PHPRO Articles

nWire Eclipse Zend Plugin Review

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:41:50 +0000

PHPRO.ORG receives many emails requesting reviews for magazines, web sites, application development tools, applications, books etc. Now and again, one of these catches the eye and deserves further inspection. Recently, a request for a product called nWire arrived which allegedly "accelerates PHP development by helping developers navigate through their code and better understand the architecture of their application". Here is a closer look at nWire.

Trim All Members Of An Array With PHP

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:00:21 +0000

This little helper function provides a simple method to trim the white space from the beginning and end of all the elements in an array. It uses the call to array trim, which, in turn, calls the trim() function. The iteration is handled internally and so provides maximum performance then dealing with the the problem in user code.

Dynamically Create Menu With PHP DOM

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:43:06 +0000

Programatically createing menus using php is a task many programmers will need to do over and over again in developing applications and web sites. Most PHP coders will have their own menu generation class that will take an array or an item and add it to a HTML un-ordered list or other tag and the styling is handled with CSS. This has proven to be a worthy solution to menu creation, however, PHP already has all the tools and classes built in to create a menu using DOM. It is both powerful and extensible and further eliminates for yet another class in your tree.

PHP 5.3 Released

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:29:30 +0000

Today marks the release of the much awaited 5.3.0 version of PHP. The release contains many of the features that the development community have been requesting for some time, along with a plethora of bug fixes and optimizations to boost reliablity and performance.

WEB2BB 0.0.7 Released

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:43:46 +0000

This release sees the completion of the namespacing. All classes now belong to the web2bb namespace, allowing users t o create their own namespaces without risk of collisions. This release also sees the addition of a configurable error 404 controller. The default behaviour can be adjusted to use any controller should a page not be found. Configurati on is based on an ini option in config.ini.php.

WEB2BB 0.0.6 Released

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:53:57 +0000

From this release on, namespaces have been introduced. The benefits of namespaces are multiple but needless to say, the greatest benefit will be to those developing with multiple libraries, or those who wish to swap out or replace existing libries in the system. This is a simple to achieve by creating a namespace alias. The implementation contains a single system wide namespace named 'web2bb'

WEB2BB 0.0.5 Released

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 07:25:26 +0000

This release shows the framework beginning to take shape from its humble beginnings. By utilizing some of the feature s in PHP 5.3 and PHP 6, the size of the code base has been reduced and much of the complexity removed. It is hoped th at the core functionality from this release will remain for all future releases. As always, feedback is welcomed.

Two Way Encryption With PHP Mcrypt

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:37:14 +0000

This class provides the functionality to encrypt and decrypt a text string. The class makes use of the PHP mcrypt extension which provides the ability to create two way encryption, or decoding of text messages.

When Tutorials Attack

Wed, 20 May 2009 20:41:46 +0000

In a recent series of tutorials released by SUN Developers Community a few notable omissions glared back from the web page. Like many PHP tutorials that pollute the web, there was a little, or no error checking, or error handling in the provided code examples. These omissions are paramount to development in any language, particularly for those who's livelihood relies on the strength of perceived enterprise readiness of the technology. To the new comer, these tutorials are the source of truth, and quality code examples are required if these new comers are going to produce quality code.

Creating Secure Passwords

Tue, 19 May 2009 11:06:21 +0000

The greatest security risk to password protection, is the user who created the password. Most developers have at sometime needed to create a system where passwords were required. Password protection comes in various implementations, from accessing a single file, or gaining entry to a system, or administration panel. The protection provided by passwords however, is only as secure as the password itself. A password that is predictable, or easy to guess can leave your security model less than adequate. However, it is not just end users who are at fault, as there is plenty of finger pointing at developers who permit insecure passwords to be used.

Farewell To Anthony Rumble

Mon, 18 May 2009 04:22:21 +0000

Today I joined a veritable who's-who of the Linux and open source community to farewell one of its champions. Anthony Rumble, who passed away on Friday May 8, 2009. Anthony was a founding member of the Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG) and AUUG and founder of Everything Linux.

Validate Date Using PHP

Fri, 15 May 2009 07:41:30 +0000

PHP provides many date manipulation devices and an entire suite of date functionality with the datetime class. However, this does not address date validation, that is, what format a date is received in. The PHP strtotime() function will accept many forms of dates in most human readable strings. The issue with strtotime is that there is no way to account for differing date formats, eg: 12/05/2010. Depending on what country a user is from, this date could have several meanings, such as which is the month, and which is day field. By splitting the date into its respective fields, each segment can be checked with the PHP checkdate function. The function below validates a date by splitting the date in year, month, day and using these as arguments to the checkdate function.

Convert Object To Array With PHP

Wed, 13 May 2009 09:02:43 +0000

Converting an object to an array using PHP comes with a small gotcha. One would be forgiven for thinking it is merely a task of casting the object and the job can be completed with a single line of code. This works well for simple objects, however, the task increases in complexity in line with the objects complexity.

Convert Fixed Width To Array

Fri, 08 May 2009 09:57:34 +0000

Following on from a recent posting a request was recieved to convert a fixed width file into an array. The process is quite similar to creating a class as the file is iterated over and the array of positions and widths are used to build the array. In this example, the SplFileObject and SPL CachingIterator are used to traverse each line of the file, and then the fixedWidthToArray() function takes care of the business of creating an array of fields from each line.

Calculate Age With PHP

Thu, 07 May 2009 12:45:12 +0000

Checking dates in PHP can be problematic as PHP primarily concerns itself with date manipulation which revolves around unix timestamps. This is a good thing, mostly. Unix timestamps however, have not concept of leap years, thus it is difficult, though not impossible, to get an accurate date calculation from them. When dates need to be accurate for legal reasons, it is vital that the leap years are considered. Here several solutions are put forward, each nicer than the previous.

Convert Fixed Width File To CSV

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:14:00 +0000

This class provides a quick and simple method of converting fixed width files into CSV. It makes use of the SplFileObject to do the iterations, making it very efficient as an iterator knows only the current member. Options are provided to specify the end of line character and field delimiter. This class is especially useful if data needs to come from a fixed width file, and inserted into a database, as most databases support the importation of data from CSV files.

Read Line From File

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:45:40 +0000

Reading files in PHP can be a tricky business if not handled correctly. Most often when confronted with reading a line from, the nearest tool to hand is the file() function. The problem with using the file() function is that it reads the whole file into an array, and thus, into memory. Any subsequent operations on the array, such as foreach() result in an internal copy of the array for PHP to work on. Should the file be a two gig log file, then the result could be up to four gigs worth of memory being devoured to gain a few hundred k of text.

Introduction to PHP and MySQL

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 07:19:43 +0000

This tutorial is aimed at those new to PHP and MySQL. The object of this tutorials is to show by way of example how to use php to CREATE a database, how to CREATE a table, how to INSERT data into a database, and how to SELECT that data and display. Each task is accompanied with examples for each of the mysql, mysqli and PDO extensions. An additional section has been added for the inclusion of useful tips when working with MySQL. The tips include random queries for often requested operations that many PHP users put into their PHP code where it properly belongs in the database.

Embedding PHP In CSS

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 07:42:24 +0000

Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of using PHP with websites, is getting variables into CSS. Having variables stored in an ini file, config file or even a database can make the updating of the look and feel of a site simple, however, CSS files, by default, do not parse PHP. Of course, the web server could be told to parse CSS as PHP in the same way it does for HTML. AddType application/x-httpd-php .css With the addition of the above line in httpd.conf or in a .htaccess, the web server will now parse PHP code that is within the CSS files. This is one solution, but a better method may be at hand.

Image To Ascii Art With PHP

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:54:12 +0000

This PHP function creates a simple ascii art rendering of a jpg image. It uses GD to do the grunt work and some simple bit shifting to allocate shades. Colors are then moved into hex values and the text generated for output to the browser. Ascii art from an image with PHP is now easy.