Hello all.

I’m Jeff Lang. I work as a PHP web developer for a university I attend. I’ve been doing PHP work as well as some writing for a few years now. In my blog, I plan to focus more on the general aspects of PHP and how it’s used in the business and educational world rather than the technical side of things. A lot of technical information is already out there, so I plan to bring some fresh ideas and content to the world of PHP.

The first thing I want to touch upon is PHP in an educational setting. I feel much can be learned from PHP being taught in school; however, I would not recommend it for a first language. First, it is extremely common to couple MySQL with PHP. PHP can be taught stand-alone, but in the real world, the PHP-MySQL (or a similar database) combination is what is used in the majority of the cases. Students are forced not only to learn the mechanics of the PHP language, but they are also forced to learn the …

I’ve written a simple web frontend for the perror utility which is provided by MySQL. Some distributions, or some systems running older versions of MySQL do not have this utility, and sometimes, I don’t have access to a shell, I ran into this very problem over the weekend when I was on vacation, so I needed a quick way to be able to lookup these errors. Long story short, I now have this utility working and it’s available to all. I figured I’m not alone, so I’d let everyone hit it if they needed to.
You can get to it by just going to http://www.phpcult.com/mysql/123. Replace the last thing with 123, 111, 122, 120 whatever and it will give you the meaning. Hope this helps people.

Chris Shifflet just did his first “podcast”, he covers some nice topics regarding SQL injection, and just basic input filtering . Things to think about, tainting data with htmlentities/addslashes/stripslashes. Why to use mysql_real_escape_string . And, just some nice clear and simple explanations of why some settings are ON or OFF by default.

The Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) will take place from April, 29 to April, 30 2006 in Sankt Augustin, Germany. It is organized by the Computer Science students of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg and the Linux/UNIX Usergroup Sankt Augustin. The Call for Papers will begin on November, 1 2005.

FrOSCon will offer Developer Rooms (just like …

MySQL Dashboard, seems like a great tool if you manage multiple database servers like I do. Currently, I am responsible for about 12 different database servers, with different amounts of load/data and users. It would be great to be able to use this tool to keep track of all the servers from a DBA perspective. Anyone aware of a similar tool in PHP ?

I love how Richard Heyes’ Application Structure post which describes his way of layint out PHP applications is similar to my own personal structure. I have been using something very similar for a few years now, which evolved by working with PHP applications and dealing with problems and how to avoid them in the future, so it’s amusing to see two people come up with something so similar.

I basically agree with the way he separates library code from normal PHP scripts that are available to the Web, but I do things a bit different. I use the following directory structure:

application root
  |
  +- crons
  +- include
  |    +- jpgraph
  |    +- pear
  |    +- Smarty
  +- locks
  +- logs
  +- scripts
  +- setup
  +- templates
  +- templates_c
  +- webroot
       +- css
       +- images
       +- js

Explanation:

• …

[Update: Beta 3 is out; please report any/all bugs via http://bugs.php.net]

With the impending release of PHP 5.1b3, it's a good time to mention the status of PDO. We've had an excellent round of QA since beta 2, resulting in the following notable items:

• common core test suite to ensure individual driver conformance
• MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers now support native prepared statements and bound parameters (when available), for improved performance.
• OCI and ODBC drivers have been improved.
• PDOStatement::closeCursor() method has been added, to explicitly free up a database connection if you're done with a result set before you reach the end.
• Added $db->getAttribute(PDO_ATTR_DRIVER_NAME) to tell you which driver is in use (mostly useful for people writing layers over the top of PDO).
• Enabled the unix build of PDO_DBLIB, which provides access to Sybase/MSSQL servers …

After nearly 2 months of development FUDforum 2.6.14 is finally out. Aside from the usual bug fixes this release includes a number of important improvements, such as full support for PHP 5.1 and introduction of a PDO database driver support, which enables FUDforum to talk with SQLite in addition to MySQL and PostgreSQL.

In addition to all of the changes in found in RC1 and RC2 there is a small number of modification made since then, a list of which can be found below.

The installer and the upgrade script can be found at their usual locations at:
http://fudforum.org/download.php and all FUDforum users are encouraged to upgrade.

Continue reading "FUDforum 2.6.14 Released"

I've had a number of people ask me about this feature recently, and now it's here. What took so long? I just didn't have mysql 4.1 installed anywhere, or enough time to set aside to look into it. A patch from Guy Harrison (for multiple rowsets) caught me at just the right time today, and set me up for some hacking.

In CVS (and showing up on snaps soon), the pdo_mysql driver now has support for the following features when compiled against mysql 4.1 or higher:

• Support for queries returning multiple rowsets, via PDOStatement::nextRowset().
• Supports "native" sqlstate error codes, for "better" error reporting.

• Supports native prepared statements and bound parameters.

I'm looking for feedback on these changes; even if you have an older mysql installation, please try the snapshot, as I want to ensure that it …

The 2nd release candidate of 2.6.14 was just published; this release performs the final bit of cleanup, code rearrangement and unification to make usage of PDO as a database interface possible. As of this release it is now possible to install FUDforum with the following PDO drivers: MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite in addition to the native MySQL and PostgreSQL interfaces.

Other important changes include fixes that accommodate the PHP 5.1 backwards compatibility (BC) breaks introduced after 5.1.0b1. Also, FUDforum no longer requires temporary tables, making their use optional, which should be welcome news to all the people who don't have the necessary privileges to perform this operation.

The installer and upgrade script are now available online and can be downloaded from:
http://fudforum.org/download.php

The release also includes various …