But, as a programmer, I started to think that, even though my own libraries speed up my development processes, I want it to be hands on a bigger and more ambitious projects -that happened long time a go but never felt impressed by any library out there. My libraries lacked on scalable development architecture and had to find for a better solution for a much bigger project I am jumping right now. I google around and found interesting offers as exposed on one of my old posts:

• CodeIgniter
• Yii
• CakePHP
• Zend
• Symfony
• PHPDevShell
• Prado
• Akelos
• ZooP
• QPHP
• ezComponents
• DooPHP

Actually, far too many, so I took my time to decide for one to suit all my needs. Checked around and read some good articles about Yii framework and then, telling the truth, I was very impressed with (information taken from http://programmersnotes.info:

• 100% OO architecture. It is really good application design.
• Authentication & roles mechanism
• Caching techniques
• DB access, which is based on PDO
• Active record and relational active record implementation
• Validation – that is really, really nice. To create quite complex register form (check if login is unique, if email is unique, email match with confirmation, passwords match, validate integer/string values, check empty fields and give nice error messages for each field you need only template (view) and model with rules defined. It took me 10-15 mins to do that!)
• Component concept. Just to give an idea, why is it nice – you can define getter and setter methods for properties, you can define read-only properties for components, define and invoke events, attach event handlers and additional features to the class without modifying it, just by attaching additional behaviour to it
• Also, check its graphical benchmarking against other MVC frameworks http://www.yiiframework.com/performance.

Wondering whether DooPHP (claiming is the fastest at the moment) or Yii, I finally decided to use the latest due that DooPHP is quite new and Yii has a huge amount of features and tweaks that, even its documentation is not the best (I just read their Definitive Guide and I think I will have to read to a couple of hundreds articles more to be ‘good’ at it), I think at the end will become the Toolset for highly scalable projects -using its automation tool called Gii, I did the skeleton of a project in less than 30 seconds -duh!.

In addition. last but not least, you can integrate Zend components easily and jQuery is nativelly implemented -and I loooooove jQuery.

For the small ones I still like my own libraries though

This plugin loads the images of a web page as the user scrolls to their position, that is, images wont load until they are not within the visible viewport margins of the window.

How to use

First we need to insert the following references into our code

<!-- insert a reference to jquery and the jquery.lazyload plugin -->
<script src="jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="jquery.lazyload.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

And now this few lines of code in our document.ready function

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
          $("img").lazyload({
              placeholder : "img/grey.gif",
              effect      : "fadeIn"
           });
       });
< /script>

And that’s it! Easy right?

I propose you the following: Here is my small old good set of Uri PHP functions encapsulated into one class, I know is not a great deal but, let’s see what can we all do with it. For every programmer that posts a function, I will write his reference into the class and post his/her site link in this post.

There are certain rules though:

1. Functions cannot be greater than 20 lines of code
2. Functions cannot depend of far too many external components (maximum one)
3. If functions depend of an external component/class, a URL indicating its reference must be provided
4. Functions are not to be repetitive, if there is one better written that the ones exposes we will replace it

The Uri Class

Here is my class:

<?php
/**
 * @author Antonio Ramirez <contactme@atmyblog.com>
 * @license http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php GNU Public License
 * @link http://www.ramirezcobos.com/
 *
 *
 */
class Uri
{
	/**
	 * Encodes the parameter to hide
	 * its contents to user
	 *
	 * @param string $val
	 */
	function uriEncode($val)
	{
		return rawurlencode(base64_encode($val));
	}
	/**
	 * Decodes a parameter string that
	 * was previously encoded with uriEncode
	 * function
	 *
	 * @param string $val
	 */
	function uriDecode($val){
		return base64_decode(rawurldecode($val));
	}
	/**
	 * Translates a given url to
	 * tinyurl version -curl required
	 *
	 * @param string $url
	 * @access public
	 * @return string $data
	 */
	function getTinyUrl($url){
		$ch = curl_init();
		$timeout = 5;
		curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,'http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url='.$url);
		curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
		curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
		$data = curl_exec($ch);
		curl_close($ch);
		return $data;
	}
	/**
	 * Translates a given url to
	 * ToLyUrl version -curl required
	 *
	 * @param string $url
	 * @access public
	 * @return string $data
	 */
	function getToLyUrl($url){
		$ch = curl_init();

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://to.ly/api.php?longurl='.urlencode($url));
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

		$data = curl_exec ($ch);
		curl_close ($ch);

		return $data;
	}
	/**
     * Gets Request param
     *
     * @param string $paramName
     * @param string $slash
     * @access public
     * @return string $param or boolean $false
     */
	function getParam($paramName, $slash=false)
	{
		return (isset($_REQUEST[$paramName])?($slash?addslashes($_REQUEST[$paramName]):$_REQUEST[$paramName]):false);
	}
	/**
     * Serializes Request params
     *
     * @param string $notThisOne
     * @access public
     * @return string $query_string
     */
	function getParams($notThisOne=false)
  	{
		global $REQUEST_METHOD, $HTTP_GET_VARS, $HTTP_POST_VARS;
		$query_string='';
		if (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],"?"))
		{
			list($fullfile, $voided) = explode("?", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
			$cgi = $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'GET' ? $HTTP_GET_VARS : $HTTP_POST_VARS;
			reset ($cgi);
			while (list($key, $value) = each($cgi)) {
			  if ($key != $notThisOne)
				$query_string .= "&" . $key . "=" . $value;
			}
		}
		return $query_string;
  	}
	/**
     * Makes a Soap Call
     *
     * @param string $uri
     * @param string $command
     * @param string $xml
     * @access public
     * @return string $response
     *
     * Requires Soap
     */
	function makeSoapCall($uri,$command,$xml)
	{

		try{

			ini_set('default_socket_timeout',10); // ten seconds, that is all we wait

			$client = new SoapClient($uri,array("connection_timeout"=>10));

			$response =  $client->__soapCall($command,array(new SoapParam($xml,'Peticion')));
		}
		catch(Exception $e){

			$response = false;
		}
		return $response;
	}
	/**
	 * Parses a given $url for validation
	 *
	 * @param string $url
	 * @access public
	 * @return $parsed_url
	 */
	function getParsedUrl($url)
	{
		$parsed_url = parse_url($url);

		if (!isset($parsed_url['scheme']) or $parsed_url['scheme'] != 'http'){
			echo 'Unsupported URL sheme given, please just use "HTTP".';
			exit();
		}
		if (!isset($parsed_url['host']) or $parsed_url['host'] == ''){
			echo 'Invalid URL given!';
			exit();
		}

		$host = $parsed_url['host'];
		$host .= (isset($parsed_url['port']) and  !empty($parsed_url['port'])) ? ':'.$parsed_url['port'] : '';
		$path = (isset($parsed_url['path']) and  !empty($parsed_url['path'])) ? $parsed_url['path'] : '/';
		$path .= (isset($parsed_url['query']) and  !empty($parsed_url['query'])) ? '?'.$parsed_url['query'] : '';

		return 'http://' . $host . $path;
	}
	/**
     * Requests a Url and returns its contents
     *
     * @param string $url
     * @access public
     * @return string $query_string
     * @uses Snoopy class http://sourceforge.net/projects/snoopy/
     */
	function getUrlContent($url)
	{
		App::import('component','snoopy');

		$url = Uri::getParsedUrl($url);

		$snoopy = new Snoopy();
		$snoopy->agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; es-ES; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12';
		$snoopy->referer = '';

		$results = false;

		if($snoopy->fetch($url)){

			$results = $snoopy->results;
			// empty buffer:
			$snoopy->results = '';
		}

		return $results;
	}
}
?>

Now my projects are bigger, require a lot more of database analysis and those sometimes go up to 30 tables or more. That means that once analysed a project, I had to create those tables in the database, specify their fields and so on… you know.

I found my self into the lazyness mode and I was already thinking that it could be great to create a set of libraries that do not require any configuration files at all and could manipulate my databases in such a way that not only queries for data but also dynamically creates the tables for me if they do not exists. That could save me around one or two days of work I thought…

Before creating anything I ask mr ‘Google’ if there was something around that could match my concept (never reinvent the wheel) and OH MY… I found it, its name is RedBean and I have to say that is one of the greatest libraries that have ever came across.

How it works

Create a database

Include the required files to work with RedBean -one file: redbean.inc.php

include('mypathto/redbean.inc.php");

Access its core:

//Assemble a database connection string (DSN)
$dsn = "mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabasename";

//Connect to database and fetch the toolbox; either with password
$toolbox = RedBean_Setup::kickstartDev($dsn, $username, $password);

Now, just for this example: creating one Bean

$rb = $toolbox->getRedBean();

// lets create one object that we didnt even declared anywhere 
$post = $rb->dispense('post');

// set some variables -fields
$post->title = 'This is magic';
$post->created = date('Y-m-d');

// save newly created object to database (how come?)
$rb->store($post);

If we were to look onto our database, we will find now that a new table is created called ‘post’ and your bean has successfully saved its properties.

Of course, this is a silly example, in my case I am using redbean on a MVC ‘modified’ pattern (I don’t like the ‘View’ part as it is implemented in modern frameworks and for small projects I use my own approach). Please, have a look to its manual, trust me, it is worth a try.

From the deep of my heart, THANKS for such a great job to his developer mr (Gabor) de Mooij. At last, one EASY yet POWERFULL library for our projects that really help us saving developing time.

Have you ever experience a series of ‘impossible things’ that happened one after the other without any comprehension? Well, that happens to me with Zend Server CE.

I am currently running a MacOSX Snow Leopard on a 17 inch MacBook Pro for the development of my projects and I have the built in Apache, PHP 5.3.1, and MySQL 5.1 as a backend DB. I do work with Dreamweaber CS4 to develop the GUI interfaces together with PhotoShop and Fireworks (all from Adobe Creative Studio CS4) and use Eclipse modified for PHP and Javascript developments (it is free but Zend calls it Zend Studio, implements some gadgets here and there a voilá, a 400 dollars product) . To debug my client-side code I do have Firebug and that’s it.

If I tell you the truth everything was working fine, but I wanted to tweak a bit more the performance of my code (we all do that), so I checked the Zend Tool Zend Server CE. Its documentation was quite good and for the comments of the rest of the programmers I thought was worth a try. This is what happened:

1. download and install Zend CE Server
2. restarted my computer
3. started Zend Server
4. damn, nothing works here, nothing! my computer suddenly slows down, what is happening?
5. looked at the processes, my God! mr Zend Server had five PHP opened at the same time as a service! And also a service controller that doesnt allow me to stop any of the Services!
6. this is crap! how should i stop this? info: http://files.zend.com/help/Zend-Server-Community-Edition/mac_osx_installation.htm
7. this info is even worst, where is installed? where all those scripts that the documentation is talking about? on the Applications folder (where is installed) there is nothing as what they are saying
8. found it (have to view hidden files in my Mac, done -defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE) with a full Mac Search (thanks spotlight)
9. uninstalling application
10. restarted computer
11. going to code a bit, going to Applications folder… diablo! my Finder crashes!
12. found tones of info, none of them worked -.DStore, .launch Services, .Onyx, etc, reinstall Snow on top, not a fresh install… reboot, Finder still crashes
13. building backups (Time Machine is quite old -a week?), whilst in the process… see next
14. looked onto Apache XAMPP install (I do not use it anymore), what??!! htpdocs and all mysql databases GONE!
15. i rund around my house screaming, yelling, and asking God why this is happening to me thousand times! -dont laugh, you probably did it a couple of times too
16. Worked with Data Recovery, FileSavage, and some data recovery programs that didn’t help at all… where are all those files?
17. last solution: fresh install Snow Leopard, Carbon Copy Cloner and TimeMachine working together for a scheduled daily backups.

Well, thank you very much Zend Server, you obviously helped me to improve the performance of my code as I had to rebuild all those libraries that weren’t backed up before making my code faster, cleaner and easy to implement and use… woaw, unreal.

Also, thanks Zend Server CE as I reinstall my OS, having only those apps that really are part of my development process and making me buy a 1.5 TB external drive to have all my backups saved daily. If it wasnt for you I wouldn’t bother spending my money on such things. You rock Zend Server!

VisualLightBox is a free application that helps you easily generate online photo albums, lightbox gallery with a nice Lightbox-style overlay effect, in a few clicks without writing a single line of code.

Just drag&drop your photos to VisualLightBox wizard window, press “Publish” and your own css web site album with beautiful LightBox effects will open in the browser instantly!
No css, image editing, javascript, html coding, just a click to get your cool web page album ready.

It takes less than a minute to have your own image gallery.

For full documentation please go to http://lightbox2.com/

Newbies, now there is no excuse to have your featured lightbox on your site!

The open source dynamic scripting language PHP is widely deployed across the Web, powering countless Web sites (including the Internet.com network). Now Facebook is aiming to change the game with today’s release of a major new PHP effort called HipHop.

With HipHop, Facebook is providing a new runtime that is intended to improve PHP use in large-scale deployments. The HipHop effort, which also includes a new Web server, has already been in use by Facebook for the past six months, though the project is just being made public today.

Facebook developers say the HipHop effort isn’t an attempt to fork the PHP community, but rather, a move to help PHP scale.

“There are two different pieces to keep in mind, one is the PHP language itself, then there is the runtime that actually goes and interprets the language and runs it,” David Recordon, Facebook’s senior open programs manager, told InternetNews.com. “What we’ve done is we’ve implemented the PHP 5.2 language with a few features removed. Our plan is to keep the language the same, but what we’ve changed is the underlying runtime and the process of going and transforming the source code into C++ and then compiling it and pushing out the compiled binary.”

Facebook said the results of using HipHop have been dramatic. CPU usage on Facebook servers has dropped by an average of 50 percent as the HipHop PHP engine reduced the load on Facebook’s infrastructure.

The results have proven to be compelling enough that Facebook now uses HipHop to deliver more than 90 percent of its production server traffic.

HipHop isn’t just a new code transformation tool, either. The overall effort also includes a new Web server to deploy PHP as well. Typically, in open source deployments, PHP is served with Apache Web servers.

“In general, Apache is a great Web server, but when we were looking at how we get the next half percent or percent of performance, we didn’t need all the features that Apache offers,” Recordon said. He added, however, that he hopes an open source project will one day emerge around making HipHop work with Apache Web servers.

The idea of optimizing the PHP runtime is not a new one, with multiple solutions in the market today including eAccelerator and commercial PHP products from Zend. Zend is one of the lead commercial sponsors behind PHP.

“HipHop looks like an interesting project,” Zend CEO Andi Gutmans told InternetNews.com. “We have been briefed by Facebook but will certainly take a closer look now. There have been other such projects but most have been targeting managed runtimes such as Java and .NET with various degrees of success. We welcome any innovation that will help PHP extend its leadership position in Web application development.”

Gutmans added that, as is the case with all runtimes, it is important to continue innovating and the PHP runtime has continued to evolve over the years.

“I think it is important to continue to fold in new ideas and innovations into the community-based runtime and it’ll be interesting to learn what HipHop concepts could be relevant to the existing PHP community,” Gutmans said.

With some PHP runtime optimization solutions, the optimization is often a simple matter of a module load and a line change in the php.ini configuration file.

It’s not quite that easy with HipHop.

“This is not an extension to PHP — this is pretty different,” Recordon said. “Right now, the process is once you build and compile HipHop, it comes with a tool that will go through the transformation process and output the binary, and that’s what you actually use to run it.”

With HipHop, Facebook said its aim is not to split the PHP community but rather to help grow it. According to Recordon, HipHop will help to solidify PHP’s position as a great language for doing Web site development.

“There is definitely the piece in there that HipHop is designed for larger PHP deployments and not necessarily for individuals hosting their own blog or small Web site,” Recordon said. “The proof of the effect of HipHop will be over the next year as we start to make deployment tools easier, and as we start to build a successful community around it and start working with others on its future development and solving problems for companies beyond just Facebook.”

Which one is best?

A huge amount of PHP programmers started to join this discussion writing their personal PHP Framework tastes, providing me with a huge list of Frameworks I would like to share with you. I don’t say that one is best that another, as one of the members said, there is no ‘best PHP MVC Framework, is whatever suits you best on your project goals’.

• CodeIgniter
• Yii
• CakePHP
• Zend
• Symfony
• PHPDevShell
• Prado
• Akelos
• ZooP
• QPHP
• ezComponents

I know the list could be much bigger, if you know more PHP Frameworks to add to this list, please comment and I will update it.

Step 1

First of all, lets make a reference to the new version of Google Maps. Check that we have to specify a parameter sensor=false. To find out more about this parameter please follow this link.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false"></script>

Step 2

Now we are going to write the HTML tags on the BODY of our document that will hold the map and the controls that will hold latitude, longitude and zoom level references. Also, see the CSS that control the size of the map holder.

<style>
div#gmap {
width: 100%;
height: 300px;
}
</style>
<body>
<center>
<!-- MAP HOLDER -->
<div id="gmap"></div>
<!-- REFERENCES -->
lat:<span id="lat"></span> lon:<span id="lon"></span><br/>
zoom level: <span id="zoom_level"></span>
</center>
</body>

Step 3

Now, we are going to write the function that will display the map when the document loads. The function, that we will call ‘initialize’ has different parts that we will describe now:

Part 1

Setting the map zoom level and its position in the world:

var myLatlng = new google.maps.LatLng(38.971154274048345,1.415863037109375); // IBIZA 
var myOptions = {
zoom: 16,
center: myLatlng,
mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
}
map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById("gmap"), myOptions);

Part 2

Placing a marker on the map specifying its center position (please refer to above code for LatLon location).

// marker refers to a global variable
marker = new google.maps.Marker({
position: myLatlng,
map: map
});

Part 3

Now, the events that will take control of the marker center re-positioning and placing the information on the correspondent document objects (lat, lon, and zoom level).

// if center changed then update lat and lon document objects
google.maps.event.addListener(map, 'center_changed', function() {
var location = map.getCenter();
document.getElementById("lat").innerHTML = location.lat();
document.getElementById("lon").innerHTML = location.lng();
// call function to reposition marker location
placeMarker(location);
});
// if zoom changed, then update document object with new info
google.maps.event.addListener(map, 'zoom_changed', function() {
zoomLevel = map.getZoom();
document.getElementById("zoom_level").innerHTML = zoomLevel;
});
// double click on the marker changes zoom level
google.maps.event.addListener(marker, 'dblclick', function() {
zoomLevel = map.getZoom()+1;
if (zoomLevel == 20) {
zoomLevel = 10;
}
document.getElementById("zoom_level").innerHTML = zoomLevel;
map.setZoom(zoomLevel);
});

Part 4

Initialize the document objects with default information

document.getElementById("zoom_level").innerHTML = 16;
document.getElementById("lat").innerHTML = 38.971154274048345;
document.getElementById("lon").innerHTML = 1.415863037109375;

Step 4

Finally, we have to write the function that will reposition the marker on ‘zoom_changed’ map event and call the ‘initialize’ function on window load event.

function placeMarker(location) {
var clickedLocation = new google.maps.LatLng(location);
marker.setPosition(location);
}
window.onload = function(){initialize()};

And that’s it, we have a great utility to plug onto our projects in order to find out the latitude and longitude of an address.

DOWNLOAD

I have included the working version of this tutorial for you to download. If you make any changes on the code in order to improve/add more functionality to it (that is easy fellows), please share it here with us.

download: Get Lat Lon Finder (1.41KB) added: 22/01/2010 clicks: 385 description:

The jQuery programmers not happy with a new release has also created a new  jQuery API site. Check what they have done on their API site here.

John Resig will announce 1.4 release details tomorrow but meanwhile, you can download it and see for yourself.

• Download jQuery 1.4 from Google CDN
• Download jQuery 1.4 from Official jQuery website

Also, if you want to learn more about what is new in jQuery 1.4 then you might find the following resources useful:

1. 14 Days of jQuery
2. Official jQuery Blog
3. jQuery 1.4 Cheatsheet
4. jQuery on Tweeter

Check what is new or changed on this new release here.

Happy birthday jQuery! Thanks for the good work!