Internationalization and Partial Rendering in the CodeIgniter Framework

As experienced Web developers, it won’t shock you to find literally thousands of comparisons between CodeIgniter and the other popular frameworks you may be considering for your site. Each framework has its good and, ummm… less good points, but

MongoDB PHP Tutorial

“MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database. Written in C++” – www.mongodb.org (mongodb.org)

There has been alot of publiclity on NOSQL databases over the last few months. CouchDB, Cassandra and Redis are known to be highly scalable and blazingly fast, yet setup and adoption for hobby developers has been relatively low because there is no need for such high scalability and they are relatively difficulty to get setup.

MongoDB strikes a balance between the familiarity and ease of use of MySQL, and the freeness and performance offered by document storage databases. The database has no set schema so you can add, remove and modify the structure of your documents without having to issue an UPDATE statement.

Installation & Setup

Installing MongoDB is very easy. The only setup required is to create the directory that Mongo stores the data in. In Windows the default location is C:\data\db\ and on *nix it is /data/db/. Once the directory is created, download the appropriate Mongo binary from the downloads page (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Downloads) and run the bin/mongod file. Mongo should now be up and running.

Now we need to install the PHP extension for MongoDB. If your on Linux or Mac OS…

Writing an Event System in PHP

In this tutorial you will learn how to create and implement an event system in PHP. You will be able to integrate it with your own web application or framework.

What is an event system?

An event system is a way to call prefined functions at a specified time in your application code. It’s main use is to allow developers to add functionality to your code without modifying the original source. Directly editing the source code of an application is proven not to work because every time the software gets updated, the changes made to the source get overwritten. By offering an event system in your application developers will be able to write plugin style code which will get executed at a specified time in the main application code. This makes your platform easier to develop for and offers a low entry level for coders wanting to add functionality themselves.

Overview of the system

event::$events is a static variable (array) which holds all of the registered events and associated Closure objects.

event::register(‘eventName’, function($args){}) accepts two arguments. The first being the name of the event and the second being a Closure object which will be called when the event is fired.…

Preventing CSRF in PHP

Cross site request forgery (CSRF) is where a malicious website will attempt to issue actions on another website without the user’s knowledge of it occuring.

Hypothetical Situation: You had just done some online banking and had ticked the ‘Remember me’ option when you logged in. The banking website easily allows you to transfer money to other people. While browsing the malicious site you see a link that seems to take you somewhere harmless but it actually sends you to www.my.bank/transfer?to=3740384342?amount=99999 . Because you ticked ‘remember me’ you are automatically logged in and the bank goes ahead and transfers the funds.

There are some obvious fundamental issues the bank could address such as checking with the user whether they want to send the funds and masking their URLs but the problem of the form still remains. Theres nothing from stopping anyone sending seemingly valid data to the URL the form submits to. This problem is known as Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and it is a potential problem in every single dynamic website. While stealing money is an extreme example, CSRF could also be used to steal cookies from a website or post spammy comments on a blog without the user…

PHP in Action – Objects, Design, Agility

Book Review

PHP in Action is a book aimed at people who are comfortable coding procedural or object orientated PHP scripts. It doesn’t teach you what a variable is or what function to use if you want to connect to a database but it does teach you design patterns, best practice techniques and useful information about PHP5′s object system. If you are looking into writing a PHP framework or want to further understand design patterns and objects in PHP then I highly recommend this book. It’s written by prominent members of the PHP community – Dagfinn Reiersol, Marcus Baker and Chris Shiflett and is 525 pages long.

Overview of the book

Chapters 2,3,4 cover the PHP5 class system. The book offers detailed and useful examples of each of the topics as well as plenty of metaphors to help the reader understand exactly what each feature should do and is capable of doing. I found this contrasted greatly with the almost minimal explanations and examples offered by the official documentation on php.net. The following features are covered:

• Magic Methods – __get(), __set(), __construct(), __autoload()
• Exception handling
• Error handling

…

PHP Namespaces

Namespaces were introduced into PHP from version 5.3 onwards. They allow the developer to seperate their code into modules or groups which inturn makes the code easier to read. Namespaces prevent class and function name conflicts, it allows you to have numerous classes with the same name, as long as they are in different namespaces. Namespaces also make the old Zend/PEAR style of class name redundant (Framework_Database_Mysql_Query) because there will no longer be any class name conflicts.

Note: throughout the tutorial we will use the hypothetical files.

/Framework/Database/Mysql/Query.php
/lib/myClass.php
/index.php

The Basics

To declare a namespace you simply use the namespace keyword followed by the name of your namespace. You can specify sub namespaces by using the backslash ( \ ). Best practices state that your namespace path should match the directory path. For example the file /Framework/Database/Mysql/Query.php should have the namespace Framework\Database\Mysql and the name of the class should be Query. You should have one namespace and class per file.

Using Namespaces

In /lib/myClass.php we declare a namespace, lib, and then define a simple class, myClass. In our index.php file we include the class and instantiate it. Because myClass is in the namespace lib, we must refer to…

PHP cURL

cURL is a library written in C that enables easy transfer of data in many different protocols including FTP, FTPS, HTTP, TELNET and LDAP. cURL does more than simply download a file. You can store cookies, upload files, use various types of authentication and tunnel all requests through a proxy. The cURL extension has been bundled with PHP since version 4.0.2 and is enabled by default in php.ini. In this tutorial we will look at the uses of cURL and how it compares to file_get_contents() , we will then write a cURL class which we can use to download the source code of a webpage and download a binary file.

cURL vs file_get_contents()

Many PHP scripts require the user to download and then parse the HTML source of a page. When people ask how to do this, the most common reply is to use the file_get_contents() function as it’s a simple one line solution – you just need to set the first argument to webpage you want to download and it will return the source code of it. While it may seem very easy to use, it has many pitfalls.

1. cURL is significantly faster than file_get_contents() at retrieving the

…

PHP Regular expresssion URL Router

In this tutorial we will create a PHP URL router. The developer using the router will be able to define these routes with regular expressions, these will then map to a file, class and method which will be called – very similar to Django’s routing. By using regular expressions to define our URLs we get maximum customizability. /class/method/ based URL routing is too restrictive sometimes. We will assume the user is using an apache or similar web server with mod_rewite enabled. You can adapt this router and use it in your web application or framework.

Quick Note: This is taken straight out of one of my applications. I have a singleton registry object called $core which you’ll see referenced many times. I suggest you make your own or use global variables.

.htaccess

First of all we need to create a .htaccess file in the root directory of your project. We turn the RewriteEngine on, and then declare a rule to route everything except images/js/css through our index.php file. So even if the person goes to www.yoursite.com/directory/file.php , rather than executing that file it will execute our index.php instead.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule !\.(js|ico|txt|gif|jpg|png|css)$ index.php

If your building a framework or application…

PHP Autoload

In large PHP applications you typically see a “classes” directory that only contains classes which are used throughout the application (database, session management, forms etc..). A problem quickly appears: Everytime you wanted to use one of the classes, you would be forced to include() it at the top of the page. __autoload() solves this by automatically including the definition file when a class is called.

Example

We have a simple application with the index.php file in the root directory and a directory called classes that contains numerous classes.
classes/time.class.php

class time
{
	function fn1()
	{
		echo 'hello world';
	}
}

The code below shows what we’d need to do if we didn’t have autoload. While that code doesn’t seem so bad, imagine writing includes on each of your 30-40 files. It would get messy and very hard to maintain. Another option would be to have a single file that all of your classes are included in, there include that one file in each of your functional scripts but you could expect a performance loss as every one of your classes would be included on the page – even if it wasn’t needed.

index.php

include('classes/time.class.php');

$time = new

…

Zend Framework – Sourcebits Contribution Team

Sourcebits is investing efforts for making one of the best PHP frameworks even better. With a whole team of talented and skilled developers, we’re contributing to the framework using the best proven components we have developed based on our experience using the Zend Framework on our projects.

You can check out the proposals we have already submmitted for review here:
* Zend Calendar.
* Zend Template.

Hope you’ll enjoy!