Archive for September 20th, 2006
PHP Developer - September 20th, 2006
DevShed continues their look at the creation of an invoicing system today with this new tutorial, “Client Management for a PHP Invoicing System”, part 3.
What’s an invoicing system that can’t manage the data for the clients you’re invoicing? This article, the third of four parts, shows how to make managing your clients easy. This part of the system allows you to view a full list of client names, and add, update or remove clients from your database.
They build on the foundations in part one and part two to now create a client management section of the tool. They give you the table structure they use and show you (including the code/interface) how to remove, update, and add new clients to the database.
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PHP Developer - September 20th, 2006
On the PHPKitchen site today, Demian Turner looks at a handy utility to ensure that the coding standards in your documents are all passable - PHP_CodeSniffer.
There was a fantastic CS helper package released at PEAR this week, PHP_CodeSniffer. The package, which requires PHP5 and is nicely coded, puts a phpcs script in your path so you can pass files or directories to it to get your CS validated.
The results are detailed and processing is surprisingly fast considering how many tokens are being parsed.
Demian gives an example of what the validation process looks like and why he finds the entire package particularly useful.
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PHP Developer - September 20th, 2006
PHPBuilder.com has another excerpt from the book PHP 5 in Practice showing quickly this time how to create a dyanmic progress bar for your application.
In some situations you might need to display a progress bar-for example, when you are performing many tasks on the back end and they take a while to complete. In these cases it is a good idea to give some indication to the user that you are in fact still performing tasks and that their browser hasn’t simply locked up.
They demonstrate a few different ways to accomplih this task including a simple “Please wait” kind of message and a more PHP-based example that changes the width of a DIV based on the amount of time it’s taken to perform the task.
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PHP Developer - September 20th, 2006
If you missed the Zend Webcast talking about “Advanced PHP Solutions” with Zeev Suaski, ComputerWorld has your chance to grab the download from it.
PHP continues to enjoy phenomenal growth becoming the de-facto standard for enterprise Web applications. With the introduction of PHP 5, PHP has reached new levels of support for Web Services, XML and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) meeting the robust demands of the enterprise environment. Learn how you can achieve scalability, performance, availability and reliability for your enterprise-class PHP applications with advanced PHP solutions from Zend Technologies.
In the webcast, Zeev talks about integrating web services, tracking and improving the response times in your application, scaling your applications, and troubleshooting applications down to the exact line of code.
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PHP Developer - September 20th, 2006
In his latest blog post, Pádraic Brady talks about a “sweeter alternative” to using Smarty for your site’s templating - Template Lite.
Use the term Template Engine in a PHP forum and the word “Smarty” will inevitably crop up. I like Smarty but, similar to a few PHP libraries, it’s very bloated.
I try to keep my applications lean and mean - small, fast, and adaptable. Unfortunately, Smarty disagrees with my needs. It’s bloated design while packing a mighty punch, uses a chunk of memory and processor time I dislike. Since I also develop open source apps which end up on shared hosts, my concerns are even more justified.
Enter Mark Dickenson. Mark is the developer of a Smarty alternative: Template Lite.
He talks about what Template Lite is and what kinds of advantages it has over Smarty, including staying try to its name. Pádraic measures it as not only being faster but also having 50% of the memoery footprint that Smarty does. He seems to favor it for those places when he just needs something light and easy on a site.
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