Style Grind » PHP

The XSL Cache Extension

Peter — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 04:08:23 +0000

The XSL Cache extension is a modification of PHP’s standard XSL extension that caches the parsed XSL stylesheet representation between sessions for 2.5x boost in performance for sites that repeatedly apply the same transform. Although there is still some further work that could be done on the extension, this code is already proving beneficial in production use for a few applications on the New York Times‘ website.

PHP 101: PHP For the Absolute Beginner

Peter — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 03:38:05 +0000

This area is intended for everyone new to PHP. It opens with a series of informal, entertaining tutorials written by Vikram Vaswani, founder and CEO of Melonfire. These tutorials build on a previously-published 5-part series which has now been updated and extended to embrace PHP 5, making parts of it suitable for those of you who already have worked with PHP 4 in the past.

Vertical Bar Graphs with CSS and PHP

Peter — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 01:37:11 +0000

Who wants to use Excel to make a new graph each week? Using CSS and PHP you can create attractive bar graphs (yes, even the stacked kind) that are always up to date.

PHP 5.2.0 Released

Peter — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 22:34:57 +0000

The key features of PHP 5.2.0 include:

New memory manager for the Zend Engine with improved performance and a more accurate memory usage tracking.
Input filtering extension was added and enabled by default.
JSON extension was added and enabled by default.
ZIP extension for creating and editing zip files was introduced.
Hooks for tracking file upload progress were introduced.
Introduced E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR error mode.
Introduced DateTime and DateTimeZone objects with methods to manipulate date/time information.
Upgraded bundled SQLite, PCRE libraries.
Upgraded OpenSSL, MySQL and PostgreSQL client libraries for Windows installations.
Many performance improvements.
Over 200 bug fixes.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.0:

Made PostgreSQL escaping functions in PostgreSQL and PDO extension keep track of character set encoding whenever possible.
Added allow_url_include, set to Off by default to disallow use of URLs for include and require.
Disable realpath cache when open_basedir and safe_mode are being used.
Improved safe_mode enforcement for error_log() function.
Fixed a possible buffer overflow in the underlying code responsible for htmlspecialchars() and htmlentities() functions.
Added missing safe_mode and open_basedir checks for the cURL extension.
Fixed overflow is str_repeat() & wordwrap() functions on 64bit machines.
Fixed handling of long paths inside the tempnam() function.
Fixed safe_mode/open_basedir checks for session.save_path, allowing them to account for extra parameters.
Fixed ini setting overload in the ini_restore() function. All users of PHP, especially those using earlier PHP 5 releases are advised to upgrade to this release as soon as possible. This release also obsoletes the 5.1 branch of PHP.

Seagull PHP Framework

Peter — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 11:52:10 +0000

Seagull is a mature OOP framework for building web, command line and GUI applications. Licensed under BSD, the project allows PHP developers to easily integrate and manage code resources, and build complex applications quickly.

Many popular PHP applications are already seamlessly integrated within the project, as are various templating engines, testing tools and managed library code. If you’re a beginner, the framework provides a number of sample applications that can be customised and extended to suit your needs. If you’re an intermediate or advanced developer, take advantage of Seagull’s best practices, standards and modular codebase to build your applications in record time.

CakePHP: Extra-pretty URLs with slugs

Peter — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 01:11:24 +0000

In this tutorial you will learn how to use words rather than IDs in your Cake URLs. These words are known as “slugs” in Wordpress so I decided to call them slugs too.

PHP Input Filter

Peter — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 22:45:31 +0000

Came across this neat PHP class when looking around for proctecting a site against XSS attacks.

“PHP Input Filter is a class that can filter input for stray or malicious PHP, JavaScript, or HTML tags. It can be used to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. It should be used to filter input supplied by the user, such as HTML code entered in form fields.”

Symfony Tutorial

Peter — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:41:46 +0000

Symfony is a PHP framework, however its very similar to Rails in it’s approach and offers features like scaffolding and simple templating. This is a complete tutorial for your first Symfony project.

Top 10 Web Developer Libraries

Peter — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 14:13:30 +0000

Cameron Olthuis has posted a list of what he thinks are the top 10 most useful developer libraries. These should be in any web developers bookmarks, so go ahead and look through these libraries and bookmark your favorite ones. The list is in no particular order.

Regular Expression Testing Tool

Peter — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 00:29:10 +0000

Really neat online tool for testing out your PHP (and other languages) regex’s. Simply enter your regular expression and some test data and the script will show you the output. With its simple and easy to use interface, this is a very valuable tool for anyone dealing with regexps; beginners and advanced users alike.

PHP5 Benchmarks

Peter — Wed, 24 May 2006 02:47:15 +0000

Compare common PHP5 functions such as building arrays, parsing variables and generating random numbers with older PHP4 functions. Some surprising data, however most seems to be in the 1-2% range.

Build RSS reader using AJAX and PHP

Peter — Fri, 12 May 2006 23:35:55 +0000

Learn how to build an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) Really Simple Syndication (RSS) reader, as well as a Web component that you can place on any Web site to look at the articles in the RSS feeds.

Using script.aculo.us with PHP for a Member Managment System

Peter — Thu, 11 May 2006 22:30:50 +0000

One of the most common request of people learning PHP is that they want to make a member system thing. That’s what we’re going to do, only cooler. I’m going to try and teach you some basic concepts of JavaScript and PHP so that you can take this code and make it a hundred times better by adding new features.

PHP 5.1.4 Released

Peter — Fri, 05 May 2006 22:51:03 +0000

PHP 5.1.4 has just been released. It fixes the critical bug with $_POST array handling discovered in PHP 5.1.3, check the changelog for other fixes.