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PHP Upgraded To Version 5.4.14, PCRE Library Merged

Zach Walton — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:57:24 +0000

Those who use PHP are in for a treat this month as the development team has released updates for both the current and old versions, 5.4 and 5.3 respectively, of the scripting language. There’s nothing major, of course, but there are a number of bug fixes that developers should be aware of.

Starting with PHP 5.4, the latest update brings it up to version 5.4.14. With this update, the team has fixed more than 10 bugs. Here’s the full changelog:

Core:

Fixed bug #64529 (Ran out of opcode space).

Fixed bug #64515 (Memoryleak when using the same variablename two times in function declaration).

Fixed bug #64432 (more empty delimiter warning in strX methods).

Fixed bug #64417 (ArrayAccess::&offsetGet() in a trait causes fatal error).

Fixed bug #64370 (microtime(true) less than $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT']).

Fixed bug #64239 (Debug backtrace changed behavior since 5.4.10 or 5.4.11).

Fixed bug #63976 (Parent class incorrectly using child constant in class property).

Fixed bug #63914 (zend_do_fcall_common_helper_SPEC does not handle exceptions properly).

Fixed bug #62343 (Show class_alias In get_declared_classes()).

PCRE:

Merged PCRE 8.32.

SNMP:

Fixed bug #61981 (OO API, walk: $suffix_as_key is not working correctly).

Zip:

Fixed bug #64452 (Zip crash intermittently). (Anatol)

Those who are still on version 5.3, the team has released a smaller update (version 5.3.24) with a number of bug fixes. It also includes the same PCRE library merge that was included in the latest version of PHP 5.4, as well as the same Zip crash bug.

Core:

Fixed bug #64370 (microtime(true) less than $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT']).

Fixed bug #63914 (zend_do_fcall_common_helper_SPEC does not handle exceptions properly).

Fixed bug #62343 (Show class_alias In get_declared_classes()).

PCRE:

Merged PCRE 8.32.

mysqlnd:

Fixed bug #63530 (mysqlnd_stmt::bind_one_parameter crashes, uses wrong alloc for stmt->param_bind).

DateTime:

Fixed bug #62852 (Unserialize Invalid Date causes crash).

Zip:

Fixed bug #64452 (Zip crash intermittently).

If you want to the source code for either version 5.4.14 or 5.3.24, you can grab it here. If you need PHP for Windows, you can grab the latest versions here.

Zend Framework 2.1.0 Is Now Available

Zach Walton — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:29:59 +0000

Zend Framework 1 has been a popular open source PHP framework since it was introduced a few years ago. It’s successor, Zend Framework 2, was released in September of last year. The team behind it have now released a major update.

The Zend Framework community announced Wednesday that Zend Framework 2.0.7 and 2.1.0 are now available for download. Version 2.0.7 will be the last scheduled release in the 2.0 series, and only contains a number of bugfixes. You can check out the bugfix list here.

The release of version 2.1.0 is a much larger deal, and features a number of new improvements and additions that make the software more powerful. Here’s the major changes:

New Zend\Permissions\Rbac component, providing Role-Based Authorization Controls. These complement our existing Zend\Permissions\Acl component, providing another mechanism for providing authorization for your applications. We have Kyle Spraggs to thank for this addition.

New Zend\Test component, providing the ability to perform functional or integration testing on your ZF2 applications, courtesy of Blanchon Vincent.

Support for Oracle and IBM DB2 databases in Zend\Db. Many thanks to Ralph Schindler for spearheading these efforts.

A new Zend\Stdlib\StringUtils class to provide unified functionality around manipulating strings, particularly those in multibyte character sets. Thanks to Marc Bennewitz!

Scrypt support for Zend\Crypt. Thanks go to Enrico Zimuel for this addition.

Apache htpassword support in Zend\Crypt and in the HTTP authentication adapter; thanks go to Enrico Zimuel again!

New integration for handling and manipulating file uploads with the InputFilter, Form, and Mvc components, including capablities around the PRG pattern. Please thank Chris Martin for his huge amount of work around this!

A new render.error event, allowing you to fail gracefully in the event of a view rendering error. This allows you to present a static error page in such situations, as well as to log the problem. Thanks go to radnan for this addition.

Additional integration between a variety of plugin managers and the service manager was created, covering form elements, filters, validators, route classes, and serializers; this allows application-level configuration of these plugin managers, providing a simplified interface for configuring custom plugins.

Martin Meredith provided seven new traits for end-user use in PHP 5.4 applications.

The Authentication component received support for storage chains and validators.

Better console support, including better help messages, increased capabilities around colorisation, and more.

Many incremental improvements in Zend\Db; in particular, addition of profiling support, cross-table select join support, derived table in select join, and literal objects.

Zend\Logger has new FirePHP, ChromePHP, MongoDB, and FingersCrossed writers; thanks go to Walter Tamboer, Jeremy Mikola, and Stefan Kleff.

The MVC layer sports more flexibility and capabilities in the AbstractRestfulController, including automated content-negotiation for JSON requests, and support for most HTTP methods, including OPTIONS and HEAD (and the ability to support arbitrary HTTP methods).

Zend\Session now has a MongoDB save handler, and provides better interoperability between sessions managed by ZF2 and 3rd party code.

Zend Framework 2.1.0 features two new components as well:

ZendService_Apple_Apns, which provides push notification capabilities for Apple iOS. This component may be installed via Composer or Pyrus.

ZendService_Google_Gcm, which provides push notification capabilities for Google Android. This component may be installed via Composer or Pyrus.

Finally, there is now tooling support for the framework in the form of zftool.phar. Those who use it can expect the following features, with more being added in the future:

Skeleton application creation

Module creation within a skeleton

Autoloader classmap creation

ZF2 installation to a directory

You can grab Zend Framework 2.0.7 and 2.1.0 here. While you’re at it, you should check out Zend Framework 2 on github.

Using INTO OUTFILE from a Remote Client

Michael Marr — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:10:20 +0000

An often useful query in SQL is SELECT ... INTO. With SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE, results can be directly placed in a file as comma separated values. Once in the common CSV format, your results can be pulled into other scripts or used as backups (although the latter is not the ideal implementation for backing up). For example:

SELECT * FROM tableA INTO OUTFILE '/path/to/file.txt'

might result in a file.txt file like this:

Cash,Johnny,2-26-1932
Jagger,Michael,7-26-1943
Presley,Elvis,1-8-1935

This is straightforward, and useful for a majority of implementations. There are a few additional options, depending on your SQL implementation. For example, check out MySQL’s SELECT … INTO page

A major problem with SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE comes when your application exists on one server, while your database server is running on another. Many web hosting/application scenarios will run into this, as separating your database and application/web layers is a vital to improving performance. Since the outfile path is local to the database machine, and not the application machine, this SQL function becomes quite useless. Even if your database user had access to the path you supplied, it’s unlikely your application user has access to that path on a remote machine. Granting access in either case is unnecessary and sloppy security protocol. Instead, add a few lines to your code and program the identical functionality.

TL;DR – you can’t use SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE remotely. Sorry. Below is a PHP solution – look in comments for other language specific solutions.

Here’s a example in PHP that will accomplish the same thing:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tableA");
$fh = fopen("/path/to/file.txt", "w+");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($result)) {
   fputs($fh, implode(',', $row)."\n");
}
fclose ($fh);

Be wary not to use PHP’s fputcsv(), as it will enclose the entire CSV row in quotes, and IS NOT identical to the output generated by SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE.

Post alternatives in your language of choice in the comments.

Facebook Set To Unveil “Hyper PHP”

Doug Caverly — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:46:32 +0000

A PHP project that’s been underway for about two years is finally going to bear fruit for Facebook. Reports indicate that the company is set to announce the creation of "Hyper PHP" (or HPHP) today, and that Facebook will see speed improvements of around 80 percent as a result.

This trick relates to Web development, and more specifically, bridging the gap between interpreted languages and compiled languages. Hyper PHP is supposed to combine their strengths and more or less escape their weaknesses.

Mike Melanson explained, "PHP is normally an interpreted language, which means that every time a user accesses a PHP page, the server needs to take the code and interpret it to produce the final product. A compiler, however, makes this process much quicker, as the code is interpreted before the user ever asks for the page. The problem here is that any time that page needs to be changed, the code needs to be recompiled."

Hyper PHP should represent a major turning point, then. What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook will be the only beneficiary. The social network is due to make Hyper PHP available on an open source basis, so all sorts of sites may get speed boosts in the end.

We’ll update this post with more information when it becomes available.

UPDATE: The official announcement and explanation are now available.

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> Facebook Page Owners Getting More Stats

> Facebook Gets Into Customized Data Centers

> Facebook Becomes Sponsor Of Apache Software Foundation

Is It Web Design, Or Web Development?

Debbie Campbell — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:30:26 +0000

I’m working with a prospective client who needs specialized e-commerce assistance – more than I’m capable of doing in a timely manner. So I found an experienced PHP programmer who can provide this expertise.

We met with the client today and all went well. The programmer has a good grasp of the rather non-traditional desires of the client as far as the workings of the checkout process, and that’s great. I’m not going to make as much money from the job as I originally thought, because I’m now not going to be the one doing the cart, but the client will get exactly what he wants and hopefully I’ll get a good long-term business relationship out of it.

What irked me today was the way the programmer continually referred to me as ‘the one who’ll make it all pretty.’

‘Pretty’ isn’t the tip of the iceberg. What I bring to the table goes way beyond aesthetics.

It’s 9 years of personal e-commerce experience and 12 years of building websites; a strong graphic design background; an understanding of search engine optimization practices; a deep understanding of cross-browser compatibility and web standards; familiarity with Section 508 accessibility guidelines; the ability to partner with my clients and provide as much education on the care of feeding of their web presence as they can take; an understanding of information architecture and navigation; and an understanding of how to create a website that engages the customer from page one.

Programmers think that my job is all about aesthetics, and hard-core designers think that I shouldn’t use the word ‘creative’ in my business name because I’m not really a creative if I work with code. I’ve actually been told that to my face…

What exactly am I? I refer to myself as a designer/developer on my business cards and I thought that covered the bases pretty well, but perhaps not. Should I consider reworking my title yet again? Web strategist? Web jack-of-all-trades? Web designoper? Web develsigner?

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TechCrunch, Others Love Linux, MySQL

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:44:35 +0000

A survey by Pingdom of seven heavily visited websites found plenty of Apache web servers and PHP coding on their platforms, where Linux carries the platform and MySQL handles the database needs.

Some interesting observations came to the people at uptime monitoring firm Pingdom.

They managed to get seven noteworthy websites to agree to share some details about their infrastructure.

None of them seemed willing to part with an administrator password, oddly enough.

The websites surveyed for the report: TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockphoto, YouSendIt, Meebo, Vimeo, and Alexaholic.

They were nearly unanimous with their choice of database backends.

MySQL owned the field, as six of seven sites said they use it. All but Alexaholic run MySQL on Linux; Alexaholic uses Microsoft SQL Server on Windows.

To get pages to their web visitors, five of the seven sites chose Apache, as have the bulk of other websites on the Internet.

Alexaholic runs IIS on Windows, while Meebo has tapped relative newcomer Lighttpd, called ‘Lighty’, for their web serving requirements.

Except for Alexaholic, the other webservers all run on Linux.

“Lighttpd tends to work really well with AJAX-based sites like ours,” said Simon Yeo, director of operations at Meebo, in the blog.

Lighttpd also boasts usage at big-time sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia.

PHP has a place on five of the seven sites, either on its own or in conjunction with other languages like Perl or Java.

Alexaholic’s Ron Hornbaker favored C# .NET, which is in line with his comfort zone, while Meebo primarily has C and C++ in its code.

When asked about his Microsoft favoritism, Hornbaker told Pingdom he’s familiar with the .NET platform.

“I’m most comfortable coding with C#.NET, and this was a personal project,” he said.
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Latest WordPress Bugfixes

Neville Hobson — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 02:21:54 +0000

If you upgraded to or installed the new WordPress version 2.1 that was released last month, you’ll be interested in a major bugfix released today:

[…] Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code. It’s available for immediate download on our download page.

Not only that, WordPress has released a security patch for version 2.0.7 to upgrade it to version 2.0.9:

Version 2.0.9 only includes the security update, which was around the code we use to prevent XSS. […] As a reminder, we’ve committed to proving security updates to 2.0 through 2010, but all new features and development are going into the newer branch, which is at this time 2.1.

An easy way to upgrade either version is to install just the changed files. Ajay D’Souza makes it easy. I expect Paul Woodhouse will have an interest in this

I haven’t yet made the jump to 2.1 on this blog (but I did on my sandbox) as I’m still dithering about the K2 theme. There’s also the issue for me re Dreamhost and PHP. Although this blog hasn’t fallen over so far, I really must find time soon to upgrade.

Related post:

Should you upgrade to WordPress 2.1?

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Using PHP Buttons In Dreamweaver

Jay Gilbert — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 19:56:23 +0000

Even if you don’t know one bit of PHP, the Dreamweaver PHP buttons can help you create database functions on your webpages. Learn more in this lesson on Dreamweaver and PHP/SQL.

I’ll admit that I am not a coder and I don’t know much more than a tiny bit of PHP at the time of writing this. However, I have managed to create database driven webpages, and even password protected members only areas due to the extremely easy to use PHP buttons in Dreamweaver.

If you are interested in learning to do this for yourself, this lesson will point you in the right direction so that you can experiment and see for yourself how easy it is.

The first thing you need to do is to create an SQL database on your webhost. This can be done via CPanel or if not that, then ask your host how…anyways, creating an SQL database with 1 table is not hard.

The key is, to create it, record the information and then try to log in to that database via Dreamweaver.

You can do this by creating a new database connection in the Application window of Dreamweaver.

This is one of the most challenging parts, and you’ll need to set up the site’s testing server. At first this can be tricky, but if you stick with it and get connected to your SQL databas via Dreamweaver, youll soon find ways to insert records, display records, and much more!

You see, once you are connected to the database, the table names will dynamically show up in Dreamweaver, and from there it is only a short step to learn how to insert records, repeat records, and display data in the database.

Of course reading a book can help you with PHP, but it is also fun to just jump right in the Dreamweaver buttons.

Even a total PHP dunce like myself was able to start creating little PHP/SQL applications once I figured out these basic steps.

So if you want to create PHP applications, but don’t know how to hand-code PHP, create a PHP/SQL database with 1 table, figure out how to connect to it via Dreamweaver, and start messing around with the Dreamweaver PHP buttons.

In a few hours time you’ll see what creating PHP/SQL applications in Dreamweaver is all about.

For more information on Dreamweaver including step by step video tutorials, visit http://www.dreamweaverhowto.com

Jay Gilbert offers step by step guides for people who want to sell info products online. Sign up for the free Dreamweaver tips training course.

PHP Development Becoming Increasingly Popular

Andy West — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 15:46:20 +0000

PHP simply refers to Hypertext Preprocessor and is becoming quite popular due to the wide nature of functions that it can be used for.

Also, PHP development is relatively simple for newcomers to learn the basics. As well, more advanced programmers are also using PHP development because there is almost no limit to what can be done when it is used properly.

PHP can be used on most operating systems, which makes it quite versatile. Whether you use Microsoft Windows, Linux, MAC OS X or a wide variety of other OS’s. PHP also allows you to choose an operating system and web browser that you are most comfortable with. One of the great features of PHP development is that it allows support for almost any kind of database that you could think of.

PHP development is basically referring to an open source scripting language. It’s most common uses are for web development and it can also be imbedded into HTML. Since it is such a versatile form of script writing, it can be used by the beginning programmers as well as the more advanced ones. In only a few hours, you can learn the basics of PHP development so that you can begin to use PHP to your advantage. Also, if you are an experienced programmer, you can utilize some of the more advanced features of PHP in order to capitalize on your potential.

Web development is becoming a more prosperous industry lately. Since the Interet and the computer wave in general is becoming quite lucrative, web development is becoming a booming industry in which everyone wants to be a part. However, it is also a very competitive industry since there are many professionals that are quite adept at programming. Therefore, learning proper PHP development strategies is beneficial. If you already have prior knowledge of computer language and coding, PHP should come as a second nature to you. The fact that is can be used in its most primal forms for basic programming as well as incredibly advanced programming ! only ads to its possible potential for programmers.

In order to become a succesful web developer, you will need to familiarize yourself with all of the different aspects of computer programming langage. Since this industry is booming more than almost any other industry right now, there are always new languages to learn and new programming developments to enquire about. Although PHP development isn’t all that new, it is quickly becoming the preferred method among many of the high ranking computer programmers. The amount of versatitily that this language gives you combined with its relatively easy learning curve make it a very desirable language to learn.

Web development is not something that just anyone should jump into. It takes a certain amount of knowledge and skill to be able to properly negotiate the different codes that are used. However, if you are already quite familiar with language code, then you will not have any trouble at all using PHP development to better your skills as well as improving your output.

Being a web developer is a very complex industry. There are always new things to learn on an almost daily basis so you always have to be on the top of your game. The world of PHP development is ever changing and will continue to flourish, so it is advisable to keep up to date with the new capabilities of this type of programming. PHP development is one of the most effective and simple to use programming devices available today.

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Andy West is a freelance writer for PhpMyDev.com . PhpMyDev offers complete web development and hosting using Linux, Apach, Mysql and PHP development (LAMP). Visit http://www.PhpMyDev.com for more information.

Playing w/ del.icio.us Web Badge JSON API

Joost de Valk — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 17:12:56 +0000

Niall Kennedy wrote on his blog that The Yahoo Developer Network provided a short preview of the soon to be released del.icio.us webbadge.

From this preview you could see an endpoint and a parameter, so Niall tried and it worked for everyone. That inspired me to make this fast PHP implementation of it, using the Zend framework JSON library. If you’re interested, have a look at the code.

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Joost de Valk is an SEO from Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works for Onetomarket, an online marketing company. He has experience as a sales manager for several IT companies, is involved in open source projects like WebKit and Mozilla, and is the creator of the biggest online resource on CSS3. Joost blogs about web design and SEO, and writes all sorts of scripts for webmasters.