730 PHP Tutorials. Page 8

NOTE: Some of this article comes from Remote Scripting with IFRAME by Eric Costello and Apple Developer Connection; 02/08/2002. It can be found here: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/02/08/iframe.html. Forward In the above-mentioned article, Costello says that Remote Scripting is the process by which a client-side application running in the browser and a server-side application can exchange data without reloading...

With the introduction of version 4.2, PHP has started supporting a new SAPI (Server Application Programming Interface) called CLI (Command Line Interface). This facility was introduced to help developers create small shell applications (scripts) with PHP. So, now you can kiss Perl goodbye forever. The CLI SAPI was released for the first time with PHP 4.2.0, but was still experimental back then and had to be explicitly enabled with --enable-cli w...

One of the challenges for any web development team is creating systems that are technically robust while still being intuitive to users. It s especially important to keep in mind the level of technical proficiency of the intended users of the system. We were reminded of this crucial truism shortly after the initial launch of a site we recently built. Our consulting division had been approached by a economic development organization who wanted us...

In the last installment, Integrating Google Maps Into Your Web Applications, you learned how to take advantage of Google s amazingly convenient mapping API. In this tutorial, I mentioned the API doesn t yet offer a means for translating addresses to latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Because these coordinates are required to display locations and plot points, information about two third-party solutions capable of doing so was provided: ...

What is RETS? At first glance it sounds like something you may want to avoid, but for the professional Realtor and their web developer it s like gold. It helps Realtors update property information on the MLS server, saving time and keeping listings current. It can all be done through PHP and a good database.

When I first heard of Zend Studio, I thought, what s the point in that? There are plenty of (free) PHP IDEs available. What s so special about this one? However, when I got down to looking at it properly, I found that Zend was indeed very different to others. For one thing, it s not really just one package, it s two, aptly named, Zend Studio Client and Zend Studio Server. The client part is an excellent, easy-to-use IDE, with integrated debugger...

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 ...

AJAX is popular for the creation of rich Internet applications, but there are good alternatives. This article will introduce you to Flex applications, rich Internet applications that run inside the Adobe Flash player.

An RSS feed lets webmasters tease visitors into returning to their websites again and again to check out new content. Danny Wall explains how to set up this simple, automated, spamless way of getting Web surfers to come back for more.

Web frameworks are all the rage these days, and for good reason - they save developers a tremendous amount of time and trouble. After all, what developer wouldn t opt to focus on being creative and making effective use of his skills rather than being burdened with the development of yet another data management interface or building another home-grown templating system? Frameworks remove such repetition by taking care of many of these tedious tas...

In the first installment of this series, I introduced PHP s LDAP functionality, and demonstrated just how easy it was to create PHP scripts that talked to Microsoft s Active Directory product. In this installment, we ll take a look at another language offering great LDAP support: Perl. In true TMTOWTDI (There s More Than One Way To Do It; The official motto of Perl) fashion, several LDAP packages exist for Perl. I ve had the pleasure of experimen...

Want to learn how to get the most out of the simpleXML extension that comes bundled with PHP 5? Welcome to the last part of the series Working with simpleXML in PHP 5. In three tutorials, this series covers topics ranging from the basics of parsing XML files with this library, to performing advanced tasks, such as searching, extracting and replacing nodes, and interoperating with the XML DOM.

So, you want to put a Search This Site button on your PHP3 sites? Well, unless all your pages are stored in a database (ugh!), there is no easy way to do this using PHP alone.

While working on this article, I received a Security bulletin highlighting a critical flaw in phpBB. This is a fairly mature open source forum written in PHP, and one that s had its fair share of critical flaws. The fact that there are still more being found, and more likely to be found, shows you how difficult it is to write completely secure software, even for an experienced team of developers. Ensure your software is up to date It seems obvio...

In this article we re going to discuss security issues relating to PHP. PHP can be a very powerful and, overall, secure language. That doesn t mean you can just throw caution to the wind, however. // ); //]] Since PHP is most commonly used as an Apache module, it derives its security model to a large degree from Apache, which, if configured properly, is a very secure environment. In cases where PHP is used as a CGI, this benefit is lost. While c...

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...

Learn how to create a sign-up form for a website with a security image. The image prevents fake sign-ups and spam. In this tutorial, we will learn how to create a security image template, then put it to use.

This article is intended to provide another look at Nathan Rohler s article that was recently published (the link is provided at the end of this article). His article illustrated how to use a database and PHP s image functions based on the GD library to create random security images. This article will demonstrate how to achieve the same goal (albeit with slightly different results) by using ImageMagick. I chose not to use hidden form fields and a...

Communicating with website users via email is crucial to the success of any online service. The ability to deliver registration confirmations and newsletters, provide a convenient and relatively secure password recovery tool, and keep clients updated with shipping status reports are just a few of the reasons for incorporating email-based features into your website infrastructure. In this tutorial, I ll show you how to incorporate email delivery ...

Communicating with website users via email is crucial to the success of any online service. The ability to deliver registration confirmations and newsletters, provide a convenient and relatively secure password recovery tool, and keep clients updated with shipping status reports are just a few of the reasons for incorporating email-based features into your website infrastructure. In this tutorial, I ll show you how to incorporate email delivery c...

Server scripting languages like Lasso and Java servlets make sending mail so complicated that you d rather avoid it at all costs. Until recently, I have been relying on a cheap (read free) perl script from cgi-resources.com, but I want to be able to do this from PHP. Yesterday (1999-02-20), I decided to give email a whirl with PHP3. I needed to have a customized thank you page after sending the mail - like the rest of geo...

Tired of sending those drab textual notifications and newsletters to your friend and clients? Ever wanted to send attachments and/or HTML embedded email. The answer is MIME. The ensuing few pages explain the basics of MIME, creating MIME-compliant messages and then ends with a working class implementation of sending MIME complaint email in PHP. Note that references to calling script, caller etc. denote the script that uses the class we are about...

Simplify the task of creating XML documents with the XML_Serializer class, which lets you build nested XML documents from PHP data structures like arrays and objects (and vice versa). I ll show you how to build an XML document tree via the XML_Serializer class from PEAR, how to programmatically create an XML document from an array or an object, how to attach attributes to elements, and how to customize the behavior of the serializer. All this, an...

Let s face it, web pages aren t designed for interaction with users. At one time or another, you ve probably found yourself needing to know what user you are dealing with, and some information about that user. But how do you do it on the web? There are many ways, but most of them are either error prone, or serious security risks. Passing around form data from page to page can easily be sniffed, and even more easily forged. What is a webmaster to...

After my last article about Session Management in PHP4, I got several emails from people that had problems implementing what I tried to describe. All theese emails had the same question: Can you give me example code ? Yes, sure I can. I will assume that you have read my previous article ( it s here in case you missed it). As I described earlier, you have to tell PHP that the current page use session variables by calling the session_start() funct...

One of the new great features with PHP4 is the session management feature. It allows you to store variables in a session object during a user visit. I used this feature recently while re-making my swedish community website (http://coolt.nu/) and thought I d share some of the experience I gained from that. What is a Session? First off I d like to explain what a session is, in case you don t know what it is. A session begins when a user surfs in...

As you learned in the last article, session tracking can add a whole new dimension to your web site. This week, I ll build upon what we learned, and show you how to create custom functions to store user session data. However, before delving further into how these functions are created, let s take a moment to ask why we would want to do this in the first place. // ); //]] Why would it be necessary to create custom functions instead of using the d...

The ability to gather, analyze, and implement information about visitors to your organization s web site is one of the most powerful aspects of this new media. The advantages of doing this are manifold -- this information is not only useful for analyzing the patterns of visitors who are interested in your products and/or services, but also allows you to provide customized services to these visitors. For example, not only could you learn which pag...

Building a dynamic website with a database backend is something that nearly every PHP programmer will need to do, usually sooner rather than later. If you haven t done it yet (or even if you have), this two-part article series will show you how to develop a website engine that can generate pages on the fly from a simple database structure.

Shining a Light on LAMP Welcome to LAMP 101. Two years ago, the general IT population still didn t know exactly what LAMP was; it was a well-kept hobby in the dark corners of enterprise development. Although it still hasn t reached the height of cocktail conversation, LAMP has come a long way, building momentum among developers and reaching the ears of C-level executives and boardrooms of some of the world s leading organizations as they consi...

Working with a database is an everyday exercise for web developers these days. From simple form processing to large-scale web applications, we almost always need a database. After working on a few projects, it doesn t take very long to realize that the same four simple database tasks repeat many times in virtually all projects. These four tasks are: // ); //]] Finding records (SELECT). Updating existing records (UPDATE). Adding new records (INSE...

WASP (Web Application Structure for PHP) is a three-tier framework built on PHP 5. Lately, more software engineers are moving from cumbersome enterprise languages such as Java and C# to languages such as Python and Ruby and PHP. With version 5, PHP has finally reached the point where these developers can feel at home in what used to be considered a hacker s language. By demonstrating that it is possible to create and use complicated, enterpris...

PHP has the drawback of not supporting events. Fortunately, a basic structure can be built to support events in PHP 5. This article tackles that problem with some proof of concept code.

When you need to present data in a chart on a web page, it is often worthwhile to generate graphical charts. This method is covered later in Section 18.4, Creating a Graph/Chart Library; however, sometimes for a quick chart CSS can suffice. Listing 9.4.1 presents a function that creates a visual chart of data using CSS and XHTML only. As written it accepts an array of values and plots them each in an area graph 1 pixel wide for each data point...

I ve been getting a lot of email and seeing lots of rumors about what happened to PHPBuilder and why it hasn t had any new stories posted recently. internet.com is taking over the maintenance of the site and I am moving on to focus on my day job and Consulting Business. No worries - the site is not going to be shut down and it is likely some new stories will be posted soon. --Tim Comments: Good Luck Tim and thanks!Carol07/16/03 15:54 RE: salut d...

So you ve got a dynamic site, filled with all sorts of user inputs, whether it be a phorum , or like my own site at knowpost.com. The site htdig.org will take care of indexing and searching your html pages, but if you are like me, you have very few html pages, and must of your content resides in BLOBs in your database. You can t do anything useful using a like %searchword% query, it just isn t coming back relevant. There has to be a...

I ve been wanting to write this article for a long time, but never really had the time to do it right. So rather than say this is going to be a how-to, I m hoping that this article will be the seed of discussion about how to build great, scalable web applications. Certainly over the past 2-3 years, my web development skills have changed dramatically. I look back at the source code for Geocrawler and can t believe I wrote that. The source code fo...

The Smarty templating system is a fantastic framework for architecting php-based websites, especially in a collaborative development environment. This article will examine the benefits of Smarty, as well as delve into some basic examples of its implementation. We will also point the way to the available resources and community based around the system. First, let s make the case for Smarty. Why smarty? Templating: Smarty has a great tagging syste...

If you ve been working with PHP for a while, you re probably used to thinking about it only in the context of a Web page or a Web server. While this is not unusual - PHP is, after all, a scripting language that s most commonly used to dynamically generate Web pages - it can stifle your creativity; as you ll see in this article, there s a lot more you can do with PHP than just connect to a database, retrieve records and insert them into an HTML te...

Chances are that at some point in the life of a web site you will need to be creating content on request. Fortunately (yeah, right...), I had to tackle this early in the development of our Metalloprotein Database site at TSRI. There are several ways of going about this. You can purchase an expensive all-in-one packaged solution (with the kitchen sink and all the chrome), or if you are like me (e.g. someone with not much dough to spend around, an...

I needed a simple little example that I could use to show how Apache s ForceType directive can be put to good use with PHP. I chose a URL-based spell checker since one of the newer features of PHP is built-in spell checking and I thought this would interest people as well. This is of course a rather useless example. You can do a lot of quite complex things with the concept presented here. The ForceType directive just changes the MIME type of som...

There is a great misconception that SQLite is not available for PHP4, rather only for PHP5. In fact, SQLite support has been around for quite some time courtesy of the bindings available via the PHP Extension Community Library (PECL). This tutorial is intended to show you how to install the SQLite PECL Extension in PHP4. Following its installation I will walk through a basic example of using SQLite to access a database stored in a flat file. So ...

I try and wade through as many postings on PHP General as possible throughout the day. Everything from What does $$var mean? to How to I redirect someone to another page? pop up. Two common problems pop up on the list frequently, one is How do I build complex queries on the fly?, and the other is the problem of how to fully utilize all those cool features in your DB. So here is what I plan to tackle in this ar...

Checkboxes in web forms are useful because they allow the person filling out the form to choose from a wide range of possible choices. Specifically, it allows the user to choose some, all or none of the elements. Although checkboxes are excellent form elements for certain tasks, there is often confusion about how to store checkbox data correctly. This article will demonstrate how to store checkbox data in a database, in a manner that follows goo...

Out here at Melonfire, we re big fans of PHP. We use it for a variety of reasons - Web site development, image generation, database connectivity - and we find it friendly, powerful and easy to use...all factors which come in handy when working against tight delivery deadlines.

In the first part of this article, I took a look at the new FTP commands built into PHP4, and demonstrated how they could be used to build a fully Web-based FTP client. But there s more than one way to skin a cat - which is why the second part of this article will explore an alternative technique of performing remote file management, this time without resorting to PHP s FTP commands.

If you re anything like me, your acquaintance with PHP s string functions is pretty limited. Sure, you know how to echo output to the screen, and you can even handle things like string concatenation and tokenization. But do you know how to format a string before inserting it into a database, or display decimals in a user-friendly format?

Whether you re new to programming, or an experienced developer, the fact remains true that application architecture is imperative to a good application. By good application I mean one that is fast, efficient, powerful, programmer-friendly, and reusable. These things make up the ideal application. I ve developed an application architecture called SwitchBox. It s somewhat derived from FuseBox, but far less cryptic, far faster, and in most cases, e...

When you switched from pedaling a bicycle to driving a car, what was the hardest thing to learn? Changing programming languages is exactly the same. This article focuses on the switch from Visual Basic to PHP. First we look at the bicycle to car changeover then specific help for VB programmers starting out with PHP. On my first time in a car, I fount it hard to remember to use the indicator. There was no equivalent on my bicycle. Braking was eve...

As many of you would surely attest, once you start developing with PHP it s pretty difficult to consider another language for your daily Web development activities. This isn t surprising, given PHP s relatively shallow learning curve, the literally thousands of readily available predefined functions, and the seemingly endliness array of projects and user groups sprouting up all over the globe. Wouldn t it be great if you could extend your use of ...

We all know accessing data in RAM is a lot quicker than accessing data on disk. So, with this in mind, wouldn t it make sense for MySQL to store as much data as possible in memory? The answer is of course yes, and MySQL can in a number of ways. Query caches, holding indexes in memory, and most extreme of all, holding an entire table in memory. The latter is the topic of this article. Tables in memory are called HEAP tables. The MySQL table types...

Last month we looked at the HEAP table type, a table type which runs entirely in memory. This month we look at setting up the InnoDB table type, the type of most interest to serious users. The standard MyISAM table type is ideal for website use, where there are many reads in comparison to writes, and no transactions. Where these conditions do not apply (and besides websites, they do not apply often in the database world), the InnoDB table is lik...

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 ...

In 2005, there were a number of technologies that continued to be important. Several, however, rose to the forefront of the news and to the forefront of what developers were doing. Of these, four technologies were recognized as the most important (and possibly most visible) in 2005. These four technologies were the finalists for the Developer.com Technology of the year recognition. These are AJAX, RSS, SOA, and virtualization. You might ask the q...

One of the nice things about PHP - and one of the primary reasons for its popularity as a rapid application development (RAD) tool - is the fact that PHP code can be inserted into regular HTML markup to turn otherwise static HTML content into dynamic, intelligent Web pages. This feature makes it possible to quickly write PHP scripts that build Web pages on the fly from a database (or other external data source), and to create smart Web applicat...

In the first part of this article, I demonstrated the basics of the patTemplate system, explaining how it could be used to build template-based Web applications. I showed you how to organize your Web pages into modular templates, and use variable placeholders in conjunction with the patTemplate API to populate and display those templates.

If you re wondering what templates are, first go read the first few paragraphs of Sascha Schumann s excellent article Templates - why and how to use them in PHP3. In general, templates let you completely separate your PHP code from the HTML, which makes the HTML graphic designers very happy and keeps them from messing up your precious programming. It s Not FastTemplates So, do we really need another article on PHPBuilder about using templates? W...

Are you faced with the task of creating a site which should be programmed by a coder (namely you) and designed by a designer? Do not you know how to make the life easy for both of you? I have got the answer for you: Use FastTemplate to make your site more customizable! Ok, you probably want to know why you want to use FastTemplates. change the look of your entire web site in seconds abstract programming without dirty HTML the designer does not n...

Web applications have become a popular way to provide global access to data, services, and products. While this global access is one of the Web s underlying advantages, any security holes in these applications are also globally exposed and frequently exploited. It is extremely easy to write applications that contain unintentional security holes. This is demonstrated by the range of common web applications, including PHPMyAdmin, PHPShop and FreeTr...

In the previous article, we explored five security checks for PHP code; in this article we explore five more. // ); //]] Use the .php extension for all script files Many PHP programmers use .inc or .class extensions for library and configuration files that are accessed by the include function. If a malicious user fet

Imagine you are in an interview. You are at the stage where the interviewer has failed to notice the gaps in your CV and is actually forced to ask you some questions. Not having prepared, their expression drains they are forced to think up one on the spot. They can only come up with... What are the stages in developing software?. Pah, easy! Design, Code, Test and Debug. A quick handshake later and you know you are in the ...

The release of PHP 5 in July 2004 marked a significant leap in PHP s evolution--it enabled the development of large-scale applications to leverage the productivity, maintainability, and reusability of object-oriented design. While the language features introduced in PHP 5 are vital for this, the development of large-scale applications requires additional tools and techniques to be viable. // ); //]] PHPUnit is such a tool. It supports the develo...

This article, the first of two parts, helps you use design patterns to better organize how your web application interacts with a database. It is excerpted from chapter 14 of the book

This article, the second of two parts, helps you use design patterns to better organize how your web application interacts with a database. It is excerpted from chapter 14 of the book

You have probably used the factory design pattern before. An abstract factory pattern helps you make sure you re creating the correct objects for your application according to the context. This article, the first one in a three-part series, gives you a taste of what you can do with the abstract factory pattern. As always, it includes plenty of examples.

You may have already encountered situations in coding PHP applications in which you would like to use inheritance, but could not for one reason or another. Fortunately, there is an alternative for these situations that can help you achieve the same result. In this first article in a two-part series, you ll learn about the adapter pattern.

Object serialization in PHP is very easy, and can be used for a variety of different purposes. It can be used to perform some fairly complex operations, in fact. This article, the first of a three-part series, introduces you to object serialization and a number of the tasks for which you can put this approach to use.

We all know how to fetch a row from MySQL, read the data, and save some data back. It s fairly simple and straightforward, with nothing tricky is going on behind the scenes. However, there is much to be gained by using an OOP approach to managing data in your database. This article is a sketch of how one might design an Object-Oriented approach to managing records in a database. All the logic inherent in your data can be encapsulated into discre...

I m no graphic designer, but I am glad to unveil a new look for PHPBuilder. I knew it was time to upgrade when I was getting more offers to rewrite the site than offers to write articles ;-) Thanks to everyone for their offers and draft looks. The changes to the site are more than skin deep - I actually made the big move to PHP4 and MySQL 3.23.22 last weekend, apparently with no problems at all. If you haven t upgraded to PHP4, go for it - as fa...

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...

This article, the first of two parts, explains how to use the Iteratorpattern to manipulate any collection of objects. It is excerpted fromchapter eight of the book