ConFoo Vancouver: December 5th-7th 2016

We are happy to open the call for papers of ConFoo Vancouver 2016! If you are interested in speaking about web development and related topics, please submit until June 6th. We will cover travel and hotel for the speakers who require it if you want to know  the quality of a great check stub maker.

ConFoo Vancouver will be held on December 5-7, 2016. For those who are familiar with ConFoo Montreal, that conference will still be running annually in addition to Vancouver. Visit our site to learn more about the event and …

I have been considering a few things that one needs follow, do and have in their projects and applications and I came up with the below list:

1. Object Oriented Techniques and practices
2. Use of Interface Concept
3. TDD (Test Driven Development) based development both on the server and client side
4. Source code management tool like GIT
5. Language specific package management tool for managing dependencies. For example: Composer for PHP
6. Continuous Integration tool
7. Automated testing

There are many more, I might be missing. Please let me know in comments. :)

The MySQL Document Store introduced with version 5.7.12 allows developers to create document collections without have to know Structured Query Language. The new feature also comes with a new set of terminology. So let us create a collection and see what it in it (basically creating a table for us SQL speakin' old timers).

So start the mysqlsh program, connect to the server, change to the world-x schema (database) switch to Python mode, a create a collection (table).

What did the server do for us? Switching to SQL mode, we can use describe to see what the server has done for us.

We have a two column …

Last time this blog covered digging into a JSON document in a MySQL 5.7 table. The goal was to pull certain records matching a particular criteria. Both Peter Zaitsev and Morgan Tocker get my thanks for their kind comments. My example was a little contrived in that an application would be used to fine tune seeking for a particular key value pair. I was trying to pull single records which is kind of silly when it is much easier to use PHP to parse the data. What follows below is a sample PHP script to grab out the matching records and then feed the results, the JSON document, into an array.

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "root", "hidave", "test");

/* check connection */
if (mysqli_connect_errno()) {
    printf("Connect failed: %s\n", …

Developing a prototype, I found myself wanting a trustworthy cloud provider. Having heard of Openshift, I got my hands on it. It's Red Hat's Platform as a Service. With it, you can host and scale applications in a cloud environment. As a developer I found some wonderful features on the quite generous free tier. The ones I'd like to highlight are that:

It's based on a gear and cartridge

In a few different places I saw comments about my last blog post about references and performance where commentators noted that my example was pointless. Which of course is true and to some degree the point.

I read a lot of PHP code and from time to time I see people with a non-PHP background (or otherwise influenced) putting references everywhere they pass arrays or such in order to prevent copies. I knew this was a bad practice in PHP 5 and wanted to verify this in PHP 7. For readers with a stronger PHP background this doesn't come to mind and so comments are like "what if I want to modify the data?" which might lead to something like this:

function modify(&$data) {
    $data["foo"] = "bar";
}
$data = [ /* huuuuuge array */ ];
modify($data);

In this code, from a performance perspective, the reference likely …

I'm known for telling "Don't use references" (also as video) as those cause different problems (i.e. with foreach) and hurt performance. The reason for the performance loss is that references disable copy-on-write while most places in PHP assume copy-on-write. Meanwhile we have PHP 7. In PHP 7 the internal variable handling changed a lot among other things the reference counting moved from the zval, the container representing a variable, to the actual element. So I decided to run a little test to verify my performance assumption was still valid.

In my test code I'm calling a function which calls strlen (one of the cheapest functions in PHP - PHP strings …

This is a followup from my two previous posts on php and js git pre-commit syntax check where I had mentioned how to check for php and js syntax independently using pre-commit with git.



But what if we wanted to check for both php and js syntax at same time while committing. So, I used the scripts used for both and combined them. …

We will learn how to convert an image to its text representation using PHP that can be used in an html page (if any such requirement arises in your application or just for fun sake :) ).


The steps followed to convert the image to text representation are:

1. Get the width and height of the image to be converted.
2. Loop through every pixel value in the image.
3. At every pixel value, find the color at that position.
4. Apply that color to a # symbol we use to represent that pixel.
5. Finally we get the text representation of the image represented by # (hashes).

Code:

<html>
    <body style="background-color: #000000;">
…

Many a times we have faced this problem that when we commit something and it breaks something on the server due to some syntax error.
I know that these can be caught by IDEs and good editors, but sometimes there might be an syntax error introduced after a code merge conflict resolution and commit.
To address this, we can use git pre-commit hooks to check for any syntax errors in the to be committed files.

There is a good script I found which does this at https://github.com/ReekenX/phpcheck-git

Steps to add pre-commit php syntax check with git:

(Issue …