Ask About PHP

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?

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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.

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We’ve all encountered it before, and we’ve all asked this question in one way or another. I see it appearing in Yahoo Answers every now and then, and I see similar platform comparison in blogs I read. Its clear this issue is still quite relevant today and will continue to be tomorrow.

So which is better? PHP or .NET?

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Finally, I found some time to take CakePHP for a spin. I’ve heard some really good things about it, and I’ve been trying to get some time to try it out. I installed the framework and went through the tutorial on building a simple blog application. I have to say I’m quite impressed.

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It’s always important to have good resources when you are starting out to learn something new. Thankfully, learning PHP is much easier with books like Programming PHP (2nd edition).

Authored by Kevin Tatroe, Peter MacIntyre, and (none other than the father of the PHP language) Rasmus Lerdorf. I found this book to be an excellent, well-rounded companion for anyone doing anything with PHP.

But, is it good for the absolute beginner?

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Thinking back a fews years ago, I was involved in building some reporting modules with graphs and charts to show our customer utilisation of our data center. After trying a number of different open source graphing packages for PHP, I finally found JpGraph, which I daresay is probably the best graphing package available for PHP. (In my experience anyway.)

However, JpGraph requires other dependencies like GD libs - the kind of thing which we may not always have control over if we host with web hosting providers. Thankfully, there’s now a simple and easy way of building simple good looking graphs with just an <img> tag.

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PHP provides a number of really neat regular expression functions. You can find the list of the regex function at the PHP site.

But the one that I’ve had most fun with is the preg_match_all() function which I’ve been using to do content extraction from an HTML page.

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It a real challenge to get your own website going these days, especially when you’re clueless about the website ’stuff’. Gone are the days of just creating some HTML pages, put in some graphics, and linking the pages around. These days you’ll be bombarded with so many acronyms and technologies you probably don’t even know where to start.

So what do you need to know if you’re planning to start a blog site?

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It’s common knowledge you can read variable from a URL querystring by using $_GET array in PHP, but that’s only possible if the URL is “executed” in the browser.

For those who might not know, querystrings are those variable-value pairs that appears behind ‘?’ of a URL. For example,

http://www.mysite.com/index.php?variable1=1&variable2=1

gives the querystring “variable1=1&variable2=1″.

What happens if you end up reading a URL from, say, a text file and you want to parse the querystring? In this case, the $_GET won’t work. So instead, PHP provides a function called parse_str(), which will convert the querystring into actual PHP variables within the scope of the code.

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There may be times when you need a way to check that a string only contains alpha-numeric characters. That means only alphabets A-Z nad numbers 0-9.

Most PHP-ers will probably use regular expressions and the function preg_match(). I will admit that regular expressions is really powerful, but it’s a real pain to learn and master. Fortunately PHP provides another function you can use.

Check out ctype_alnum() function.

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