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Deployment tip: How to use environ variables to create different environments with PHP
If you use a framework such as Symfony2 this problem is solved for you, but if you aren’t using any framework you probably need to solve it in one way or another. Let me explain it. One typical scenario: production and development. We have one development database and another one for production. Each database has it’s own connection string. Probably we need to hard-code the connection string within the PHP code, but obviously if we are in the development environment we are going to use one connection string and the production one in the production environment. We can solve the problem with exotic tricks in the deployment script. I like to use exactly the same source code in all environments. Exactly the same means exactly the same, so I cannot change the code before pushing it to production. Mainly because normally my production environment usually it’s a cloud, and change the code it’s a mess. What can we do? …
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Encode our PHP code into spaces and new line characters
According to one my last blog post with an exotic usage of dynamic includes with PHP we will keep on with something still more exotic. The idea is to create clean code. And what is cleaner than the blank? …
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Building a simple API proxy server with PHP
This days I’m playing with Backbone and using public API as a source. The Web Browser has one horrible feature: It don’t allow to fetch any external resource to our host due to the cross-origin restriction. For example if we have a server at localhost we cannot perform one AJAX request to another host different than localhost. Nowadays there is a header to allow it: Access-Control-Allow-Origin. The problem is that the remote server must set up this header. For example I was playing with github’s API and github doesn’t have this header. If the server is my server, is pretty straightforward to put this header but obviously I’m not the sysadmin of github, so I cannot do it. What the solution? One possible solution is, for example, create a proxy server at localhost with PHP. With PHP we can use any remote API with curl (I wrote about it here and here for example). It’s not difficult, but I asked myself: Can we create a dummy proxy server with PHP to handle any request to localhost and redirects to the real server, Instead of create one proxy for each request?. Let’s start. Problably there is one open source solution (tell me if you know it) but I’m on holidays and I want to code a little bit (I now, it looks insane but that’s me :) ). …
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Book review: CouchDB and PHP Web Development
Finally the new Book “CouchDB and PHP Web Development” written by Tim Juravich is ready an in my hands. It was my first experience as technical reviewer. The author contacted me by email and the editor sent me book chapters to review. Basically I gave my opinion, I test the code and I hunt for bugs. It was a great experience. Now is really cool to see the book in my hands. …
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Scroll desktop's Web pages remotely with our smartphone, using Node.js and WebSockets
Why this script? OK. It was a crazy idea. It started with one “Is it possible? Yes, let’s code it” in my mind. Let start. I want to scroll one web page in the TV’s web browser (or PC’s browser) using my smartphone lying on my couch. I’ve got a wireless mouse so I don’t really need it, but scroll the TV browser with the smartphone sounds cool, isn’t it? …
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Building a simple Dependency Injection Container with PHP
If you are looking for a small Dependency Injection Container with PHP maybe you need have look to Pimple. …
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Building a simple SQL wrapper with PHP. Part 2.
In one of our last post we built a simple SQL wrapper with PHP. Now we are going to improve it a little bit. We area going to use a class Table instead of the table name. Why? Simple. We want to create triggers. OK we can create triggers directly in the database but sometimes our triggers need to perform operations outside the database, such as call a REST webservice, filesystem’s logs or things like that. …
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Strange behavior in PHP with method visibility
Normally I feel very comfortable with PHP, but not all is good. There’s some things I don’t like. One is the lack of real annotations and another one is this rare behaviour with visibility within the OO. Let me explain this a little bit. …
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Database connection pooling with PHP and React (node.php)
Last saturday I meet a new hype: “React” also known as “node.php”. Basically it’s the same idea than node.js but built with PHP instead of javascript. Twitter was on fire with this new library (at least my timeline). The next sunday was a rainy day and because of that I spent the afternoon hacking a little bit with this new library. Basically I want to create a database connection pooling. It’s one of the things that I miss in PHP. I wrote a post here some time ago with this idea with one exotic experiment building one connection pooling using gearman. Today the idea is the same but now with React. Let’s start …
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Building a simple SQL wrapper with PHP
If we don’t use an ORM within our projects we need to write SQL statements by hand. I don’t mind to write SQL. It’s simple and descriptive but sometimes we like to use helpers to avoid write the same code again and again. Today we are going to create a simple library to help use to write simple SQL queries. Let’s start: …
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Asynchronous queries to PostgreSql database from the browser with node.js and socket.io
Normally we perform our database connection at server side with PHP and PDO for example. In this post I will show a simple technique to send queries to our database (PostgreSql in this example) asynchronously using node.js and socket.io. …
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Inject dependencies via PhpDoc
Last month I attended to Codemotion conference. I was listening to a talk about Java and I saw the “@inject” decorator. I must admit I switched off my mind from the conference and I started to take notes in my notebook. The idea is to implement something similar in PHP. It’s a pity we don’t have real decorators in PHP. I really miss them. We need to use PhpDoc. It’s not the same than real decorators in other programming languages. That’s my prototype. Let’s go. …
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How to use eval() without using eval() in PHP
Yes I know. Eval() is evil. If our answer is to use eval() function, we are probably asking the wrong question. When we see an eval() function all our coding smell’s red lights start flashing inside our mind. Definitely it’s a bad practice. …
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Deploying tips for Web Applications
I’ve seen the same error in too many projects. When we start a project normally we start with a paper, a white board or something similar. After the first drafts we start coding. In the early stage of the project we want to build a working prototype. It’s natural. It’s important to have a working prototype as fast as we can. The things are different in a browser. All works within a white board, but with a working alpha release we will feel “real” sensations. …
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How to protect from SQL Injection with PHP
Security is a part of our work as developers. We need to ensure our applications against malicious attacks. SQL Injection is one of the most common possible attacks. Basically SQL Injection is one kind of attack that happens when someone injects SQL statements in our application. You can find a lot of info about SQL Injection attack. Basically you need to follow the security golden rule …
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Checking the performance of PHP exceptions
Sometimes we use exceptions to manage the flow of our scripts. I imagine that the use of exceptions must have a performance lack. Because of that I will perform a small benchmark to test the performance of one simple script throwing exceptions and without them. Let’s start: …
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Working with clouds. Multi-master file-system replication with CouchDB
When we want to work with a cloud/cluster one of the most common problems is the file-system. It’s mandatory to be able to scale horizontally (scale out). We need to share the same file-system between our nodes. We can do it with a file server (samba for example), but this solution inserts a huge bottleneck into our application. There’s different distributed filesystems such as Apache Hadoop (inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System). In this post we’re going to build a really simple distributed storage system based on NoSql. Let’s start. …
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Coding Katas, TDD and Katayunos
2011 is about to finish, and I want to speak about my way through the world of TDD. In the beginning of the year appeared a new cool project called 12meses12katas (12 months - 12 katas). The aim of the project was to propose one coding kata per month, and allow to the people to publish their implementation of the kata over github. In the line of this project a crew of crazy coders started another cool project called Katayunos. Katayunos is a small pun with the word Desayuno (Breakfast) and Coding Kata. It’s something similar than a code retreat. The purpose of the katayunos was to meet together in one place one saturday morning, have a breakfast and play with pair programming and TDD with one coding kata. Something too geek to explain to non-geek people, I known, but if you are reading this, It’s probable that your understand this ;). Our first katayuno was in the cafeteria of one Hotel. One cold Saturday morning (a really cold one believe me). The main problem was that we didn’t have any electrical plug, so our pomodoros were marked by the laptop batteries. …
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Playing with the new PHP5.4 features
PHP5.4 it’s close and it’s time to start playing with the new cool features. I’ve created a new Virtual Machine to play with the new features available within PHP5.4. I wrote a post with the most exciting features (at least for me) when I saw the feature list in the alpha version. Now the Release Candidate is with us, so it’s the time of start playing with them. I also discover really cool features that I pass over in my first review …
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Working with Request objects in PHP (II). Back to the past
In one of my last post “Working with request objects in PHP”, I wrote a simple library to handle request objects. According that post let’s do a bit of history of PHP. In the early years of PHP (PHP3 - PHP4) one of the cool features of PHP was the “variable injection” inside our projects with register_globals=on. If you had the following a url: …
Gonzalo Ayuso
Web Architect
Personal blog since 2008
