Php

I recently had a little fun playing with the dynamic cache available in the Zend Platform. The Zend Platform is a commercial product, which provides a number of cool professional features to a PHP setup - one of these is the option to do dynamic caching.

With dynamic caching you can cache the output of a function for a determined period and instead of doing database queries or web service calls for a feature, you can cache the results, save resources and get faster pages.

In programming languages common tasks should be easy, and surprisingly often I find my self loading data from some source file into a database. With PHP loading a CSV file into the database - or posting the data to an API - is quite easy.

The only trick is to know the functions file_get_contents, split (and possibly list).

The routine goes something like this:

$fileName = 'rawData.csv';

$content = file_get_contents($fileName);
$rows = split("\n", $content );

foreach ($rows as $row) {
	list($item1, $item2, item3) = split(';', $row);

	// Do something interesting...
}

If you have a php array, but need to nuke an item from it, the unset function is just the tool to do that. When iterating through the array after removing the item, you should be slightly careful.

The unset function does remove the item, but it doesn’t “reindex” the array, so you should traverse the array by index-numbers after removing the item. The issue is probably best illustrated by this example:

Yesterday PHP 4.4.9 was released, and today PHP 4 is officially dead. There wil be no more updates.

Don’t worry too much tough. PHP 5 is far superior and there’s absolutely no go reason not to have moved on to PHP 5 long ago.

PHP 4 - It was a nice ride and I’m sure you deserve the rest.

For professional PHP development, nothing beats ZendStudio in my book. Currently ZendStudio is in the process of moving from a standalone application to something build on top of Eclipse. I’m sure it might be a wise move on the long term, but there are a few things bugging me with th current version. The number one issue is shown in the screenshot to the right.

Would someone please tell either Eclipse or ZendStudio, that PHP files do not need to be build, compiled or what ever it is doing - besides wasting my time for a few minutes.

In less than 3 months - on August 8th, 2008 - PHP4 reaches end of life. If you still haven’t updated, it’s damn well time to get migration started. PHP5 far better than the previous versions, and if it’s good enough for Yahoo, Facebook and many other huge sites, it’ll probably be a joyride for you too.

I’m sure most people only thing of PHP as a Weblanguage due to be called through a browser. It has however since version 4.3.0 also been possible to use PHP on the commandline - as you do with Perl, Shell scripts and likewise. If you’re using Linux (or an other Unix-like operating system - including Mac OSX) you probably have a few small programs available which can make it a breeze to check if the syntax in all you PHP scripts is correct.

If you have the GD extension available, you can do a few useful things. One of the simple things is getting an image size is a simple matter. You can either fetch the height and width in seperate variables – or even fetch the height and width in a string pre-formatted for use in an image tag.

Here’s the example in source:

$load\_ext = get\_loaded\_extensions();

if (!in\_array(gd, $load\_ext)) {
    echo "GD is NOT available";
    die();
}

$nikonFile   = './aarhus\_demo\_photo.jpg';
list($width, $height, $type, $img\_txt)  = getimagesize($nikonFile);

echo "The image is ".$width . " by ".$height."\\n";
echo "![]($nikonFile)\\n";

Within most photos from digital cameras besides the actual image, there’s a little ”information block” call EXIF data. If you have the correct PHP extension installed on your server – the one called ”exif” – it’s pretty easy to read the EXIF data and display them, as you like.

First, let’s check if the extension is available?

$load\_ext = get\_loaded\_extensions();
if (!in\_array(exif, $load\_ext)) {
echo "Exif is NOT available";
} else {
echo "Exif extension is available.";
};

If you’re doing some basic profiling of your PHP scripts, the build-in microtime function can help you make some simple benchmarking fast. Here’s a rough example to show you how it could be used. The doSomething function is the function we want to benchmark.

$time = microtime();
$time = explode(' ', $time);
$time = $time\[1\] + $time\[0\];
$start = $time;

doSomething();

$time = microtime();
$time = explode(' ', $time);
$time = $time\[1\] + $time\[0\];
$finish = $time;
$total\_time = round(($finish - $start), 6);
if ($debug) print ("<p>Processing took approximately $total\_time seconds</p>");