a popular tool that works good. While creating our fanpage for Leevio, we found that we are limited by available applications to decorate and present a page “really” well. What we could do is design our page in an ordinary way, like writing FBML tags and and embed those in a tab. Or we could develop an application and embed it’s tab to another tab on our page. Which one did we go with? NONE!
We thought that it would be really interesting if we can develop a service (some sort of a visual designer for such pages) by which everyone (anyone, seriously) can design and decorate their fanpage with some data they really want to deliver to their audience. So we did a quick meeting to find out if it was really possible by us, and the challenges we found are the followings
1. Limited canvas size,
2. Works with different data sources
3. Drag and drop friendly, with proper layering.
4. Compatible with major browsers (Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera and Chrome)
5. Proper caching and storing widget data
We decided to develop this project in a “release early, release often” fashion. We didnt want to deliver a HUGE giant bloated with too many widgets and services after working for tons of hours. Instead we wanted to deliver a working barebone skeleton for our users which performs it’s job pretty well, and then to add feature s gradually in a regular interval. It would also help us to decide quickly how users are reacting with our project.
We four developers worked really hard for next couple of weeks to make it work, in short sprints and milestones. And now it is available for your use – you can check it out at http://miproapps.com. There are more than 25 pretty useful widgets to help you designing your fanpage impressively. We’ve also added tutorials and screencasts for you. Lets see how did we work with all our challenges.
MiproApps Design Canvas
1. Limited Canvas Size
To make sure users still be able to design his page easily, we keep three pre defined size for each widgets. Width of these three sizes are designed in such a way so that anyone can design multi-column page, easily.
2. Works with different data sources.
The core of MiproApps are external data sources and a very well designed parser to parse those data source in an unified way. Guess what, most of these data source are ready to be pulled out. Almost all of them offers valid RSS/Atom feeds. And that saved us HUGE (GIGANTIC cud be more appropriate) amount of work to do by ourselves. We just collect username for each of these data sources (like twitter, youtube) and then we pulled out feeds for that specific user. Everything is about public data, and that also saved us from some pain about treating private and sensitive information. Except one widget (I will come to that later) we just asked for plain username from users. And for twitter, we had to deal with oath based authentication system so that we can pull out user’s timeline using their token. These tokens are for read-only access to be more trusted by our users. We set a caching time of 10 minutes so that we have to call only 6 times max for an user in an hour. Do you kno what is the current rate limit per user per hour in Twitter? it’s only 75!
Configuration Editor
3. Drag and drop friendliness
We choose jQuery UI as we are very good at jQuery. And I must confess, that was a very good decision indeed. The excellent support of managing draggable and droppable components in jQuery UI made our life really easier. The only thing we found tricky was to persist the draggable state of each component on “Design Canvas”. But anyway, it was done very effectively and is working really great. You should check this out at http://miproapps.com
And oh, by the way, the z-index layering was quite a UI challenge for us. On a Facebook page canvas area, the internal Facebook components has maximum z-ndex of “101”. So we had to deal with that to keep our components z-index lower than that, to avoid an overlay over any internal Facebook item (a dialog box, for example, or the notification dropdown 🙂 )
4. Compatible with major browsers
Oh boy, we were doomed in hell with a monster called IE and that really made our day terrible every minute!. However, we tamed the beast quite good and now it works well with MiproApps. Another friendly monster betrayed us at last minute, has a name “Chrome”. we are working on that subtle UI issues and hope to deliver some updates pretty soon.
5. Proper caching and storing user data
Now that was a major challenge we dealt with. Each user can use hundreds of widgets, which colt actually pull data from hundreds of different data sources out there. So caching is a very important step we’d taken care of from the first day. We used Memcached. And we designed the architecture to cache data from every widget separately, not as a page in a whole. And it was challenging to deal with failsafe condition (you remember twitter’s fail whale, right?). Some widgets needed to be dealt with extra care for the caching technology of Facebook itself. But in overall it was a good architecture and worked impressively well. We are proud of it!
Useful set of widgets
Lets have a look at the tools, libraries and services we use for MiproApps
1. Subversion, definitely a life saver version controlling system.
2. Springloops as a subversion repository and deploy manager. It’s deploy manager is really awesome!
3. Lighthouse for Issue Tracking
4. Netbeans as our IDE, Mac OSX and Ubuntu as development OS. PHP and ZendFramework. For oAuth, we used PECL oAuth library. Memcached was used for caching.
5. jQuery and jQuery UI. The image slider you see on the front page was done using the brilliant Coin Slider.
6. Screencast was recorded by Screenium. Tutorial screenshots were taken using Jing.
7. Icons came from MediaLoot and legendary Silk by Famfamfam.
So that’s It – have a look at MiproApps at http://miproapps.com. Currently the application is in beta mode (all plans are free during beta – beside that, there will always be a free plan for everyone) and we are adding exciting widgets everyday. Hope you will like it.
