PHP Developer - October 25th, 2006
On his blog today, Richard Davey shares a bit of code that will take an image and make a “nicely formatted reflection” of it automatically.
You can use it to give your site that ‘iTunes / Apple’ look if you so desire. I created it to make image uploads to a site I run look that little bit nicer, so figured I would share it with you all.
The script, Easy Reflections, can be grabbed from here along with the installation and use instructions (including the values for the six parameters to change the image).
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PHP Developer - October 25th, 2006
Hot on the heels of this announcement, Andi Gutmans has posted some of his thoughts on this new functionality and how it can help companies both large and small (he mentions specifically Yahoo! of course).
In my experience, databases have had a long history of being the typical bottleneck in PHP applications. There are many reasons for that.
His reasons include the fact that web apps being heavily database driven, PHP developers would rather write PHP than SQL, and that there’s a lack of good, cheap tools to help find these bottlenecks. What he focuses on most, though, is the overhead caused by the need for multi-process environments to force each process to manage their own connections to the databse.
He talks about some stats on average connections and application speed, about efforts IBM has made to help the situation, and how it’s not necessarily just the server’s fault for delegating out the database resources - why can’t they all adapt?
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PHP Developer - October 25th, 2006
PHPBuilder.com has posted a brand new tutorial today covering the installation and use of one of the most popular PEAR packages - HTML_QuickForm.
It makes handling the rendering and display of forms, and more usefully, both client and server-side validation, quick and easy. This article will take you through the basics of that package. It assumes familiarity with HTML form elements, and reasonably basic PHP skills.
Thanks to the PEAR installer, setting the package up on your machine is a snap. They also point out that you’ll need the HTML_Common package to get things working. They move on to creating a simple form - showing how to add the elements and what the output looks like. There’s even information on adding input validation (you do validate your input, don’t you?) and doing a bit of formatting for the layout of the elements.
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PHP Developer - October 25th, 2006
Ilia Alshanetsky is asking the crowd for comments in his latest blog entry, specificalyl about the new filter extension coming in the next major PHP 5 series release - version 5.2.
What I am interested in hearing is are there any other common types of data collected by PHP forms that would be worth while adding filters for into the extension. My own suggestions would be the phone (US/EU formats) and postal/zip code validators.
Comments on have already been made ranging from date validation improvements to input validation. Head on over and add your own comments/ideas to the mix…
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