The NETTUTS.com site has posted the next part in their series on the creation of a photo site with PHP and jQuery. This time they focus on the backend of the application, written in PHP.
With a follow up to a previous post of his about Delphi's choice of VCL over Prado for the behind the scenes framework for their software, Eirik Hoem has posted this based on feedback from the original post.
What I miss in the feedback I got from my previous post was people acually using VCL/PHP for enterprise applications and how that is working. From what I can tell the usage of Exceptions is still limited to the 3rd party libs such as Zend Framework which are included with VCL/PHP. That's a bit interesting.
He mentions one big issue that several people pointed out with the VLC implementation - the class name prefixing (or lack there of) and the problems it could cause in the future. Prado uses naming conventions that keep its classes out of the move generally named realm. He also touches on the quality of the code behind the VLC implementation, noting that while it might work well for smaller projects, there's more of a potential for failure on enterprise-level usage.
In a new blog post today Evert Pot shares some of his thoughts on integrating the Zend implementation of the OpenID protocol, Zend_OpenId, into his application.
The Zend Framework has a pretty good OpenID library. I was looking for a library written for PHP5 (strict), and this seemed like a good choice...
He mentions some of both sides of the argument - (the good) the flexibility of the library to work with different backend storage methods and (the bad) the requirements it has for the Zend Framework sessions system for authentication.
PHPBuilder.com has continued their series looking at building an Ajax-driven shopping cart with part two posted today (part one here). Last time they laid the PHP foundation for the example app, this time they add another layer - the Ajax functionality to manage the current contents of the cart.
Finally, a link to the shopping cart is provided, although you could just as easily have displayed the cart contents on the same page. For the sake of brevity I'll just show you how to integrate the add feature, and will leave the subtraction mechanism to you as an exercise.
The Ajax frontend calls a managecart.php backend file that calls addToCart and deleteFromCart based on which type of "task" is passed to it.
On the IBuildings blog today, Sandy Pleyte has posted a look at using the ATK framework and what kind of effect its own recently added caching system (atkCache) has on its performance.
Now there is a cache object (atkCache) available in the ATK SVN trunk. The new atkCache class is a factory class, which builds and returns instances of atkCache which has all the methods to communicate with an external cache to handle the actual storage and retrieval.
It supports lots of different backend caching methods - APC, eAccelerator, the Zend Platform functionality, memcache, xcache and both file and variable caching.
He includes an example of its use - creating an object to cache to a file, configuring it with options like lifetime and path, and an example of its use (to cache a theme for a web page).
In this new post to his blog, Richard Heyes talks about an example he's come across of PHP being used as backend behind a large marketing project:
I recently read an interesting example at Neil Shearing's internet marketing strategies blog of combining .NET desktop software with a PHP backend.
We all know PHP is often slated by "real programmers" as a scripting language only useful for kiddie's home pages, and its nice to see a serious marketer choosing PHP to power the backend to a serious piece of viral software with the potential to go load-mad.
Richard also points out some of his experience trying to market his software and which of his customers are the ones that would provide the most return (the ones looking for updates) and how he can gather their information more productively to further his project's goals.
The DevX.com site has posted some code that gives you methods for passing information back and forth between PHP and a Flash application.
When you need to develop a web form with a special design and great effects, you will probably elect to use Flash. But building and programming Flash forms is considerably different from building standard HTML-based forms. [...] To do that though, you need to know how to access data in the Flash form and (sometimes) how to update the Flash form from PHP as well.
They help you build a sample Flash form as a base to work with in the transfer methods including the ActionScript to get the data out of each field. The tutorial shows the two way communication that's possible - pushing the Flash values out to the PHP script via a getURL() call and pulling the results back in with a call to loadVars() from the PHP script's output.
From the Geeks Not Nerds blog there's the first part of a new series of tutorials looking to help you create your own blogging backend from scratch (PHP5, SQL, HTML and Javascript).
This is the first of a multi part series that will cover designing and building a blog backend from the ground up. The goal of this series is to have a fully functional (albeit simple) blog backend as the final product of the series. We will focus more on good programming technique and design and less on the actual coding of the blog, writing just enough to make a functional example.
They step through the basic design of the application before anything else, laying down the structure for things to come. From there, they move into the database structure for the rest of this part of the series. They even provide the SQL file you'll need to get their structure set up quickly and easily.
On the IBM developerWorks site, the next part of their tutorial series looking at working with AIX and PHP has been posted. This time, there's a focus on integrating a Java business application in using DB2 (version 9) as the backend.
It is possible to develop applications that employ both Java and PHP technology on AIX. You can use the Java programming language for the core logic (or redeploy an existing Java-based application), while gaining the benefits of PHP as a Web-based interface platform. In this article, the third of the series, find out how to connect the core application created in the second installment to a DB2 database for the storage of the survey questions and responses.
They talk some about database roles before working through the DB2 database installation. Then it's time to make the connection to the application, create the table structures and insert information.
On the MSBWare.com site there's a new tutorial looking at the integration of the FCKeditor (a powerful web-based editor that works much like Word) with a MySQL database backend via PHP.
This article is intended to address the lack of documentation in integrating the FCKeditor with your MySQL database. Their tutorials show how to configure and use the editor, but how to get it to save to your database isn't addressed at all. While this article will utilize the MySQL DBMS, the concepts are the same for any DBMS.
They start with the download and install of the editor, including placing it in a page where it can be used (inclusion and configuration). The next step is to wrap the entire editor block in a form to make it submittable and, finally, write the update script to happen on submit. Complete code is included at the end of the tutorial.
