April 28th, 2009 by Eric
I was recently presented with the challenge of aggregating database hits for content that is e-mailed and commented on. My gut reaction was to think of a PHP script, or perhaps set of scripts to filter & count the database rows. Script processing of data sets with proper ORM can yield very meaningful information to both the programmer and the end-user. However this can be memory-intensive, and creating an ORM layer for such a simple task *could* be considered overkill. This is when MySQL views can help you.
Continue reading ‘MySQL Views to the Rescue!’
March 30th, 2009 by Eric
About two years ago I read of an emerging ORM-solution called Propel. Having just finished my first full readthrough of PHP 5 Object, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra, I was eager to research object relational mappers that differed from the one used in that book. My experience was one of major disappointment. After spending hours of frustration installing the library, and more hours configuring and running my first propel build, I ran a measly script to add an author to a bookstore database. And it was slow…much slower than one file of PHP. I dropped Propel, deeming it too unstable and unpredictable to run in any redistributable software. Continue reading ‘Get Propelled!’
March 14th, 2009 by Eric
As I posted in a previous blog, the Gentle Beginnings site that I left over a half a year ago was 90% done, but was missing one core feature – the ability to post and read birthing stories. Recently I revisited this site to add the birthing story component, and learned a couple of hard lessons about Joomla! application development. Hopefully by posting this I can shed some light on the less documented portions of Joomla!, and perhaps save someone else precious time. Continue reading ‘Joomla! Applications: The Basics’
March 2nd, 2009 by Eric
When developing a web application using PHP, it is important to follow best practices for optimizing memory usage, database access, and file sizes. All these thing taken into account for, you will likely still find parts of an application to be bulky, or you may find repeated data calls an unnecessary overhead. When you need it, you should use Cache_Lite. Continue reading ‘Application Caching with Cache_Lite’
February 22nd, 2009 by Eric
With PHP becoming a bigger player in the realm of enterprise web application design, there are several questions that the PHP developer must ask his/herself. One such question is licensing, and whether or not an application should be open or closed source.
Since PHP itself is an open source project, the vast majority of products released using PHP are open source as well. However, there may be a need to license out software-as-a-service, or the need to secure your source. Enter Nu-Coder. Continue reading ‘Product Highlight: Nu-Coder by NuSphere’
February 15th, 2009 by Eric
While PHP Frameworks have become quite popular with web developers over the last two years, they have their drawbacks. They can be bulky and/or bloated, bringing the simplest of tasks into a fold of dependencies and data calls. They can be difficult to administrate remotely – if you use a shared host, some command-line configurations options are immediately disqualified. You may just be looking for a helper library, but do not want to drag your application through the mud of an entire framework to get one piece of functionality. Continue reading ‘To PHP or not to PHP…Let the Framework Debate Begin! (Part 1)’
February 10th, 2009 by Eric
HTML_QuickForm is a very popular PEAR library that eases form design for the web programmer. It consists of three separate but equally important parts – form components, form renderers, and form validators. The last of these three is the focus of this week’s tutorial.
Web programmers always have to be considerate of the security risks involved in web application design, and user input is one of the top priorities in application security. Thankfully, HTML_QuickForm makes validating forms a simple process, using object-oriented prinicples of inheritence while unifying client and server-side validation. Continue reading ‘Extending HTML_QuickForm_Rule’
