-
Looking for the perfect PHP IDE
I’ve got a problem. I haven’t found the perfect IDE for me. Yet. I’ve got problems with every software. Now I will try to explain the problems I have and maybe someone shows me the light and helps me to discover the perfect editor/IDE. …
-
My development tips
Another unsorted list of ideas this time about coding tips. …
-
Digressing about working with old code, refactoring and scope creep.
Maybe there’re people who write code without bugs and never need to change one line of their source code. That’s not me. I try to improve my coding skill for the years. That means sometimes I need to face against my old code and if need to rewrite it probably I will do in a different way. I always feel the desire to refactor it. Refactor code is a good thing but is not always viable.Let’s show an example. Nowadays I’ve embraced Zend coding standard. For instance one not camelized variable creeps me out. But in my early days as a PHP developer (almost ten years ago) I didn’t take care about any coding standards. If code worked, it was OK. Now I realized that’s not enough. Code must work. Indeed!. But it must be ready to be changed, adapted to new needs and meet new requirements, and another developer must be able to understand it. Last days before holidays I’ve been working adapting a project to PHP5.3. It’s not a hard job. Some functions have disappeared, now we only have one kind of regular expressions and a couple of things more. I need to check a lot of lines of code. Sometimes I blush myself when I see the code I wrote five or even eight years ago. I want to change a lot of things. Refactor again and again but I must remember that’s not in the scope of the project. The objective of the project is clear: The application must work in a server with PHP5.3. If I start to refactor code the project deviates from project’s main scope. That’s a clear scope creep’s signal. …
-
First impressions about namespaces in PHP
I’ve been working wih my first project using namenspaces in PHP. As a PHP developer I have been suffering the lack of a program language without namespaces for years. But now it’s over. Finally we have namespaces in PHP since PHP 5.3. My early impressions wasn’t good. I had a problem. I really liked PEAR naming conventions. I know that leads to those ugly long class names, but I felt very comfortable with them. I even started to write a post in my blog called “Things I don’t like in PHP. Namespaces”. But I decided not to publish it since have been working a bit seriously with them. Now I have use them and my impressions have been changed. I’ve embraced them and they are not so bad. They have the same advantages than PEAR naming conventions and they give us some extra benefits further. Here we have a great article about namenspaces in PHP5.3 …
-
Flushing files with PHP
Sometimes we need to show files as pdf from PHP. That’s pretty straightforward. …
-
Clustering PHP applications. Tips and hints
Sometimes a web server and a database is fair enough to meet our project requirements. But if the project scales we probably need to think in a clustered solution. This post is an attempt at being an unsorted list of ideas working with clustered PHP applications. Maybe more than a list of ideas is a list of problems that you will face when swapping from a standalone server to a clustered server. …
-
Vuvuzela in PHP
South Africa’s World Cup is here. Someone will win. We will remember goals, players, mistakes but definitely we will remember the sound of this world cup. The annoying vuvuzela. There’re filters to avoid this sound in the matches. And here is my personal contribution to the word cup. A vuvuzela in PHP. A standalone single php script with a mp3 Embedded inside. Put it in your server and enjoy with the sound. …
-
My website is slow. What can I do?
You are working with a website. The website works. All is perfect but your clients told you it’s very slow. You must face the problem and improve the behaviour of the web site. But remember all site works properly. There isn’t any errors. The common way to resolve problems (understand the problem, reproduce the problem in test environment, solve the problem) doesn’t fit in this scenario. What can we do? I want to give some recommendations to improve performance problems in this post. Let’s go …
-
Detecting errors and bottle necks in PHP.
In this post I want to make a short list of different ways to detect errors and bottle necks in our PHP projects. It’s an informal list of recommendations and best practises useful at least for me …
-
PHPDoc, code completion and iterations with PHP
Coding is very important part within our work as developers. Maybe it isn’t the outcome of our work. Our clients don’t really mind if our code is smart or not. They only want the product or service we give them. Code is our problem. However smart code and agile programming skills are really useful to accomplish with our objectives. One useful tool is PHPDoc. …
-
Building network services with PHP and xinetd
Not all is web and HTTP. Sometimes we need to create a network service listening to a port. We can create a TCP server in C, Java or even PHP but there’s a really helpful daemon in Linux that helps us to do it. This daemon is xinetd. In this article we are going to create a network service with PHP and xinretd. …
-
Sessions, comet and PHP
I faced this problem when I was developing a comet server but it can happen with any script that needs too many time. I have done a comet process. This process is very simple. Basically is a PHP script who looks the modification date of a file. When it changes, the script ends but if nothing happens the script ends after 30 seconds and start again (with a JavaScript loop). The script worked perfectly on sandbox. In production also worked (brilliant isn’t it?). But the problem appears when I open other tabs in the browser. The application became slow. Very slow. Every click, even really simple operations turned into unusable operations. I realized this behavior appear only when comet was enabled. …
-
Playing with PHP, CouchDB and ORM
I’m playing with PHP and CouchDB. After writing a class to connect PHP and CouchDB I’ve done a variation of the interface to use CouchDB with PHP in a similar way to ORM. Yes. I know ORM means Object Relational Mapping and CouchDB isn’t a Relational Database but have a look to the following interface: …
-
PHP and couchDB
Last days I’ve been playing with couchDB and PHP. There are several ways to use couchDB with PHP. There also are extensions but I want to build a simple library and I will show now the code. …
-
Building a simple template engine in PHP.
Yes that’s another template engine in PHP. I’ve been using Smarty for years. It’s easy to install and easy to use. But there is something I don’t like in Smarty. I need to learn another language (smarty markup) to create my templates. Normally my templates are not very complex. I only use them to move HTML code outside PHP. Basically my templates are: HTML and some variables that pass from PHP to tpl. Sometimes I need to do a loop. I know Smarty has a lot of helpers but I never use them. …
-
Easy trick to move cache files to RAM without coding a PHP line.
Some year ago I faced to a problem to increase the performance of a web application. This application used Smarty as template engine. Smarty ‘compiles’ the templates (the tpl files) into tpl.php files. …
-
Building a REST client with asynchronous calls using PHP and curl
One month ago I posted an article called Building a simple HTTP client with PHP. A REST client. In this post I tried to create a simple fluid interface to call REST webservices in PHP. Some days ago I read an article and one light switch on on my mind. I can use curl’s “multi” functions to improve my library and perform simultaneous calls very easily. …
-
Pivot tables in PHP
In my work as developer I normally need to transform data from one format to another. Typically our input data is a database and we need to show the database data into a report, datagrid or something similar. It’s very typical to use pivot tables. It’s not very dificult to handle pivot tables by hand but the work is always the same: groups by, totals, subtotals, totals per row …. Now I want to write a class to pivot tables in PHP with the most common requirements (at least for me). I know we can create pivot tables with SQL. Group by and some other database specific commands like oracle’s GROUP BY ROLLUP/CUBE can do the work, but I like clean SQL querys. The business logic must be in PHP and SQL must be as clean as we can. …
-
Building a simple HTTP client with PHP. A REST client
REST webservices are cool. Nowadays there are a lot of APIS with REST and in combination with JSONP is really easy to build applications. Actually I am playing with CouchDB. It has a nice RESTfull API and I want to use it with PHP. There are several PHP libraries, even a nice PHP extension to work with CouchDB. I like Zend Framework’s REST client but as exercise I will develop a HTTP client. My idea is to create a simple class that allows me to perform GET, POST and DELETE requests to a remote server. …
-
Clean way to call to multiple xmlrpc remote servers
The problem: …
Gonzalo Ayuso
Web Architect
Personal blog since 2008
