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
With the exponential growth of Facebook over the past few years, it’s safe to say that quite a large number of active web users today own and use a Facebook account regularly. Facebook connect, which Facebook launched late 2008, is a set of APIs which allow you to integrate your users’ Facebook profile into your web application. Apart from allowing your visitors to login to your site using their Facebook identity (hence negating the registration process), it also allows you to leverage on the various social features of Facebook. Let’s take a overview of Facebook Connect, and how we can integrate it into our web application.
Facebook APIs
Facebook provides both RESTFUL and Javascript APIs. A great number of client libraries are available for creating your web application, though Facebook provides official support for only a handful of them. We will be using Facebook’s official PHP 5 client and Javascript libraries.
FQL and XFBML
Before we look delve deeper into Facebook connect integration, let’s look at FQL and XFBML – the two essential components of the Facebook connect platform.
FQL (yes, Facebook Query Language!) allows you to query data from Facebook easily using a SQL like…
We built a simple to-do list application last week by implementing the CI basics we learnt in first part of this tutorial. Today, let’s go over some of the things that will allow you to customise and extend the CI framework for your specific needs.
Changing the default URL routing
As we have already seen, CI parses the URLs in the following format:
example.com/className/functionName/variable1/variable2
While this suits most of the times, sometimes we might want to tweak CI to handle things different. With a reference to the blog example we saw in the first part, say, we want to display the entries of a blog by accessing a URL along the lines of "example.com/post/postID". Here, we actually want the "postID" to be parsed as a variable rather than a function name.
CI allows us to make such tweaks by allowing us to write our own routing rules. These rules are defined in application/config/routes.php file in an associative array called $route . The key of the associative array will define the URI to be matched, and its corresponding value will be the destination URI to which the request to be routed to. Apart from providing two…
Last week, we covered the basic structure of a CodeIgniter application. Let’s now jump right into developing a simple todo list application using CodeIgniter. We will be keeping the actual functionality of the application itself simple here, as the goal here is to give a good overview on what it takes to build a CI application from scratch.
Okay, the first thing you have to do is to download and extract the latest build of CodeIgniter. Next, download the controllers, models and views that I have used in this sample todo list application. You should refer to these files as you read the tutorial. Here is the demo of the sample application (use “demo” as username and password).
Directory structure
All the files related to our application will be placed in the "system/application" folder:
As you can see, we have to place our controllers, views and models in their correspondng /controllers, /views and /models directories. Initially, we will have a sample controller (Welcome) in the /controllers directory, and its corresponding Welcome view in the /views directory. The model directory will be empty.
The /config directory consists of various files which will help us…
CodeIgniter is a PHP framework that makes writing secure web applications a breeze. Being extremely light weighted, it’s an impressive toolkit which promotes the Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach to software development. CodeIgniter’s incredibly useful libraries, helpers and simplicity give you a sound foundation to quickly build your web apps on. This will be the first part of a series of tutorials focusing on CodeIgniter. Today, let’s get started with the basics of CodeIgniter and familiarize ourselves with the structure and semantics of a CI application.
I am assuming that you are already familiar with the MVC pattern, so let’s briefly see how it applies to a typical CI application.
View – A view is simply the content which a user sees rendered on a any page. It can be either a full web page, or even code snippets like the header or the footer of a web page. The view’s primary aim is to render data on the screen, which will be passed to it by a controller.
Controller – A controller handles the actual application logic. It acts as an intermediate between the View (front end) and the Model (the data). The controller, typically fetches records from…
Right from Twitter to Google Wave, real time information streaming via the browser seems to be the most “happening” thing on the web arena currently. However, feeding real time information as and when it is available to an user using your web application is not as straight forward as it is on a desktop environment.
Not yet released, FLOW3 starts making noises on the mass: what’s TYPO3 up to?
As a result of the already proven TYPO3 CMS, the upcoming 5th version of the system is bringing a solid PHP framework, which can be used apart from the whole system for developing applications of any kind.
The FLOW3 subsite stats, against what’s commonly seen out there, FLOW3 is not a pick’n’mix store of motley components. It’s a framework which helps you with the infrastructure of your application. Object Lifecycle Management, Package Management, Resource Management and Security are on his home field. Real business logic is left over to third-party packages.
All the most common features we can find in other PHP frameworks are going to be provided by FLOW3, like MVC architecture, Validation, Filters, Persistence Object Manager and much more.
Next week, I’ll post a getting started with a simple application and provide my personal review of this framework, which – OMHO – is going to rock!
You may come across number of functions, variables inside a class, you
call each one them as object of the class.
The keyword “this” is used in a class in php , to call and use these objects as
shown in the example below.
A short tutorial on how to make a simple object for HTTP request without the need of using CURL.
The way to accomplish that is using the function stream_context_create to prepare the string, and then you use fopen and stream_get_contents to get the response.
<?php
class Custom_Http_Request
{
private $_url;
private $_body;
private $_method = 'POST';
private $_headers = array();
private $_response;
private $_stream;
public function __construct($url, $body)
{
if (empty($url) || empty($body)) {
throw new Exception('Both URL and BODY are required '
. 'for fetching the request.');
}
$this->_url = $url;
$this->_body = $body;
}
public function setMethod($method)
{
if ('POST' == $method || 'GET' == $method) {
$this->_method = $method;
return $this;
}
throw new Exception('Invalid method set.');
}
public function addHeader(array $header)
{
if (!empty($header)) {
$this->_headers[] = $header;
return $this;
}
throw new Exception('The headers are empty.');
}
public function getMethod()
{
return $this->_method;
}
public function getBody()
{
return $this->_body;
}
public function getHeaders()
{
return $this->_headers;
}
public function getResponse()
{
if (is_null($this->_stream)) {
$this->_openStream();
}
if (is_null($this->_response)) {
$this->_response = @stream_get_contents($this->_stream);
if (false === $this->_response) {
throw new Exception('It is not possible to '
. 'read from the response.');
}
}
…
Subscribe to feeds
