Entries tagged php
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Is greater comfort with Windows a good enough reason to switch from PHP to ASP.NET?
Learning Linux really isn’t that hard, and it will dramatically increase your potential horizons as a programmer. Install Ubuntu on a virtual machine on your laptop and start running through some tutorials.
[... 53 words]How log in my e-mail and send sms via php?
If you want to send SMS via PHP I suggest taking a look at www.twilio.com—they are pretty inexpensive and ridiculously easy to get started with.
[... 44 words]What is the best framework to use, Yii or Ruby on Rails?
This is a big decision, and it’s worth taking the time to pick what’s the best fit for you. I recommend going through the tutorials for each one, building the basic application they describe and seeing which made the most sense to you. As a Django developer, I suggest trying that framework too :)
[... 126 words]How can I get access to the PHP script of websites like Dropbox?
If a website doesn’t deliberately publish its server-side code (some sites like reddit do this, but it’s pretty rare) then you won’t be able to see it. You can search for an open source clone but these will often be pretty low quality—the smartest open source developers tend to work on libraries that solve common problems rather than putting their efforts in to building complete clones of existing sites.
[... 175 words]Does creating a zip file with php use more RAM then CPU? Or vise versa? Also, is it faster to use a system call, or the php zip library? Exec (zip filename.zip) vs. $zip =new ZipArchive().
You can find out the answer yourself using a very simple benchmark—just call time() before and after each option and loop them a few thousand times to calculate an average.
[... 74 words]Which should I learn: Python or PHP?
Python will teach you more about programming than PHP—and you’ll be able to learn PHP easily if you learn Python first.
[... 36 words]System Administration: What service/product do you recommend for central logging of events and errors from multiple servers? Why?
We rolled our own solution to this using MongoDB, due to its super-fast writes and ability to store, index and search JSON. We were also attracted by its capped collections, which make it easy to e.g. only log the last 100,000 items.
[... 113 words]How can you build a search engine for a website built in PHP/MySQL?
There are a bunch of options.
[... 310 words]What are XML feed best practices?
It sounds like you’re pretty much screwed already, if you’re dealing with companies that still think FTPing XML around is a sensible thing to do.
[... 364 words]Is there a framework that allows me to collect input from individual users, and then charge for the aggregate and analysis of that data?
No—your needs are extremely specific. You’re going to have to build this yourself.
[... 95 words]What are some good examples of a first PHP app to build for someone who is learning?
Build a blog. Blog engines are, in my opinion, the ideal starter project for learning any server-side web technology.
[... 172 words]Can someone improve their knowledge of programming in Ruby or PHP by using a framework like Rails or Zend, or does the framework just do a lot of the work for you without giving you an opportunity to learn from it?
Read the source, luke.
[... 82 words]How are real time web applications achievable with PHP?
You don’t need to build your comet server using the same technology as the rest of your site.
[... 181 words]What are the tradeoffs (e.g. development speed, performance, scalability) between using various php frameworks, ruby/rails, or python/django? Is there any reason to choose one overwhelmingly over another?
At this point, I’d argue that the decision between them comes down to programming language rather than framework—the frameworks have mostly converged on a very similar set of features.
[... 145 words]In what circumstances should one use “magic quotes” in PHP?
Absolutely never. Magic quotes was a badly designed feature, and PHP has been trying to escape its legacy for years. If you are constructing SQL strings using string concatenation you’re asking for trouble—use prepared statements or a library that interpolates and correctly escapes variables for you.
[... 65 words]djng—a Django powered microframework
djng is nearly two weeks old now, so it’s about time I wrote a bit about the project.
[... 1,501 words]Getting from point A to B (the right way)
If your laptop is relatively recent it might have hardware support for virtualization (Intel Core Duo chips do, for example). If so, it’s worth looking in to using VMWare or Parallels to run a virtual linux server locally on your machine. You’ll need a fair amount of RAM for this as well—2 GB minimum probably.
[... 194 words]Testing a new version of IXR
Almost two years to the day since the last release, I’ve put together a new version of IXR, my PHP XML-RPC library. I haven’t published it on the site just yet as I want to make sure any bugs are ironed out first, but you can grab a copy here:
[... 177 words]PHP 5 is out!
It’s finally here! Unfortunately PHP.net, while a great site in most respects, fails miserably when it comes to permalinks for news items and/or new software releases. You can grab it from their downloads page, and read more about it in the changelog. Now all it needs is widespread adoption. Unfortunately, something tells me PHP 4 is going to stick around for a long, long time.
Simple mini-languages with PHP
I linked to PDML the other day in my blogmarks, but beyond a cursory glance I hadn’t really dug in to what makes it tick. Dumky over at Curiosity is bliss points out that it makes use of an ingenious output buffering trick. To create a PDML document, you add a single line to the top of a page that includes and executes the PDML library (written in PHP). The rest of the document is written in the custom PDML markup language. The script uses output buffering to capture the rest of the page, then executes a callback function that actually processes the page content (see ob_start() for details).
[... 195 words]PHP and Apache 2.0
For as long as Apache 2 has been stable, the PHP manual has carried this strongly worded warning:
[... 274 words]Zend PHP 5 Goodies
Zend have quietly released a veritable treasure trove of PHP 5 tutorials via their PHP5 InfoCenter:
[... 212 words]PHP 5 Release Candidate 1
I haven’t blogged much about PHP in a while because I’ve been up to my nose in mod_python and loving every minute of it. This news is just too important to miss: PHP 5 Release Candidate 1 has been released, bringing the first production-ready release tantilisingly close. While I doubt PHP 5 will tempt me back it’s definitely an exciting upgrade—my biggest complaint with PHP 4 is the brain-dead object model which defaults to copying whole objects rather than passing references, and this is one of the many things addressed by PHP 5. The new libxml2 powered XML features sound really powerful, and SQLite as an on-board database should be ideal for knocking out small stand-alone applications without needing to set up a mySQL database for them.
[... 173 words]XML highlights for PHP 5
XML in PHP5: An in-depth look into advanced XML features (via Keith) does exactly what it says on the tin. Here are the bits that caught my eye:
[... 155 words]New PHP community site
Via The Farm, Chris Shiflett is calling for assistance in setting up a new PHP community site to run along similar lines to use Perl. Chris has already secured an offer of hosting and support from O’Reilly and is now seeking offers of help from potential contributers. PHP has long needed a site of this kind (PHP Builder has lost a lot of momentum since being sold by Tim Perdue) so this could be a worth while project to get involved with if you have the time.
[... 140 words]An apology
It turns out that the Javascript on PHP.net mentioned previously was not deliberately obfuscated to protect the code from prying eyes; it was merely compressed to reduce the size of the script. See this comment for further details. I’d like to apologise to the maintainers of PHP.net for jumping the gun on this issue. Incidentally, the unobfuscated code is now available in CVS.
The good and the ugly
PHP.net has a new feature on their search page—a really nice implementation of an auto complete text widget in Javascript. Even better, the search page is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and uses CSS for the layout. Let’s hope this is an indication of things to the come for the rest of the site, which still mostly consists of tag soup.
[... 368 words]Easy installers for PHP scripts
I tried out FUDforum last night, after Rasmus Lerdorf recommended it in a comment on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Feature wise, it’s pretty impressive but still doesn’t quite do it for me—I want something that’s trivial to integrate with an existing authentication system and outputs valid HTML (or XHTML) out of the box. Rasmus says it’s the only board he’s seen that doesn’t have obvious security holes though so it’s probably worth checking out if you need to set up a forum of that kind.
[... 275 words]The difference between POST and GET
How important is the ability to tell the difference between data sent by POST and data sent by GET (i.e in the query string) when developing web applications? Some web frameworks (such as PHP) provide separate mechanisms for accessing POST and GET data. Others (such as Python’s cgi module) provide a single interface to form information that doesn’t distinguish between the two. I already have a strong opinion on this but I’m going to leave it open for discussion here for a bit before weighing in.
PHP’s date() function in Python
In switching from PHP to Python I’m discovering an increasing number of PHP functions that I’ve learnt to rely on but have no direct equivalent in the Python standard library. Often Python simply provides a different way of approaching the problem, but old habits die hard and I’ve been replicating some of PHP’s functionality in Python for my own personal use.
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