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Watermarks in our images with PHP and Gearman
In my last post I’ve tried to explain how to add a dynamic watermarks in our images using PHP and the GD library. Someone told me in a comment that he has used something similar, but he had to disable it because of the use of huge resources. Probably the use of the solution of the previous post doesn’t scale well. If you have a hight traffic site your memory and CPU usage will increase a lot because of the image transformation (especially if you work with big images). It’d be better if you can generate the watermarks offline, but if is mandatory to create them dynamically (for example we need to place the current timestamp), there are other solutions. …
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Watermarks in our images with PHP and mod_rewrite
Imagine you have a set of images and you need to add watermark to all of them. You can do the work with an image editor (Gimp or Photoshop for example). It’s easy work but if your image library is big, the easy work become into hard. But imagine again you need to add a dynamic watermark, let’s say the current timestamp. To solve this problem we can use PHP’s GD image function set. …
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Speed up page page load combining javascript files with PHP
One of the golden rules when we want a high performance web site is minimize the HTTP requests. Normally we have several JavaScript files within our projects. It’s a very good practice to combine all our JavaScript files into an only one file. We can do it manually. Not a hard work. We only need to copy and paste the source files into our single js file. There’s even tools to do it. You can have look to Yslow (if you don’t know it yet). That’s a good solution if your project is finished. But if your project is alive and you are changing it, it’s helpful to spare your JavaScript files between several files. It’s good to organize them (at least for me). So we need to choose between high performance and development comfort. Because of that I like to use the simple script I’m going to show now. Let’s start. …
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Function decorators in PHP with PHPDoc and Annotations
This days I’m playing with annotations in PHP. PHP, at least just now, doesn’t support annotations natively like Java. I hope it will be available in next versions but if we want to use them already, we need to create “fake” annotations within PHPDoc. We also have another problem. The PHP’s built-in’s reflection functions cannot parse properly PHPDoc’s annotations but hopefully we have a great library called addendum to do this. …
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PHP Template Engine Comparison. Part 2 (versus Plain PHP)
In my last post I created a small (and very personal) test of different templating engines in PHP (Smarty, Haanga and Twiw). Someone posted a comment asking for the comparison between those template engines and old school phtml. OK I’ve done some tests. It’s a bit difficult to create the template inheritance (without cloning one of the template engines and creating a new one) so I have one approximation with a simple include. It’s not the same but it’s similar. I’ve also implemented cycle filter (OK I’ve borrowed getCycle function from Twig. Not really implemented ;) ) …
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PHP Template Engine Comparison
I’m going to face a project using a template engine with PHP. Because of that I’m will perform a small benchmark test of several PHP template engines. That’s not an exhaustive performance test. It’s only my personal test. Template engines has a lot of features but I normally only use a few of them and the other features very seldom. In this performance test I will check the same features under different template engines to see the syntax differences and the performance. The template engines selected for the test are Smarty, Twig and Haanga. Let’s start: …
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Using PHP classes to store configuration data
In my last projects I’m using something I think is useful and it’s not a common practice in our PHP projects. That’s is the usage of a plain PHP’s class for the application’s configuration. Let me explain it. Normally we use ini file for configuration. PHP has a built-in function for parse ini file. It converts the ini file into a PHP array …
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My VIM configuration for PHP development.
Keeping on with my continuous search for the perfect IDE I’ve resumed my fight against VIM. As someone told me the learning of vim is a road of pain. It’s something like going to the gym. We known that going to the gym is good and healthy but it’s hard and painfully especially at the beginning. The learning curve of vim is hard. Vim is rare, or at least it’s different than all other IDEs. In this post I don’t want to create a vim tutorial (there are a lot of on the web). I want to share my actual vim configuration and the plugins I normally use. The configuration is not very original. It’s based on Matthew Weier O’Phinney configuration. You can find here a great post about vim in Matthew Weier’s blog. VIM is not my default IDE yet. I hope to swap to VIM soon but I feel myself slower when I code comparing with Netbeans or ZendStudio, and slow means less productive but I also feel if invest more time vim can be really productive. Here we are my vim plug-ins: …
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Keep our PostgreSQL databases syncronized with PHP. Database version control.
Last October I attended to PHP Barcelona 2010. One of the talk I really wanted to see was “Database version control without pain”. In this talk Harrie Verveer showed us different tools to keep synchronized our databases. This is a really common problem working with databases. Source code is well covered with source control management tools. I normally use mercurial (hg) but with git, bazaar or svn we can cover all our needs within source code. We create source code at development server and push the changes to production. It’s really easy to keep synchronized all our code. But with databases it’s different. Maybe Oracle’s people are few steps above the rest and they have something similar than source code control for database schema’s natively in the database. If you add a new column to a table, your schema will be transformed into a new version. Oracle database is great. It has incredible features and really good performance, if you can afford the fee. In this post I will try to solve this problem with PostgreSQL. A really good database similar than Oracle and open source and free (as “free beer” also) …
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Real-life example of Closure usage with PHP5.3
One of the new improvements in new PHP5.3 version are the Closures. Here you are a real-life example where closures are really useful for me. Imagine the following scenario. A very common scenario at least in my daily work. We have a recordset from a SQL: …
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Protect files within public folders with mod_rewrite and PHP
Here’s the problem. We have a legacy application (or a WordPress blog for the example) and we want to protect the access to the application according to our corporate single sign on. We can create a plug-in in WordPress to ensure only our single sign-on’s session cookie is activated. …
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Database connection pooling with PHP and gearman
Handling Database connections with PHP is pretty straightforward. Just open database connection, perform the actions we need, and close it. There’s a little problem. We cannot create a pull of database connections. We need to create the connection in every request. Create and destroy, again and again. There are some third-party solutions like SQL relay or pgpool2 (if you use PostgreSQL like me). In this post I’m going to try to explain a personal experiment to create a connection pooling using gearman. Another purpose of this experiment is create a prepared statements’ cache not only for the current request but also for all ones. Let’s start. …
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Quality assurance ideas in agile developement
Nowadays being agile is cool. All people is speaking about Scrum and agile development. There’s even people going far away and speak about Kanban. Agile development isn’t a new idea. Maybe it’s only setting up a name to an old one.Quality assurance activities should be designed to identify missing, ineffective or inefficient policies, processes and procedures used in the project. According to the PMBOK guide there’s a tool to perform quality audits called root analysis. Basically root analysis aims to find the source and the solution of the problem and helps to determine inefficiencies. Performed it regularly you can fine tune processes. The steps to perform root analysis technique: …
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Speed up PHP scripts with asynchronous database queries
That’s the situation. A web application with 4 heavy queries. Yes I know you can use a cache or things like that but imagine you must perform the four queries yes or yes. As I say before the four database queries are heavy ones. 2 seconds per one. Do it sequentially, that’s means our script will use at least 8 seconds (without adding the extra PHP time). Eight seconds are a huge time in a page load. …
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Performance analysis using bind parameters with PDO and PHP.
Some months ago a work mate asked me for the differences between using bind variables versus executing the SQL statement directly as a string throughout a PDO connection. …
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Live video streaming with PHP
Picture this. We want to stream live video. In fact don’t need PHP. We only need a flash player (or HTML5) and our live feed. The problem appear when we need to offer some kind of security. For example we want to show videos only to registered users based on our authentication system. Imagine we’re using sessions for validate users. That’s means we cannot put the media in a public folder and point our media player to those files. We can obfuscate the file name but it’ll remain public. In this small tutorial We’re going to see how to implement it with PHP. Let’s start. …
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Building an ORM with PHP.
First of all I must clear one thing. If you are looking for a full ORM you must take a look to Doctrine or maybe to the new version, still not stable, Doctrine2. Doctrine is probably the most advanced PHP project that we can find. Having said that let’s start with Nov/Orm. What’s the motivation for me to build this ORM? The answer is a bit ambiguous. I like SQL. It allows us to speak with the database in a very easy way. When I want to connect with the database with PHP I like PDO. It’s a great extension. But my problem is the following one: I need to write SQL and I need to know the names of the tables and the names of the fields and write them within my SQL string again and again. So the idea I figured out was to create a set of classes based on my tables, in a similar way than traditional ORMs to help me to autocomplete the fields and table names. PHP’s IDEs help us with the autocomplete of PHP but not with SQL. You must change the perspective or even the software. If my tables are mapped with PHP objects in a particular way I can get two objectives at the same time. …
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Using a stream wrapper to access CouchDb attachments with PHP
I’m still working in my filesystem with CouchDb. After creating a library to enable working with PHP and CouchDB (see the post here), and after using Monkey Patching to override standard PHP’s filesystem functions. I’ve created another solution now. Thanks to a comment in my last post (many thanks Benjamin) I’ve discovered that it’s possible to create a stream wrapper in PHP (I thought it was only available with a C extension). …
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Using Monkey Patching to store files into CouchDb using the standard filesystem functions with PHP
Let’s go a little further in our CouchDb storage system with PHP. I will show you why. We have some files using PHP’s filesystem functions and we want to change them to the new interface with the Nov\CouchDb\Fs library. We’ve got the following code: …
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Using CouchDb as filesystem with PHP
One of the problems I need to solve in my clustered PHP applications is where to store files. When I say files I’m not speaking about source code. I’m speaking about additional data files, such as download-able pdfs, logs, etc. Those files must be on every node of the cluster. One possible approach to the solution is to use a distributed filesystem, rsync or maybe use a file-server mounted on every node. Another solution may be the usage of CouchDb. CouchDb has two great features to meet or requirements with this problem. It allows us to store files as attachments and it also allows to perform a great and very easy multi-master replica system. …
Gonzalo Ayuso
Web Architect
Personal blog since 2008
