VT’s Tech Blog

This is something which PHP programmers should know. Of late, while I’ve been taking interviews for PHP programmers, I’ve realized that many programmers don’t have a clue about the difference between the two.

Difference between “require()” and “include()” in PHP

After Delicious’ frequent downtime, I went out looking for another social bookmarking network, and landed up at blinklist. Blinklist imported all my delicious bookmarks and I was up and running here in a few seconds.

My BlinkList is available at: http://www.blinklist.com/vinuthomas/

BlinkList | Your personal start page and social bookmarking engine

Here are some Rapid Development Frameworks for PHP:

Prado PHP Framework:
PRADO is a component-based and event-driven framework for rapid Web programming in PHP 5. PRADO reconceptualizes Web application development in terms of components, events and properties instead of procedures, URLs and query parameters.

Cake PHP:
Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

Qcodo:
Qcodo is a completely object-oriented framework that takes the best of PHP and provides a truly rapid application development platform. Initial prototypes roll out in minutes instead of hours. The framework consists of two main components: the Code Generator and Qforms. While the framework was designed to support the complexities of large projects, it is an incredibly lightweight framework which can be utilized by small and large web applications alike.

Symfony:
Based on the best practices of web development, thoroughly tried on several active websites, symfony aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, and to replace the repetitive coding tasks by power, control and pleasure. Symfony is based on several great open-source projects.

Here’s a cool way to check which portions of your pages are being clicked by viewers. The author of this article has used Javascript to capture the mouse clicks on the screen and save the location to the database using Ajax.

“One of the more interesting aspects of Ajax is the ability to track a user’s interaction within the browser. I wanted to investigate navigation patterns, so I have written an Ajax based link tracker. If you press the “Ctrlâ€? and “X” keys you will be presented with an overlay which displays links usage by percentage. This functionality was created with JavaScript and a very simple API.“

Link: Ajax Link Tracker

fileNice is a simple remote file browser which uses PHP and Ajax to display files which are in your dump folder. fileNice generates links to the filesto paste in your web pages and also allows you to upload your images directly to flickr.

A great tool to have if you’ve got tons of stuff uploaded to your server, and need to get to them to link from your pages.

Live demo of fileNice in action
fileNice Home Page

[tags]Ajax, PHP, File Manager[/tags]

Just upgraded the blogs to WordPress 2. My old theme broke during the upgrade option. I’ve reverted back to the Blix theme for now till I get the other theme working properly on WP2.

WordPress 2 is up for download at:
http://wordpress.org/download/

Here are two tutorials from IBM on objects in PHP 5.

The first articles describes the fundamentals of objects and classes in PHP V5, from the very basics through to inheritance, for experienced object-oriented programmers and those who have not yet been introduced to objects.

Link to article: Getting Started with objects in PHP V5 – Why you need to know objects and classes, and how to use them

The second article introduces some of PHP V5′s more advanced and design-oriented features. Among them are object types, which allow for decoupling the components of a system from one another, creating reusable, extensible, and scalable code.

Advanced PHP V5 objects – Create reusable, extensible, and scalable PHP code

A good article on debugging Javascript while programming with PHP & Ajax.

“Javascript is a powerful tool in the web programmers toolbox however, it’s also one of our greatest headaches. Dealing with browser inconsistencies is always a source of great pain. You test on multiple platforms, find everyone you know with a mac running safari and think you have your code locked down however it rarely always works out this way. Being able to detect javascript errors in the wild can be a great resource for you to really see how your code is performing on a day to day basis. Mozilla and IE support a powerful event handler called “onerror” used like window.onerror = function(){};”

Link: AJAX, PHP and Javascript Errors – How to get more data – Jim’s PHP Programming Paradise

Here’s an article by Trenton Moss with 10 excellent tips on CSS. The article covers topics such as CSS shorthand rule, CSS for printing, Image replacement techniques, CSS positioning and much more.

Link: Ten CSS tricks you may not know

Mambo 4.5 has in-built functions to create search engine friendly URL’s. Most search engines don’t index sites with query strings in the URL. To overcome this, most CMS systems have in-build systems that allow you to clean the URL to make it search engine friendly. For example take the following URLs as an example:
http://project.com/index.php

http://project.com/index.php?option=com_view&task=view&article=4

Most search engines don’t index the inner pages with URL’s like the one above since they assumes that it’s part of index.php. All Mambo pages refer to index.php, so most of the inner contents don’t get indexed on a search engine.
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