730 PHP Tutorials. Page 1

I wish I had known these 10 simple things the day I started working with PHP. This article is part II in the this series and is intended for newbies. The previous article is located here. Tip 6: Single and double quotes Single and double quotes confused me for some time and it really should not have. I see this quite often in the forum as well. It s very easy to understand that double quotes allow php to parse and single quotes do not. Here are ...

I wish I had known these 10 tips the day I started working with PHP. Instead of learning them through painstaking process, I could have been on my way to becoming a PHP programmer even sooner! This article is presented in two parts and is intended for folks who are new to PHP. Tip 1: MySQL Connection Class The majority of web applications I ve worked with over the past year have used some variation of this connection class: class DB { function D...

Last week, we continued our discussion of PHP standalone scripts with child processes and more. This week, we conclude our discussion and bring together what you ve learned. The third of three parts, this article is excerpted from chapter five of the book

An abstract class is a class that cannot (or should not) be instantiated. They are surprisingly useful for certain purposes. In this article, you will learn the important concepts related to abstract classes in PHP 4, and see many hands-on examples that will allow you to make use of them in your own applications.

Welcome to part two of the series Abstract classes in PHP. In three tutorials, this series introduces the key concepts of abstract classes in PHP 4-PHP 5, and explores their application and use in different object-oriented development environments. Whether you re an experienced PHP developer wanting to fill in some gaps related to abstract classes, or only a beginner starting to taste the power of object-based programming in PHP, hopefully you ...

Here we are again. This is the tutorial you ve been waiting for! Welcome to the last part of the series Abstract classes in PHP. If you ve already read the previous articles, then you ll know that this series introduces the basics of abstract classes in PHP 4/PHP 5, and illustrates their use and implementation in concrete situations.

Polymorphism is an object-oriented programming concept that can be difficult to understand. This article, the first of a three-part series, walks you through the basics of Polymorphism so that you can make use of it in your own applications. The specific example in this article will show you how to use it with different database systems.

In this article, I will explain how it is possible to connect and query an MS SQL server (running under a Windows operating system) from php installed on a unix box. The same problem, in the case of php installed under Windows is not covered here because it is well explained in php FAQ; sadly I cannot say the same thing for the unix case. In fact, there is a multitude of incorrect or outdated sources of information which will cause new people tr...

If you are starting to create a library of reuseable PHP functions, you will soon encounter some typical problems. For example, you will experience name clashes if you start mixing your own components with that of other developers: sooner or later some foreign function will have the same name as one of yours or will use a global variable that you are using, too.

This chapter discusses the database abstraction layer PEAR DB. This package supplies a standard set of functions for talking to many different kinds of databases (from

When I started seeing spam messages posted to the new column annotation system, I knew I would have to create some sort of user authentication system that helps weed out the losers. I m the type that would rather write an entire library myself than try to learn something like PHPLib or other similar libraries. The library needed to handle registration, confirmation emails, account updates (passwords, emails) among other things. It also needed to...

Over this second article in a series covering network programming in PHP, you will learn how to run popular Windows network monitoring utilities, such as the ping, netstat and ipconfig programs, by adding some new methods to the QueryProcessor class introduced in the previous article.

Welcome to the concluding part of the series Using SQLite with PHP 5. As you ll possibly know, PHP 5 comes equipped with a fully-featured RDBMS called SQLite that definitely can make your life as a PHP developer much easier. It s particularly helpful if you want to get rid of MySQL at least for a time while maintaining the data layer of your application completely isolated from the business logic.

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...

This article will cover advanced control structures and techniques, including multi-conditional if statements and an introduction to the for statement. // ); //]] The for loop In our previous articles, we discussed using a while loop as a means to repeat a block of code until the condition it provided is determined to be false. Although useful, while loops are used primarily when you don t initially know how many times you want to execute the ...

To start things off, let s assume that you are already familiar with GD, and that you have read articles such as this. If you are already familiar with GD s basic concepts and wish to move further, this is the right place for you. Since PHP4.3, GD has come bundled with PHP. This means often that you only have to change one line to install GD. If you do not know if GD is installed, run phpinfo() and look for GD s section; if it s there, you have ...

Welcome back! In my last column I introduced you to basic PHP references and how they are used. This week, I ll take that basic introduction a step further and implement some of the more advanced uses for references in PHP. First, I ll be discussing the concept of returning a reference from a function, followed by using references within objects. Let s get started. Returning by Reference Last week, I discussed how references could be used as para...

Today we ll discuss an advanced function concept called variable-length argument lists, and explain how to use dynamic function and variable names in PHP. // ); //]] Variable-length argument lists Until now, we have looked at parameters that are passed to custom functions to be statically defined (meaning once you decide on a set of parameters you are stuck with them until you change the declaration). Today, we ll discuss how you can create func...

We know from the previous article that the user ID is very important, in that it is used to retrieve various information from the database at various stages of the application. The login form sets this userID when you log in. It is the login system that will be the focus of this second part in a four-part series.

In the first article of this two-part series, we examined what is arguably the most significant feature of PHP 5; the significant advances to its object-oriented programming capabilities. Among other topics, I introduced the addition of the final, private, protected, abstract and static method scopes, as well as the new private and protected class member scopes. We also examined the new abstract class and interface features, before concluding th...

Setting up a web application to send plain text email is easy. What if you need the email to handle other content, such as images or special document formats? This article explains how to design a PHP class for sending email with attachments.

PHP is being used more and more as a tool for building e-commerce applications. A necessary part of most e-commerce applications is the ability to accept credit card payment in real-time, and PHP handles this facet of online shopping with ease --- with a little help. This article will explain how to use PHP with Anacom. Anacom is a popular online credit card processor with a fairly friendly interface. You can read more about Anacom at http://www...

This article, the first of two parts, describes a fun little project that will help you sharpen your image manipulation skills. The completed application takes an image and converts it to a string of text that resembles the original image. Brian Vaughn gets you started.

Picking up where we left off in part one, we will work on some more helper methods and our conversion method. By the time we are done, we will have a fully functional image to text converter.

If you create object-oriented programs in in PHP 5, you know that their performance can be improved by rationalizing the use of objects. The proxy pattern can help with this task. In this first of a two-part series, you will learn the key points of how to use this pattern with PHP 5.

Today we ll introduce the function declaration, how it works, and how it can be used to create your own custom functions in PHP 4. // ); //]] What are functions? A function is basically a compartmentalized PHP script designed to accomplish a single task (usually a task that will need to be accomplished multiple times). Furthermore, code contained within functions is ignored until the function is called from another part in the script. We ve alre...

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...

PHP is short for what is officially called PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf, a developer who needed a tool to keep track of who was looking at his resume. The first version of Lerdorf s preprocessor (known then as PHP/FI) was released in 1994. Since then, PHP has become popular in the open-source community and was renamed PHP with the release of version 3.0. PHP is now at version 4.0 and is used by over 3 million w...

See how PHP 5 compares to PHP 4 in this brief introduction to the language and learn what features have led PHP to be installed on over 15 million domains. (From the book,

Would you like to learn how to simulate an MVC-based system with PHP? If so, you ve come to the right place. This is the first article in a three-part series that will show you how to build this schema in PHP by constructing a few classes that represent what is needed.

Working with low-level sockets can be a painful task in PHP. Fortunately, PHP offers a nice library of socket handling functions to make your life easier. If you do a lot of network programming in PHP, you will want to check out this three-part series, which starts with the basics and takes you through more advanced approaches. This article is the first one in the series.

If you have reached the point in your programming life where you are using design patterns, you will want to read this article. The first of a three-part series, it covers the Observer pattern, which can be just the thing for situations where objects need to send information to a centralized mechanism.

A decorator class allows you to add more capacity to an existing class while leaving the original class untouched. It has certain advantages over inheritance, as you will learn in this first article of a three-part series.

Have you ever wanted to enrich your site with information from Google, Amazon, eBay, or one of the many other sites that provide web services through SOAP? In this tutorial, I will be demonstrating how to use the SOAP package from PEAR to query Google s extensive database (consuming the web service, in the jargon). This tutorial assumes you are using PHP 4 and PEAR::SOAP 0.8.1, and requires basic familiarity with PHP (including a little object-o...

At the end of my last article, we had SOAP running with PHP and were using Google as a glorified spell-checker. Seeing as it is rather well known as a search engine, this week we ll look into conducting web searches in a bit more detail. We ll also talk about how to deal with any errors that occur. Searching with Google Instead of the simple string returned by doSpellingSuggestion, when calling doGoogleSearch we get a nested structure of objects...

Welcome to the second tutorial of the series Using HTTP compression in PHP. In three parts, this series demonstrates how to apply HTTP compression to parsed PHP pages, in order to reduce their overall download times, which results in faster delivery of dynamic content.

Web services allow you to exchange information over HTTP using XML. When you want to find out the weather forecast for New York City, the current stock price of IBM, or the best-selling DVD according to Amazon.com, you can write a short script to gather that data in a format you can easily manipulate. From a developer s perspective, it s as if you re calling a local function that returns a value. // ); //]] A major advantage of web services is u...

by Kieran Mathieson PHP applications use various technologies, like HTML, relational databases (RDB), JavaScript, object-oriented programming (OOP), and so on. Most of them work well together. For instance, PHP code can easily write JavaScript, JavaScript can use a browser s document object model (DOM) to change HTML, etc. OOP and RDB don t fit together quite as well. When programmers write code mapping PHP classes to RDB tables, they need to mak...

As a PHP developer myself, I spend a fair part of my time looking for ways to write cleaner, more efficient code. I ll be the first to admit that I don t succeed too often; however, that doesn t stop me from making the effort. And nine times out of ten, I don t have to look too far - the PHP community is incredibly generous with its advice and assistance, and the language itself offers tools which can slice through complex problems in much the sa...

Arrays offer an ideal means for storing, manipulating, sorting, and retrieving the kinds of data sets that programmers spend a lot of time working with. PHP supports the array data type. This article explains the array-based features and functions it supports. It is excerpted from the book,

Sorry I haven t updated PHPBuilder is SO long, but I ve been a bit busy helping build a new web site called SourceForge. While building the site, I stretched my knowledge of PHP and databases and thought I would share a few things I learned. A lot of people ask about passing arrays and using checkboxes/select boxes in PHP, so that s what I ll cover today. To pass multiple values, as in a Multiple Select Box, put [] after the variable...

If you ve ever created large scripts that require many variables (sometimes nearly 100), you know what it s like trying to keep track of what each variable contains and what it s used for. Trust me, I ve been there. If we can store those variables inside other variables then the list of hundereds shrinks to less than 10. That s where arrays come in. An array, broken down to its simplest form, is simply a variable that holds variables. It s kind ...

Arrays fall under the same category that a lot of concepts in PHP do: Difficult to understand at first, easy to use once you do, and impossible to live without. In this article, we will be taking a look at why they are so important to program development, and explore how to work with them. You will also learn how you can write a random link generator using arrays, and expand it to display banners or buttons associated with the links. So, What E...

This article will introduce the PHP array data type and discuss the fundamentals of working with arrays. // ); //]] What exactly is an array? An array is a variable type in PHP that allows the programmer to associate one value directly to another value or simply take a set of data and organize it into a list format (much like a table). It can be used in many ways to store and organize data quickly and efficiently. It is one of the more useful da...

Today we ll continue our discussion of arrays in PHP including the use of associative and multidimensional arrays. // ); //]] In my last article, we introduced a new array data type in PHP and covered its fundamentals. Today we ll dive deeper into arrays and introduce a type of array called an associative array and a more complex type of array -- the multidimensional array. Associative arrays When we last discussed arrays, we described how array...

Templates can bring order and structure to a web site. In this article I describe how templates can be used to control the page layout for a site that is currently composed of many pages of static HTML, using a popular template class and a new feature of PHP4. But first, let s set the scene. There are two distinct motivations for introducing templates: to separate functionality (PHP) from layout (HTML) to avoid duplication of repeated elements S...

As a freelance programmer, I have built quite a few web applications over the years, some pretty and some not-so-pretty. Before I got involved in PHP, I had worked mostly in Java, with its rigid and forced programming style. With PHP, of course, it s easy to get lazy and write sloppy code, and PHP will always perform well no matter what. Recently, however, I took over maintenance of a web application which set new lows for maintainability, quali...

I hate typing, but I like writing code. A while ago I started to dread all the rote typing required to handle forms in PHP, and began looking for a Better Way. This article describes how I used PHP s regular expression functions to do most of the heavy lifting required to process forms properly, saving lots of typing and giving me time to do stuff I don t hate, such as writing code (and playing NetHack). // ); //]] The Problem Jeff Cogswell desc...

After looking at Gregarius last month, this time it s b2evolution s turn to be in the spotlight. b2evolution is blogging software (and more), written in PHP and MySQL, released under the GNU GPL, and it s what I use for my personal blog. It s definitely one of the few applications worth considering if you want to host and maintain your own blog. It has a comprehensive feature set, including multilingualism (the main developer, Francois Planque, i...

If you ve been programming for a while, you ve probably heard the term OOP before - it stands for Object-Oriented Programming, and refers to a technique in which you create program objects and then use these objects to build the functionality you need into your program. And maybe you ve wondered just how useful this is, and how you could go about adding this capability to your own code.

In this tutorial, I will give ideas on how the graphics capabilities of PHP can be used to create simple bar charts in GIF and PNG format. I will briefly touch on non-graphics alternatives as well. My objective is to show you some basics that will enable you to proceed to much more complex charts. The included code will give you a working foundation to start with. If you are looking for further inspiration after this tutorial, you can find point...

This article covers the basics of program control structures, including conditional statements and looping using the if and while statements in PHP. It also contains a brief note regarding embedding code blocks within other code blocks. // ); //]] Conditional blocks One of the most fundamental tools of any true programming language is the ability to control what code gets executed and under what conditions by using

The configuration system that PHP uses for installation is one of those nice, simple things in life that makes it rosy. At first it might seem a little confusing, but it s really very easy. So let s dive right in. // ); //]] To download PHP, visit the php.net download page and click the link under the heading Complete Source Code. The first thing to do after downloading and unpacking your source archive is to kick the tires a little bit. You c...

This article covers basic PHP syntax, including variable usage, variable types, and several ways of printing variables to the web browser. // ); //]] Embedded code blocks PHP is an embedded web development language with many similarities to commercial packages such as Microsoft s Active Server Pages (ASP) or Cold Fusion. One of the similarities between PHP and these packages (especially ASP) is the abili

When debugging a site that s live, viewing the progression of your script can save quite a bit of time, resulting in considerably less complaints. However, it s absolutely essential that you avoid throwing your variables to the screen while visitors are viewing your pages. One way to avoid exposing your sensitive data, while also giving yourself a live printout of your variables is by making them visible to only you and/or your team. The techniq...

This article is excerpted from Chapter 3 of Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to Professional with permission from Apress. PHP and Ajax While the concept of Ajax contains a handy set of functionality for creating actions on the fly, if you are not making use of its ability to connect to the server, you are really just using basic JavaScript. Not that there is anything truly wrong with that, but the real power lies in joining the client-side f...

This article is excerpted from Chapter 3 of Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to Professional with permission from Apress. Auto-Complete A nice feature that I first noticed as being received positively by the Internet community is the auto-complete feature in Gmail. Basically, when you re entering the e-mail address of the person you re sending a message to, Gmail searches your list of contacts (using Ajax) and automatically drops down a list...

A couple of months ago, I knew almost nothing about PHP, only that is was a programming language that I needed to learn. Today, my whole site relies upon PHP and I have gained the confidence that almost anything is possible using PHP. I accomplished this achievement using methods that I will describe in this article. Set Small Goals That You Can Achieve One of the most destructive things a programmer can do is to try to develop an extensive prog...

By now you will have a very good understanding not only of how PHP works but the flexibility and wide range of platforms and programming applications that you can interact with in PHP. You can confidently connect to databases and create textual output for the person browsing your web site to view, but sooner or later you are going to need to output that information in a graphical format. Sure you could fire up a graphics program and create a few ...

One of the things I hear from people and my friends is questions about the best way to work with PHP. They always want to know how to get started on a project, what software to use, how to plan it successfully, and so on. In this article I plan on revealing the magical secrets about how I do my PHP programming so quickly with so few bugs.

Abstraction is a technique which simplifies something complex. It does this by removing non-essential parts of the object, allowing us to concentrate on the important parts. In the case of database abstraction, the complexities of connecting to a database is hidden behind a standard API, thereby allowing the programmer to connect to many different types of databases without relearning the methods and syntax peculiar to each different type. PEAR ...

Like most PHP developers out there, I started off using databases to store relatively simple data structures for my dynamic sites. PHP s slickness and ease of database connectivity is no doubt a major reason for its wild success, and also probably a reason why databases get created and used without a huge amount of design and documentation. In my next couple of articles, I m going to attempt to talk about the best way to use databases with PHP. ...

Last week I talked about how to best use indices in your database queries. Now let s talk about transactions. Transactions may sound reasonably straightforward, as indexing does, but there are a lot of things you can do wrong which will haunt you in certain circumstances. The general idea behind a transaction is that several steps can be performed in series, with the capability to undo all of the steps at once if needed. In addition, the transac...

One of PHP s greatest strengths can also be a great weakness in the wrong hands. I m talking about its forgiving nature. One of the reasons why PHP has become so wildly popular is because it lets very inexperienced web developers build powerful applications without much planning, consistency, or documentation. Unfortunately, that means an awful lot of PHP code out there is sloppy, hard to read and impossible to maintain. I know because I ve writ...

It is the intention of this article to discuss and generate further debate surrounding best practices in developing database driven, session orientated dynamic websites and to present some adopted styles and conventions. The ideas and approaches that are developed here could be realised with almost any combination of server side scripting language and relational database. Sessions and relational databases both offer the opportunity of storing in...

binarycloud is a platform for rapidly developing complex web applications. It includes basic services like authentication, permissions, a template engine, database abstraction etc., an extensive collection of libraries, and a framework for configuring the system and building your own logic. During its six-month gestation period, binarycloud was used in two commercial production cycles, and is (in SourceForge lingo) Production/Stable. Go download...

If you want to store binary data like images and html files directly in your MySQL database, this column is for you! I will show how you can store the data via the HTML forms File feature in your database and how you can access and use this data in your webproject. If you have read the article PHP, MySQL and images by William Samplonius here on phpbuilder.com, this might be interesting for you as William stores the binary...

reprinted with permission by Manning Publications Ideally, a user interface (UI) will be invisible to users, providing them with the options they need when they need them but otherwise staying out of their way, leaving users free to focus on the problem at hand. Unfortunately, this is a very hard thing to get right, and we become accustomed, or resigned, to working with suboptimal UIs on a daily basis until someone shows us a better way, and we r...

Since its release in 2004, PHP 5 has evolved to become stable enough for serious consideration in use in a production environment. Along the way, PHP 5 has seen more than a handful of tweaks and changes, especially in its overhauled support for XML and XML web services. Now that it is a stable, it is fitting that there be a reference on all things PHP and XML. Enter Pro PHP XML and Web Services, which aims to be your single source of refer...