BATON ROUGE, LA (Date) – K-fx², Inc., a Baton Rouge-based new media design firm, continued exceeding client expectations with several additions to the SBS Migration web site, www.sbsmigration.com.  SBS Migration, a New Orleans-based small business server upgrade firm, recently offered their services internationally. The web site currently allows SBS Migration to extend their services to more than 85 countries and looks to expand even further into the global market.

If you get an object from alloc, copy or new, you must autorelease or release it when you’re done.

• If you retain something, you must autorelease or release it when you’re done.

• If you get an object from anywhere else, DO NOT release or autorelease it.

So a few weeks ago I embarked on a trip to Houston to learn from an expert in the iPhone developer community.  I had the opportunity to be trained for a weekend by Nathan Eror, of Free Time Studios. The opportunity, was worth it’s weight in proverbial gold.

Having tried to learn Objective-C on my own in the past, I found it frustrating, and not worth the energy.  It was disappointing, because I’ve had 5 years of C++ in a Unix environment in college, but found the differences in syntax with Objective-C to be too frustrating.

After the Friday session with Nathan though, which he devoted entirely to language review and XCode power tips, I felt like a renewed man.  It’s amazing what kind of progress someone can make, when they have a knowledgeable teacher, great presentations, and large chunks of time to focus on learning.

Nathan’s explanations on memory management, and the differences between bracket notation and dot notation in Objective-C clicked immediately, where reading documentation behind the late night glow of my Macbook Pro made little progress.

Over the next two days we pushed out 10 exercise apps, and learned the basic concepts that go into developing useable applications. The final exercise app was a culmination of all of our learning, and resulted in an app that communicated with a remote API and displayed that data graphically on a Map using Map Kit.

I personally learned alot that weekend, and I’m excited about the future possibilites of developing iPhone apps.  I’ve grown to appreciate compiled languages again, and enjoy working on such a revolutionary platform.

So what are you waiting for?  Get in touch with us and let’s build the next great app!

In October of 2007, the Pastime was officially declared a Historical Landmark based upon the cultural contribution to the area.  In what began as a small grocery store in the 1920s, Pastime Restaurant has sustained its presence and grown into two successful locations.  The original Pastime Restaurant is located on South Blvd. in downtown Baton Rouge and Pastime Junior on Drusilla Lane in the Drusilla Shopping Center.

K-fx², Inc. and Diane Allen and Associates, a full service marketing and advertising agency, have teamed up with the Port of Greater Baton Rouge to improve the Port ‘s current site, www.PortGBR.com.  The Port of Greater Baton Rouge wants the new site to be a valuable source of information to its employees, partners, customers and the community.   As a leader among U.S. ports, the Port’s objective is to emphasize its importance to the economic development of Louisiana through its strategic location, versatile transportation offerings and shipping possibilities and excellent infrastructure. 

With a combination of innovative and creative design, the Port’s new site will be enhanced by providing a more user-friendly layout, quick informative links, current announcements and more interactive features, such as eNews for registered users.  The web site will also include improved features like aerial overviews of the facilities and current meteorological data.  The Port of Greater Baton Rouge is expected to unveil its new web site this Fall 2009.

Let’s assume we have a Zend Module for donations in our base, that allows a non-profit organization to accept donations via Authorize.net. Obviously we want the urls for the donations module to be secure. But what if our client also wanted to accept payments for event registrations. Do we want to hardcode certain urls with https://? No. Do we want to duplicate the code we use in php to redirect the donations module to a secure url? No.

So what’s the solution? A Custom Controller Plugin and the standard application.ini file in a Zend_Framework Application that allows us to define modules, controllers, and actions to require ssl.

An Example application.ini file

  modules.donations.require_ssl = true
  modules.events.registrations.require_ssl = true

The above example shows a snippet of our configuration file. There are three formats that we will use to enforce ssl :

modules.module_name.require_ssl = true

modules.module_name.controller_name.require_ssl = true

modules.module_name.controller_name.action_name.require_ssl = true

Now for the second part, we’ll load this Controller Plugin, that will check if any combination of module, controller and action require an ssl redirect. If we detect a redirect setting in the application.ini for any combination, we’ll rebuild the url with an https:// prefix, and redirect to that url and exit the execution stack.

Custom SSL Plugin

class Custom_Controller_Plugin_Ssl extends Zend_Controller_Plugin_Abstract {

	/**
	 * Check the application.ini file for security settings.
	 * If the url requires being secured, r ebuild a secure url
	 * and redirect.
	 *
	 * @param Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request
	 * @return void
	 * @author Travis Boudreaux
	 */
	public function preDispatch(Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request) {

		$shouldSecureUrl = false;

                $options = Zend_Registry::getInstance()->get('options');

		if (APPLICATION_ENVIRONMENT == ENV_PRODUCTION ) {

			//check configuration file for one of three require_ssl directives
			//secure an entire module with modules.module_name.require_ssl = true
			//secure an entire controller with modules.module_name.controller_name.require_ssl = true
			//secure an action with modules.module_name.controller_name.action_name.require_ssl = true
			if ($options['modules'][$request->module]['require_ssl'] ||
					$options['modules'][$request->module][$request->controller]['require_ssl'] ||
					$options['modules'][$request->module][$request->controller][$request->action]['require_ssl'] ){

				$shouldSecureUrl = true;

			}

			if ($shouldSecureUrl)	{

				$this->_secureUrl($request);

			}
		}
	}

	/**
	 * Check the request to see if it is secure.  If it isn't
	 * rebuild a secure url, redirect and exit.
	 *
	 * @param Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request
	 * @return void
	 * @author Travis Boudreaux
	 */
	protected function _secureUrl( Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request){

		$server = $request->getServer();
                $hostname = $server['HTTP_HOST'];

		if (!$request->isSecure()) {
			//url scheme is not secure so we rebuild url with secureScheme
			$url = Zend_Controller_Request_Http::SCHEME_HTTPS . "://" . $hostname . $request->getPathInfo();

			$redirector = Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::getStaticHelper('redirector');
	  	$redirector->setGoToUrl($url);
	  	$redirector->redirectAndExit();
	  }
	}
}

Hopefully this has been helpful. Feel free to reuse part or all of this code in your application, though we do not take any responsibilities of its use. We’d love to hear your comments and get some feedback.

LAM’s web site showcases the K-fx² team’s creativity and innovation through its unique features, such as the interactive map of Louisiana, which allows you to plan a trip by clicking on different areas of the state to see all of the museums and historic sites within your desired radius. The web site also provides news and professional development opportunities to the museum community, hosts classifieds and forums for its members, and is the hub for museum events and exhibits.