Ask About PHP

Lately, I’ve been kind of swept up by this craze to own one of those ‘netbooks’, those ultra-portable and cheap notebooks. I was keeping my eye on getting an MSI Wind, and hoping to get in touch with various PC providers to find out when the product will be available.

So I went to check out three retailers and their website and found their published email contacts. Instead of calling them on the phone, I decided to drop them an email instead. Imagine my surprise when two out of the three got bounced for various reasons, and one just went missing into the ether.

Let’s look at where each of these companies went wrong.
Read the rest of this entry »

In my previous posting I touched on a PHP class called DateClass (by Steve Powell) that I downloaded from phpclasses.org. The DateClass package actually contained 2 separate classes. One for manipulating dates and the other for date spans.

This post will cover how to use the DateSpanClass to easily calculate the difference between 2 dates, in intervals from seconds to years. Sadly, however, the class have some bugs which needs to be fixed before it can be used.

Read the rest of this entry »

Performing data/time calculation is basic requirement in any programming project. No serious application can hide from it, so thankfully PHP itself comes with some very useful data/time functions. But, I feel that those PHP date/time functions are probably great for data/time display and formatting, but not so much for calculating for things like the beginning/end of the week, the number of seconds between two dates etc.

Again thankfully, after a visit to phpclasses.org, I found a nifty little class written by Steve Powell (way back in 2004) called DateClass which did what I wanted. Unfortunately, the documentation was only a class reference sheet, and doesn’t come with any examples to quickly get things going.

Read the rest of this entry »

This book caught my eye recently because there was a chapter in it which talks about Search Engines. I’ve been looking at building a spider which can crawl a website and analyse SEO information for me, but wasn’t sure how to go about doing it.

Written by Timothy Boronczyk with help from Martin E. Psinas, this book didn’t really go much into depth on building a web spider/crawler, nor provide me with any major new information. But, it does give some very practical real world advice in building those commonly used application projects.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometime back, I posted about my first experience with CakePHP. I installed the framework and went through the tutorial on building a simple blog application, and said “I was quite impressed”.

Now, after 3+ development weeks trying to build a real-world application, I think, maybe I was too hasty to draw that conclusion.

Read the rest of this entry »

In my previous post about creating simple graphs using Google Charts API, I mentioned about a PHP class, called Google Graph, which Ryon Sherman wrote that encapsulates this API, making it easier to code in PHP.

I incorporated this class in my CakePHP project, and found that there were a couple of problems with it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Designing and building a website is one thing, but maintaining the site is definately something else. I’ve met many website owners who thought that getting someone in to build up a website and turn it on is all there is to running a website.

What a hard lesson that was for them when it turns out that getting a website started was the easiest part of running your own website. Thankfully, there are a great many wonderful tools out there that webmasters have been using to help them manage their sites.

Here are some of the webmaster tools that I use everyday and definately can’t live without.

Read the rest of this entry »

That’s right, I’m still on my CakePHP journey. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time now trying to match what I want to build with how to go about doing it in CakePHP. We all know that the blog example is pretty simplistic - a real world app won’t be quite so straightforward. At the moment, I’m trying to build up an intranet of sorts, with lots of different independant apps, and it’s driving me crazy… How would I structure the it? Should I use ‘plugins’? The folders, the views etc. Yes, it’s all still a big mess.

In any case, I found that CakePHP has a really nifty feature that really helps with sorting out the mess, and it’s called “scaffolding”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Later this week I’ll be attending a talk on interoperability, organised by Microsoft. A friend of mine working at the local Microsoft office is organising the event. He was asking me to help spread the word about the event.

We got talking and from what he tells me about his job as an ‘Evangelist’, I get the distinct feeling that Microsoft is aiming to swing those companies with mixed platforms to using more MS-centric solutions, “because MS products enables technical interoperability out of the box with other vendors”.

That got me thinking about which is better, companies running different technology platforms versus those that focuses on a specific platform?

Read the rest of this entry »

This is probably going to be the first of many postings of my exploration with CakePHP. This post will briefly look at the CakePHP’s ‘Associations’ feature. Associations is “the relational mapping provided by the [CakePHP] model”.

In non-Cake speak, we’re talking about standard SQL joins - the mapping of relations between SQL tables. As you may know, doing SQL joins can be quite messy with unwieldy SQL strings. Thankfully, CakePHP provides a very simple way of joining tables.

Read the rest of this entry »