Shibboleth authentication adapter for the Zend Framework

I have been running some sites under a Shibboleth Service Provider for quite a long time. In some cases I had to modify applications written in PHP to be able to use Shibboleth authentication. But now I reached the point, when I had to implement Shibboleth authentication in my own application. Since I'm using Zend Framework for years, the natural way to achieve that was implementing a Shibboleth authentication adapter for the Zend_Auth component.

Simple horizontal text scrolling with Ext Core 3 (marquee replacement)

For one of my projects I needed to implement a line of scrolling text at the top or at the bottom of the browser window. One of the options was to use the non-standard marquee HTML element, which I rejected for obvious reasons. Plus, it didn't work very well - the motion was not smooth and there were too few options to customize its behaviour. So I decided to implement the text scrolling using Javascript.

 There are plenty of code examples on the web. In fact, it's fairly easy, you just need to update the text position using CSS properties. Since I'm used to the ExtJS framework i wrote a simple class using the Ext Core 3 library. Actually I didn't need the high-level features of ExtJS, but I wanted to take advantage of the cross-borswer support, that's why I used the low-level library Ext Core.

Relyiable hashes in PHP

Sometimes we need to maintain simple hashes, but at the same time we don't want to have them cracked too easily. When using a hash function on a not too complex string (like a single word), there is a risk, that the hash can be cracked using rainbow tables in few minutes.

Initializing objects from other objects in PHP

Sometimes we need to initialize an object based on another object. Typically, if we have a class MyClass and subclass MyExtendedClass with some additional functionality, we may need to turn a MyClass object into a MyExtendedClass object. How to do that easily in PHP?

Dokuwiki Shibboleth authentication backend

DokuWiki is a standards compliant, simple to use Wiki, mainly aimed at creating documentation of any kind. It is targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki and eases the creation of structured texts. All data is stored in plain text files – no database is required. (description taken from DokuWiki homepage).