PHP PEAR

PEAR as a framework for building web applications is itself built on top of a base of standard classes. These classes support basic error-handling routines, needed variables, and constants to the classes that inherit them. That is, most PEAR libraries and packages are themselves subclasses of the standard base PEAR classes. // ); //]] The PEAR development team has gone to great effort to create a standard error-handling class and emulation for d...

At some point, most developers have a need to create graphs. I ve known some to get frustrated and end up exporting the data to a spreadsheet, rather than relying upon the graphing capabilities of Open Office or Excel. That can be the way to go in certain cases, but not because there s no alternative. PHP has some great graphing libraries; JpGraph is probably the most well-known, but it can require a commercial licence. This article looks at PEAR...

What is PEAR? And why should I care? // ); //]] The PEAR project was started by Stig S. Bakken to create a tool similar to that of Perl s CPAN archive. Its primary goal is to become a repository for PHP extensions and library code. The most ambitious goal of the project is to try to define standards that can help developers write portable and re-usable code. Documentation about the project is starting to appear on the Internet, surely a conseque...

This month I look at another of the PEAR packages I find extremely useful - Validate. Poor validation is a key weakness many scripts are guilty of, enabling security exploits. The Validate package can be used to validate any data, and is especially useful for validating user input. It can be used to validate: numbers (whether they fall into a certain range, or are decimal or not) emails (domain, syntax and RFC822) strings (whether they re numeric...

Contents: Caching in context Where to get PEAR Cache How PEAR Cache works Function call caching Output caching Customized solutions Caching in context Caching is currently a hot topic in the PHP world. Because PHP produces dynamic web pages, scripts must be run and results must be calculated each time a web page is requested, regardless if the results are the same each time. In addition, PHP compiles the script every time it is requested. This ov...

I ve fallen in love with PEAR s Image_Graph package. More than once I ve come up against a requirement, and then found that the developers have implemented a solution in quite an elegant way. They d be the first to admit there s still lots to do - the package is after all still an alpha release. But it s achieved a lot, so I can t resist taking it on a second date. After last month s introduction, this time I look a little deeper into the availab...

Often I have been a victim of badly designed code or by changes made to the initial specification of a project. Sometimes my personal pet project changes hosting providers and because of that, it needs to use a different database server, or a corporate project changes its direction and consequently its platform. In any case, I end up changing database servers. // ); //]] Things like these happen very frequently in the IT world. People start out ...

In this article I m going to lay out how you can go about using this great library in your own classes. Specifically, we will be covering PEAR, PEAR_Error, DB, and Log. One thing to note here is that if you don t know what OOP stands for or you have yet to dive into PHP OOP programming this will most likely go over your head. Starting with an OOP primer would be a good idea. [ Next Page ] Comments: One (more) small flawStevenv Vasilogianis04/26/...

Programmers are often told not to reinvent the wheel, and that the best programmers borrow from others before they start to build something themselves. PHP, being primarily a web language, sees a lot of reinventing in regards to form display, processing and validation. However, there s a great PEAR package that needs a little more exposure: HTML_QuickForm. It makes handling the rendering and display of forms, and more usefully, both client and s...

True power in a programming language comes from its extensibility. A good programming language can be expanded and extended in ways the designer never could have imagined originally. If you have ever programmed in Perl, chances are you have heard of CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. As you know, it s an easy way to add functionality to Perl. Most Perl programmers can t see how they ever lived without it. PHP has a similar capability. ...

If you ve ever done any perl programming, or if you ve spent any time talking to perl programmers, you have probably heard of CPAN - the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. CPAN provides a central repository of perl modules, most of which are made available under the same licenses as perl itself (the GPL and The Artistic License). In many ways, CPAN has been the killer app that has made perl one of the most popular languages around. By using...

When you have publicly available forms on the Web, you are always prone to attack by people who want to use your application for their own purposes. Forums, polls, guestbooks, and blogs are the popular places for robots to try to generate inauthentic posts on your site. Many sites, such as Yahoo, now employ CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA, or completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart, is a project of the Carnegie Mellon School...

All programmers know that code reuse is the key to an efficient and timely, not to mention sane, application development process. Yet far too few practice what is so often preached, much to the chagrin of colleagues, clients, and project managers everywhere. Such irrationality is compounded by the fact that many languages enjoy hyperactive user communities, who regularly churn out large amounts of code and make it available for others to freely ...

Total separation of business and template logic is an often-sought goal in advanced web application development. Many times, PHP leads to a compromise. Some code sets implement features by embedding markup in the business logic. Others put business logic in the template side. // ); //]] While this was true even for my own software development, recently I came to the conclusion that it didn t need to be that way. By simple trial and error, develo...

Within the current incarnation of (X)HTML tables are the building blocks to well organized and attractive designs. They allow the developer an incredible amount of control over the visual representation of information and graphics. However they come with a catch, they are an absolute headache to write into your PHP code. The simple process of querying a database and showing the results in a table becomes a disorganized and ungainly process looki...