Archive for May, 2006
PHP Developer - May 19th, 2006
Despite some apparent time as a nurse for two small furry creatures, Scott Johnson as found time to get back into his “geekiness” in this new post on his blog.
He asks the question: “Is there significant overhead to the is_ functions like is_array, is_object, is_string in php?” He wonders if those kinds of functions, since they are on such a base level, could cause more trouble than their worth when used en masse. He asks because it’s used heavily in an approach for his developing Ookles application.
There’s already been one comment made on the post, and it mentions that they are, in fact, a trivial call to PHP. It’s a simple test that validates simply without much need for too much background action. It does mentions some caveats - is_object, is_resource, and, at times, is_callable.
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PHP Developer - May 19th, 2006
As mentioned in this new post on Marcus Whitney’s blog and this item from the Pro::PHP podcast website, there will be an interview with Brion Vibber of Wikimedia today streamed live via php|architect.
Tune in [on May 19th] as we interview Brion Vibber, Chief Technology Officer of Wikimedia. Brion will share his experience with using PHP in the endeavor of powering the web application with the mission of providing “…every single person… free access to the sum of all human knowledge”. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is currently the 16th most visited site in the world, and it runs on PHP. Brion will share the lessons learned from Wikipedia’s meteoric rise as the go-to destination for all things ‘info’ and how they have intelligently scaled and secured PHP for the truest of enterprise deployments.
If you’d like to attend, head on over to the signup page on the php|architect site and submit your info today. You’ll recieve an email with instructions on where to go and when to be there to be a part of the action.
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PHP Developer - May 19th, 2006
In the ever-continuing work that he’s been doing with SimpleXML lately, Ben Ramsey shares a new bit of code</a. on his blog today for creating images from XML data.
It’s not really a “problem,” but FeedBurner’s FeedCount image is a rigid 88 pixels wide, and I wanted to include it on my homepage under the “syndicate” heading, an area that I’ve defined in my template as having only 80 pixels in width. The 88 pixels were throwing things off, so I used the width attribute of the HTML img tag to solve the problem. Unfortunately, it just squeezes the image, making the text in it appear fuzzy.
FeedBurner conveniently provides what they call their “Awareness API,” which is a RESTful interface to retrieve (as XML data) the same exact information displayed in the FeedCountTM image. I simply fired up an image editing program, shuffled things around a bit until the image was a nice, clean 80 pixels wide, and saved it as the base image (shown to the right) I would use for generating an image similar to the one FeedBurner provides.
He explains what the script does via the SimpleXML call and gives the code to accomplish it. It’s a short bit of code, but quite powerful when combined with the API from Feedburner - grabbing the data from a local image and integrating the text response from the API. It’s great that they have that too - definitely a wise move to allow users even more flexibility in integration for their site.
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Dev Shed - May 18th, 2006
This articles looks ahead to the improvements you can expect in MySQL 5.1. These include triggers user variables and other features. It is excerpted from chapter 8 of em Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization From Novice to Professional em written by Jon Stephens and Chad Russell Apress ISBN 159 593324 ….
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Dev Shed - May 18th, 2006
Welcome to the first of three tutorials in a series that covers network programming in PHP. In this article you will learn how to use some useful PHP networking functions that will help you perform a variety of common networking tasks. To that end you will build a simple networking query application in PHP 5….
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