730 PHP Tutorials. Page 5

PHP 5, due for release in the coming weeks, will offer users an abundance of new and enhanced features, yet perhaps none are as appealing as the vast improvements to its object-oriented capabilities. In an earlier article, I introduced these new features, showing you how to improve class management using variable and method scopes, interfaces, abstract classes, and unified constructors and destructors. These enhancements allow you to take a far m...

The object-oriented paradigm includes the ability to overload classes; not surprisingly, this is possible in PHP. In this first part of a series, you will learn how to implement class overloading in PHP 4, specifically using the overload() function, which comes in handy for triggering __set() and __get() methods when a property access is overloaded.

If you ve ever been interested in making significant use of PHP outside of a web environment, this article will show you how. The first of three parts, it is excerpted from chapter five of the book

O Reilly Media, Inc. is rolling out a new syndication mechanism that provides greater control over the content we publish online. You ll notice some improvements immediately, such as better standards compliance, graphical tiles accompanying article descriptions, and enclosure support for podcatching applications. We ve tested the new feeds using a variety of popular newsreaders and aggregators, but we realize that there may be a few bumps along t...

In an era where data becomes volumetric in every business, much attention has been given to proper database management and the ease of data access. Businesses that use MS Access begin to look for an alternative which allows better database performance, higher reliability, higher flexibility, yet inexpensive. With the numerous choices available in the market, considering you don t want to put too much investment on it, only one, MySQL, stands out ...

Web applications today are much more complex beasts than they were even just a few years ago. The largest sites may constitute thousands of files with complex directory structures, and migrating those between development, staging, and production environments can be difficult to say the least. My own experience with web applications dates back to 1996. While I ve seen a lot of changes over the years, keeping a large project in check never seems to...

One of the best things about programming in PHP is how easy it is to learn the language and its libraries. Everything seems to fit together and you can almost guess how to do a specific task, even not knowing much about the function that you need to use. A lot of times you will just try doing something and be surprised that the language has that specific feature. // ); //]] All of this is very nice, but it takes a little while to get to know PHP...

The PHP release teams have been uber-busy cranking out fresh releases of PHP. The new releases include: PHP 4.4.4 - (changelog) PHP 5.1.6 - (changelog) PHP 5.2.0RC3 - Per Ilia Alshanetsky, this is most likely the final release candidate for PHP 5.2.0. Zend Conference Schedule Posted Zend has finalized the schedule for the upcoming conference to be held October 30-November 2, 2006 in San Jose, CA. This year s theme is Creating Modern Web Applicat...

You can help mold the future of the structure of PEAR! The PEAR group is holding a general election for input on the way that PEAR related decisions are made and such. More specifically, As PEAR moves forward, it is time to re-evaluate the way that decisions are made, who makes them, and how they are documented. Some example decisions: How should PEAR handle coding standards for PHP 5, PHP 6 and beyond? Who handles acceptance of new packages? Wh...

Many in the PHP blogosphere provided us with their respective takes on 2006; some were more personal than others, but all were interesting to read. Derick Rethans provides us with probably the most popular wrap-up of PHP in 2006, but there are others that are worthy of a good read (in no particular order): Andrew Van der Stock Chris Shiflett Wez Furlong Laura Thomson Ligaya Turmelle Greg Beaver Davey Shafik Sara Golemon Aaron Wormus a href=http...

The schedule for the International PHP Conference (to be held November 5-8, 2006 in Frankfurt) has been finalized, with extensive in-depth sessions in both German and English. Sessions and workshops fall into the following topics: General PHP PHP and Business PHP and Databases PHP Design PHP Extensions PHP and XML PHP-GTK PHP Security PHP Enterprise / Integration Of course the lineup includes some PHP core developers as well as some enterpr...

The PHP Development Team has announced the release of PHP 4.4.6, which addresses a segfault that occurs when register globals is enabled. It also fixes a few minor bugs. To see the complete list, you can visit the changelog and to download your updated copy, go to this page. Pro PHP Podcast is Back Sean Coates and Paul Reinheimer have revived the popular Pro PHP podcast and are committed to providing a bi-weekly news update for you. You can get c...

Tobias Schlitt let us know that the free of charge 2-day mini-conference in Dortmund has reached 50 attendees. It will be taking place October 7-8, 2006. The PHP Weekender site is in German, however so you ll need to translate it to read it in English. PHP Appalachia Wraps Up Many people have asked me how PHP Appalachia fared, and of course my resounding answer was that it rocked. Actually, I wrote that 3+ days of collaboration, exchanging infor...

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is a powerful technology for designing Web applications. This article is the first in a three part series that will explain two of the bases of OOP, Inheritance and Polymorphism, and apply these principles to building an extensible form generator.

In part two of this three-part series, we refresh our memory of Inheritance and subclasses from part one, and take our first stab at implementing a form generator.

In the last part of this three-part series of articles, we will find out how to improve the form generator we created in part II by learning about Polymorphism and adding it to the mix.

One useful feature provided by the tight integration of PHP with Apache is the ability to install PHP as a dynamically loadable Apache module. This is a systems administrator s dream because it allows developers to upgrade PHP without having to recompile Apache. If you have ever gone through the 1.5 million steps required to install ApacheSSL, you can appreciate the value in this option. // ); //]] For more information on what dynamically shared...

One of the better inventions of the 21st Century is with no doubt PHP-Gtk. Released in March 2001, in an effort to show that PHP isn t just a web scripting language, PHP-Gtk offers coders running GTK the opportunity to create custom desktop applications without having to meddle outside of their language of choice. In this article, I m going to walk you through the process of installing PHP-Gtk on a Linux desktop. I m running KRUD 8, from tummy.c...

PHP, while originally designed and built to run on Unix, has had the ability since version 3 to run on Windows. That includes 9x, ME, NT, and 2000. In this article I m going to go through the process of installing PHP on Windows and explain what you should look out for. // ); //]] On Windows, as on Unix, you have two options for installing PHP: as a CGI or as an ISAPI module. The obvious benefit of the latter is speed. The downside is that this ...

Your production machine might have PHP installed on an Apache server in a Linux environment, but most of the people (like me) will develop and test their code on a Windows machine before they move their work on to the production machine. Working on this assumption, in this article I am going to step you through the installation of PHP interpreter under BadBlueWeb Server in windows environment. In the article we shall use BadBlue Personal Edition...

Jayesh Jain Introduction If you are a great fan of PHP, you might have installed PHP on an Apache server and used MySQL as the backend on windows or a linux machine. Most of the people will develop and test their code on a windows machine till they move their work on a production machine. In this article I am going to step you through installing PHP under IIS (Internet Information Server) on Windows 2000 and use Microsoft Access as backend (in f...

Software engineering is not unlike other industrial craft; the actors in each respective trade are engaged in the practice of creating something out of nothing. Often their products are the result of skills within several disciplines. For example, a furniture designer might require knowledge working within wood, metal, and glass, while often a software product s quality is often the function of the software designer s knowledge and experience wor...

Sci-fi author Duncan Munro s 1950 short story U-Turn includes a well-known passage that reads, May you live in interesting times. I haven t actually read the story, therefore can t say whether it was meant as a blessing or a curse. Regardless, it seems particularly applicable to those of us steeped in Web development, as the last ten years have truly proved to be a whirlwind of excitement. And as the Web platform continues to mature, we re s...

I m working to develope a web-based Geographical Information System (GIS) and one of the big problems I had was to write an easy algorithm to zoom a portion of a map. First of all I tried to use Server Side Maps, but I found that they need a Perl script with too many lines of code. So I came to phpbuilder and found an article from Rasmus Lerdorf : Creating Dynamic Images with PHP that shows how useful PHP and the GD library could be for that pur...

Before I start anything, I d like to acknowledge the work of Alain M. Samoun. His articles on phpBuilder.com and phpclasses.org were fundamental in figuring out how to interface to COM componentry, so thank you VERY much Alain! The steps being followed in this tutorial are: Check pre-requisites Check and modify php.ini settings. Modify COM permissions to allow PHP to use the COM interface Modify the applications COM permissions to allow the use ...

Before commencing this tutorial, i have to say that for the ODBC setup section, I used the work of Leo West. His page on ODBC setup and interfacing with Ms-SQL server was most usefull to my original work project... Until my boss changed the project specs to make the database to be MS-Access, instead of MySQL. If you need to find out more information about SQL, go here. Summary of Contents Creating an Access database Setting up an ODBC Conn...

While everyone who programs in PHP has to learn some English eventually to get a handle on its function names and language constructs, PHP can create applications in just about any human language. Some applications need to be used by speakers of many different languages. PHP s internationalization and localization support makes it easier to make an application written for French speakers useful for German speakers. // ); //]] Internationalizati...

The bridge class, or what s commonly known as the bridge pattern, lets you create a class with its abstract functionality and implementation residing on different class hierarchies. This lets you decouple the class from its concrete application. This article, the first of three parts, introduces you to the bridge pattern and its uses.

In this article, the first of a three-part series, you will be introduced to the basics of creating directors and builder objects with PHP 5. As usual, there will be copious examples to help you quickly start using the builder pattern in your own PHP projects.

The mediator design pattern can help you achieve and maintain synchronization between a group of PHP classes. In this first of a two-part series, you ll be introduced to the mediator pattern, how it functions, and how it can help you with your application development.

In the first article of a three-part series, you will learn the basics of using the simplexml extension that comes with PHP 5. This library is primarily focused on parsing simple XML files, and can save you a lot of work.

Most PHP developers go through scores of changes in regards to their development expertise. They usually start by creating simple scripts to add dynamic features to their Web sites, then go on to add new features. This process leads to more complexity with the mix of PHP and HTML. It is quite common to see PHP scripts that include other files, with the ultimate objective of reusing code and HTML widgets. One that includes file outputs--the standa...

Static properties and methods can be quite useful in a range of situations, not merely for constructing a Singleton class. This article, the first in a two-part series, introduces the basic concepts of static properties and methods, using plenty of hands-on examples.

This article, the first of three parts, introduces you to the chain of responsibility pattern in PHP 5. This pattern is useful when a specific class cannot deal with a particular task, and must therefore transfer a program s execution to another class with the appropriate capability.

The composite pattern is one of the less commonly used patterns in PHP 5. Nevertheless, in certain situations, it is very helpful. This article, the first one in a two-part series, will introduce you to the basic concepts of the composite pattern.

The facade pattern may be one of the less well known patterns in PHP, but it definitely has its uses. In this first article of a two-part series, you ll learn the basics of how the facade pattern works, illustrated with numerous examples.

Among the considerable variety of structural design patterns that can be implemented with PHP 4 (and PHP 5, by the way), there s one in particular that deserves special attention. It s easy to apply in the context of a given web application, and it offers remarkable functionality when it comes to preventing the unnecessary instantiation of different classes. This two-part series covers that pattern.

PHP developers frequently need to maintain the state of an object across several web pages. There are a number of ways to do this. In this article, the first of two parts, you will learn how to handle this task with the memento pattern.

The strategy design pattern can be very useful in the context of form validation. This article, the first of two parts, will introduce you to the strategy pattern and give you some idea of how you can use it in your own PHP applications.

Although the article s title may seem a bit intimidating, the truth is that things are much simpler than you think. Like many other programming languages, PHP also allows you to construct and use visitor objects with minor hassles. But, before I go deeper into the subject, first let s ask ourselves the following question: what are visitor objects, after all?

In this article, the first part of a series, you ll learn the basics of applying the command pattern with PHP 5. As always, plenty of hands-on examples are included.

Today we ll revisit our discussion of functions and introduce several new topics, including scope, static variables, and return values. // ); //]] The last time we spoke about functions, we took a fairly basic look at how they work and how they can be used in your scripts. This included declaring functions both with and without parameters, as well as how to declare default values for any parameters that the function may require. Today we ll exte...

In PHP, session management is used to help web applications maintain their state across several HTTP requests when needed. In this first part of a series, you will learn the basics of the PHP built-in session mechanism, as well as some of its many useful functions.

PHP5 is not yet official but the development versions are already usable (and unstable!) so we can start to learn and practice the new features of the upcoming version of PHP. In this article I will focus in three major new features of PHP5:. The new object model Exceptions Namespaces First of all a couple of disclaimers: Some of the techniques described in this article can be done with PHP4, but are presented anyway to make the whole article mo...

Welcome back! Last time we met, I discussed with you the concept of using multiple files to store your PHP scripts. // ); //]] In today s column, I ll be introducing one of the more interesting and useful methods of writing PHP scripts -- the object-oriented method. Those of you who might have experience with an object-oriented programming language such as Java or even C++ will find themselves right at home with most of the concepts I ll begin o...

Welcome back! In my last column I introduced to you the concept of classes in PHP and provided you with some basic examples for writing your scripts in an object-oriented way. This week, I ll discuss the concept of objects in more detail, including some of the more powerful features (and the main reason to use objects) such as inheritance and using objects as data-storage containers. Let s get started. Object Hierarchies One of the most powerful ...

Are you one of those sorry souls who has desperately tried to learn network programming in C, but never had the stamina to tame the wild beast? I was for a long time until I finally decided that I had to learn it -- not only for my own satisfaction, but because I bumped into a problem that required some network programming. After a few sweaty nights, I became completely overwhelmed. Then I realized that my favorite programming language of all tim...

If you use PHP 5 to build web-based applications that access a database, you might want to consider SQLite. A lighter option than MySQL, this database may still suit your purposes if you don t need all of MySQL s bells and whistles. This three-part series covers many of SQLite s most useful features.

Working on a website for my company, I discovered the need for wireless access to my email, stocks and such. Not wanting to pay someone else to give me this information, I decided to develop a wireless site. The information to do this is available on the internet, but it is scattered and hard to come across. I needed the ability to run php scripts, access databases, and other functions that I needed PHP to do for me. This article covers the basi...

Working on a website for my company, I discovered the need for wireless access to my email, stocks and such. Not wanting to pay someone else to give me this information, I decided to develop a wireless site. The information to do this is available on the internet, but it is scattered and hard to come across. I needed the ability to run php scripts, access databases, and other functions that I needed PHP to do for me. This article covers the basi...

If you re running a business in which you re invoicing clients, you need some way to keep track of which invoices have gone out and which clients have paid. In this second article of a four-part series that covers the creation of a PHP invoicing system, we create the parts that deal with this kind of invoice management.

In this first article of a series, Alejandro Gervasio explains the core concepts of Iterators in PHP, concentrating most of his efforts on the subject s practical side.

Welcome to the final part of the series Iterators in the Simplest Sense. In this set of articles, you ll learn the basic concepts of iterators in PHP 4 and PHP 5. The overall learning experience is strongly focused on the practical sense of the topic, so you can start quickly using iterators within your own PHP applications.

PHP has become a popular scripting language for building dynamic web pages. Elizabeth Fulghum presents a series of tutorials to get you up and running with PHP. To learn PHP, simply start with the first tutorial and continue to those following: Learning PHP: The What s and the Why s Tired of being limited by client-side Web development? Liz Fulghum begins a series of articles to teach you PHP. In this first article in the series, learn what PHP i...

Just tuning in? If you missed the first installment in the series, you can read it here. One of the questions I frequently get asked by new PHP programmers is How do I install PHP on Windows so I can test my scripts? In this article, we will be taking a look at the answer to that question and examining the steps needed to set up a development environment for PHP on Windows. Even if you already have a web host that supports PHP, being ...

Now that you have a working PHP development environment, it s time to start learning some of the actual language. In the next few articles, we will be taking a look at the fundamentals of the PHP language in preparation for creating your first script: a full-fledged form processor. This time, we will be focusing on the basic structure of PHP and taking a look at how it handles variables and data types. Basic Syntax Starting and Ending PHP Code B...

Anyone who has designed web sites for any length of time knows the limitations of html and other client side languages like CSS and JavaScript. While these languages remain at the core of web development, their primary function is to control how text and graphics are presented. Because they lack the ability to manipulate information on demand, or communicate with web servers, the result is a static web page. The ability to create dynamic pages op...

So, you know HTML, you installed an open source CMS application and you need to customize the source code. You need to learn PHP basics and quickly. This is a non-technical, informational article to assist the newbie programmer on their quest for greater programming skills. First of all, the good news is that it is possible. The bad news is that it could take some time depending upon existing skills and your specific situation. I am willing to b...

This site I m working on relies heavily on user input through forms, and all that data needs to be checked before being sent a database. I knew PHP3 s regular expression functions should solve my problem, but I didn t know how to form the regular expressions in the first place. What I needed were some sample strings--obviously the first places I looked were the PHP3 manual and the POSIX 1002.3 specification, but they don t help much in the way o...

Project Description In our last article we implemented a simple phone list using PHP and MySQL. The basic premise was to give salespeople access to a central contact database without the need of synchronizing their phones/PDAs. The script pulled contact data from a database, displayed the records, and dialed the selected record. This project will expand on that example, adding the following features: The contact database will include address info...

Here is the code from my Linux Journal article on how to build a business application using PostgreSQL s transactions and PHP4. Download Code Common.php ?php//connect to postgres database$conn=pg_pconnect(user=tperdue dbname=linuxjournal);//see if our connection was successfulif (!$conn) { //connection failed - exit the page with an error //you could also try to proceed without the ...

Are you looking forward to learning about loading XML data strings, as well as searching and accessing nodes? Then this is the tutorial you ve been waiting for since last week! Welcome to the second part of the series Working with simpleXML in PHP 5. This three-part series introduces the most important features of the simpleXML extension that comes with PHP 5, and shows by several hands-on examples how to implement the handy set of XML-parsin...

Internationalization and localization of a web page is simply the act of setting it up to be able to handle displaying in multiple languages and adding those different languages in. There are many different ways in which to do this. One of the simplest is to just make sure that all your strings that you ever output are stored as variables or constants in an included file. That way, you can make multiple copies of that file,each with different la...

Ring Ring, I pick up the phone and hear I need to put my real estate properties on my website, can you do this. I do not want to input them twice, once in the MLS and again on your our own site. Sure, I say, and hang up the phone. Now what. After hours of trying to parse through an MLS listing on the internet with unsuccessful results I stumble upon RETS. What is this? Well it is a standard that all companies offering MLS listings ...

I have to warn you not to be misled by the title of this article. It isn t really about cutting down trees with PHP.

Figuring out where your hits are coming from and which pages are being viewed is not too difficult if you use a good log analyzer like Analog or something similar. But if you want to pull up reports on the fly at any time, you need to take a different route. For about six months, I was importing my Apache logs into an SQL database and then running ad-hoc queries against that. Unfortunately, that requires me to go out and manually grab those log ...

In early September, Zend launched the new version of their PHP development environment Zend Studio 3.0, which, by many accounts, is a drastic step forward in PHP development technologies. I ve acquired a copy of the new Studio, and today I ll try to give you a reasonable rundown of what this new Studio is all about and if it is worth its price tag. // ); //]] I ve been a PHP developer for a long time, using many different development environment...

Mach-II is a framework for organizing applications using standard OO techniques. This article will cover how to install, set up and configure a Mach-II application, and explore basic coding techniques.

The DirectoryIterator class is an important part of the Standard PHP Library (SPL). Among other things, it lets you traverse any specified directory with a regular foreach loop. In this first article of a three-part series, some of the most relevant methods that come with the DirectoryIterator class are covered.

One of the most common tasks that I came across developing interactive websites was processing users input. In this article I would like to share the experience I had developing an object-oriented solution for it. The best effect that I can imagine this paper to have is to not just show “another solution for checking a submitted form”, but rather to let you taste the power of object-oriented technology. Together with you, I will look b...

If you want to write PHP scripts that handle email, there are a few things you need to understand first. This article, the first of two parts, introduces you to these concepts. It is excerpted from chapter 8 of the

MVC Frameworks, such as WASP, provide a solid jumping-off point for entry-level programmers to produce strong, well-formed code. The framework simplifies such things as creating a page (using a kind of page object) and creating or searching for data (using database table objects). // ); //]] However, probably the most difficult concept for novice PHP programmers to grasp is handling their application s state and session data. This article will a...

Last week, we began our discussion of PHP standalone scripts. This week, we ll be talking about child processes, shared resources, signals, and writing daemons. The second of three parts, this article is excerpted from chapter five of the book

Among the huge variety of design patterns that can be easily implemented in PHP 5, the interpreter is one that might be particularly interesting to you. It allows you to build effortlessly the so-called parser layers. Welcome to the second installment of the series that began with Building Interpreter Classes with PHP 5. Made up of three parts, this series introduces the core concepts on this useful pattern, and also complements its theory with...

After going through a series of pages during a registration process, you don t want the user to be able to go back after the final submit. What can you do to manually expire those pages, and perhaps display a custom message? In this scenario, I didn t want my session to expire as I needed it to continue. Instead, I used an extra session variable to track whether my session was alive or not. There are four main components: (1) the ent...