VT’s Tech Blog

Project Jaws

Here’s a cool project from Google’s Summer of Code. A CMS framework for PHP which is easy to use and administer. The administration side uses a lot of Ajax features to ease up the functionality, check out the layout settings in the administrative section to see how easy it is to control the layout.

Jaws is a Framework and Content Management System for building dynamic web sites. It aims to be User Friendly giving ease of use and lots of ways to customize web sites, but at the same time is Developer Friendly, it offers a simple and powerful framework to hack your own modules.

Link: Jaws Project Jaws

Demo: Jaws Demo Site

Posted in PHP | No Comments »

CSSVista

A very cool utility for CSS coders - CssVista allows you to preview your CSS styles on both IE and Firefox side by side.

CSSVista is a free Windows application for web developers which lets you edit your CSS code live in both Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously. If you like this, you may be interested in our browser compatibility service, SiteVista.

Link: CSSVista: Live CSS editing with Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously

Posted in CSS | No Comments »

Pixy: XSS and SQL Scanner for PHP

If you’re working on PHP 4.x, here’s a tool which checks if your codebase is succeptible to Cross site scripting or SQL injection.

Pixy is a Java program that performs automatic scans of PHP 4 source code, aimed at the detection of XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities. Pixy takes a PHP program as input, and creates a report that lists possible vulnerable points in the program, together with additional information for understanding the vulnerability.

Pixy still doesn’t support PHP 5 !

Pixy: XSS and SQLI Scanner for PHP

Posted in PHP, Security | No Comments »

Optimize Ubuntu Feisty Fawn for Speed

If you’re looking for ways to speed up your Ubuntu installation, here a link you’d find useful. Please remember to reboot after you tweak - or you’ll end up having to reinstall your OS from scratch

Link: Optimize Ubuntu Feisty Fawn for Speed - Tips for a faster Ubuntu machine! - Softpedia

Posted in Linux | 1 Comment »

PHP port check

There was a request from the PHP Bangalore User group on how to check if a webserver is running on a domain. The solution I proposed was to check if we can connect to port 80 on that domain. That would let us know if the webserver on the domain was running or not. Here’s the code snippet showing how to do that using PHP Sockets.


< ?php
error_reporting(0);
// Your Domain to check
$site = "www.vinuthomas.com";
// Port to check - Default port 80 for webserver
// You can check other ports by changing the
// value of $port
$port = 80;
//open the port and check
$fp = fsockopen($site,$port,$errno,$errstr,10);
if(!$fp)
{
echo "Cannot connect to server";
// you can send your notification mail here.
}else{
echo "Connect was successful - no errors";
fclose($fp);
}
?>


This script can be modified to check for other ports on the server like FTP and SMTP by just changing the $port value in the script.

Posted in PHP | 3 Comments »

Zend Framework 1.0.0RC2 Released

The Zend framework team has accounced the release of Zend Framework 1.0.0 Release Candidate 2.

There are a few noteworthy additions in this release:

• Zend_Gdata has a new object-oriented usage, making this client very similar to the interface of Gdata clients for other programming languages.
• Zend_Service_StrikeIron is a new web service client.
• We now provide separate downloadable packages for the documentation. The product download does not provide documentation, but you can view it online or download it for offline reading. The download page on the framework website has been redesigned.
• Zend_Db supports an option to turn off the automatic identifier quoting that it does by default.

There have been 38 issues fixed in this release since 1.0.0RC1. The changelog is available at:
http://framework.zend.com/changelog
The next release will be in mid-June, and it will likely be a third release candidate.

Link to announcement: Zend Developer Zone | Zend Framework 1.0.0RC2 Released
Download : http://framework.zend.com/

Posted in PHP | No Comments »

Caching Wordpress offline using Google Gears

If you’re still wondering what you can do with Google gears, here are a tutorials to get you started on the right track. Nick Halstead takes you though how to cache Wordpress pages using Google Gears:

“I was instantly fascinated by Google Gears so I had to immediately try out the sample code that you can download. The tutorial on the website gives a simple example of how to cache a few files using the Resource Store. It makes it very easy to setup a JSON manifest file that contains which pages you want to have cached.“

Link: Google Gears Caching of WordPress in PHP

Posted in Ajax, PHP | No Comments »