-
Talk about node.js and WebSockets
Last friday I spoke about node.js and Websockets with the people of The Mêlée. The talk was an introduction to node.js and focused in the new HTML5 feature: the WebSockets. …
-
Working with Request objects in PHP
Normally when we work with web applications we need to handle Request objects. Requests are the input of our applications. According to the golden rule of security: …
-
Display errors on screen even with display errors = off with PHP
Last month I was in a coding kata session playing with StingCalculator, and between iteration and iteration we were taking about the problems of shared hostings. Shared hosting are cheap, but normally they don’t allow us the use some kind of features. For example we cannot see the error log. That’s a problem when we need to see what happens within our application. Normally I work with my own servers, and I have got full access to error logs. But if we cannot see the error log and the server is configured with display errors = off in php.ini (typical configuration in shared hosting), we have a problem. …
-
Building a small microframework with PHP (Part 2). Command line interface
In my last post we spoke about building a small microframework with PHP. The main goal of this kind of framework was to be able to map urls to plain PHP classes and become those classes easily testeable with PHPUnit. Now we’re going to take a step forward. Sometimes we need to execute the script from command line, for example if we need to use them in a crontab file. OK. We can use curl and perform a simple http call to the webserver. But it’s pretty straightforward to create a command line interface (CLI) for our microframework. Zend Framework and Symfony has a great console tools. I’ve used Zend_Console_Getopt in a project and is really easy to use and well documented. But now we’re going to build a command line interface from scratch. …
-
Building a small microframework with PHP
Nowadays microframewors are very popular. Since Blake Mizerany created Sinatra (Ruby), we have a lot of Sinatra clones in PHP world. Probably the most famous (and a really good one) is Silex. But we also have several ones, such as Limonade, GluePHP and Slim. Those frameworks are similar. We define routes and we connect those routes to callbacks: …
-
Checking the performance reading arrays with PHP
Reading last Fabien Potencier’s post I see something interesting: “People like micro-optimizations. They are easy to understand, easy to apply… and useless”. It’s true. We don’t need to obsess with small micro-optimizations. As someone said in a comment “developer time is more precious than processor time”. It’s true again. But normally our code is coded once and executed thousands of times, and we must keep in mind that CPU time many times means money. We need to balance it (as always). But, WTH. I like micro-optimizations, and here comes another one: Checking the access to arrays with PHP. …
-
Runtime Classes. A experiment with PHP and Object Oriented Programming
Last week I was thinking about creation of a new type of classes. PHP classes but created dynamically at run time. When this idea was running through my head I read the following article and I wanted to write something similar. Warning: Probably that it is something totally useless, but I wanted to create a working prototype (and it was fun to do it ;) ). Let’s start: …
-
Building a client for a REST API with PHP.
Today we’re going to create a library to use a simple RESTfull API for a great project called Gzaas. Don’t you know what the hell is Gzaas? Gzaas is simple idea idea of a friend of mine (hi @ojoven!). A simple project that creates cool mesages on full screen. Then you can share the link in twitter, facebook and things like that. Yes. I now when I explain it, the first word that appear in our minds is WTF, but it’s cool, really cool. …
-
Using node.js to store PHP sessions
We use sessions when we want to preserve certain data across subsequent accesses. PHP allows us to use different handlers when we’re using sessions. The default one is filesystem, but we can change it with session.save_handler in the php.ini. session.save_handler defines the name of the handler which is used for storing and retrieving data associated with a session. We also can create our own handler to manage sessions. In this post we’re going to create a custom handler to store sessions in a node.js service. Let’s start: …
-
Populating datagrid techniques with PHP
Today I want to speak about populating datagrid techniques with PHP. At least in my daily work datagrids and tabular data are very common, because of that I want to show two different techniques when populating datagrids with data from our database. Maybe it’s obvious, but I want to show the differences. Let’s start. …
-
Database abstraction layers in PHP. PDO versus DBAL
I normally use PDO in my PHP projects. I like it because it’s a PHP extension easy to use and shares the same interface between all databases. Normally I use PostgreSQL but if I change to mySql or Oracle I don’t need to use different functions to handle the database connections. …
-
New features in PHP5.4 alpha1
We already have the php5.4 alpha ready for testing. This new release has a few features that I really like. The lack of those features gave me problems in the past. Because of that, I’m very excited waiting for the new stable release of PHP 5.4. Now I’m going to list the new features I like. There’re more features (check the full list here) but those ones are the ones I’m really waiting for: …
-
Real time notifications (part II). Now with node.js and socket.io
In one of my previous posts I wrote about Real time notifications with PHP. I wanted to create a simple comet system fully written in PHP and JavaScript. It worked but as Scott Mattocks told me in a comment this implementation was still just doing short polling. The performance with this solution may be bad in a medium/hight traffic site. This days I’m playing with node.js and I want to create a simple test. I want to do exactly the same than the previous post but now with node.js instead of my PHP+js test. Let’s start …
-
Web console with node.js
Continuing with my experiments of node.js, this time I want to create a Web console. The idea is simple. I want to send a few command to the server and I display the output inside the browser. I can do it entirely with PHP but I want to send the output to the browser as fast as they appear without waiting for the end of the command. OK we can do it flushing the output in the server but this solution normally crashes if we keep the application open for a long time. WebSockets again to the rescue. If we need a cross-browser implementation we need the socket.io library. Let’s start: …
-
Real time monitoring PHP applications with websockets and node.js
The inspection of the error logs is a common way to detect errors and bugs. We also can show errors on-screen within our developement server, or we even can use great tools like firePHP to show our PHP errors and warnings inside our firebug console. That’s cool, but we only can see our session errors/warnings. If we want to see another’s errors we need to inspect the error log. tail -f is our friend, but we need to surf against all the warnings of all sessions to see our desired ones. Because of that I want to build a tool to monitor my PHP applications in real-time. Let’s start: …
-
Performance analysis of Stored Procedures with PDO and PHP
Last week I had an interesting conversation on twitter about the usage of stored procedures in databases. Someone told stored procedure are evil. I’m not agree with that. Stored procedures are a great place to store business logic. In this post I’m going to test the performance of a small piece of code using stored procedures and using only PHP code. …
-
Reflection over PHPDoc with PHP
I want to parse PHPDoc code. Let me explain a little bit what I want to do. Imagine a dummy function documented with PHPDoc: …
-
Performance analysis fetching data with PDO and PHP.
Fetching data from databases is a common operation in our work as developers. There are many drivers (normally I use PDO), but the usage of all of them are similar and switch from one to another is not difficult (they almost share the same interface). In this post I will focus on fetching data. Basically we’ve got two functions: fetch and fetchAll. I’ve created two examples. One with fetch and another one with fetchAll: …
-
Howto Send/Read SMSs using a GSM modem, AT+ commands and PHP
I need to send/read SMS with PHP. To do that, I need a GSM modem. There are few of them if we google a little bit. GSM modems are similar than normal modems. They’ve got a SIM card and we can do the same things we can do with a mobile phone, but using AT and AT+ commands programmatically. That’s means we can send (and read) SMSs and create scripts to perform those operations. Normally those kind of devices uses a serial interface. So we need to connect our PC/server with a serial cable to the device. That’s a problem. Modern PCs sometimes dont’t have serial ports. Modern GSM modems have a USB port, and even we can use serial/USB converters. I don’t like to connect directly those devices to the PC/server. They must be close. Serial/USB cables cannot be very long (2 or 3 meters). I prefer to connect those devices using serial/ethernet converters. Because of that I will create a dual library. The idea is enable the operations when device is connected via serial cable and also when it’s connected thought a serial/ethernet converter. …
-
Real time notifications with PHP
Real time communications are cool, isn’t it? Something impossible to do five years ago now (or almost impossible) is already available. Nowadays we have two possible solutions. WebSockets and Comet. WebSockets are probably the best solution but they’ve got two mayor problems: …
Gonzalo Ayuso
Web Architect
Personal blog since 2008
