This recent article from the Builder.com.au website shows exactly how simple it is to get a LAMP server up and running on your Ubuntu installation.
I can't tell you how many times I have been asked what is the fastest, easiest way to install a LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL, PHP) server on Ubuntu. Well, I guess it's time I just post it here for everyone to enjoy.
You're just two apt-get calls and a few various commands away from pulling in an Apache 2 web server and a PHP5 module that has MySQL support already built in. Set the password for the MySQL installation and you're all set to go.
Matthew Turland has this new blog post looking at some benchmarks he's generated for a group of mainstream PHP HTTP clients:
One of the interesting bits of research that I've done is benchmarking various mainstream PHP HTTP clients. Of course, we all know that there are lies, damned lies, statistics, and benchmarks, so take these with a grain of salt.
He ran them on his Sony Viao on Ubuntu with a stock PHP5 package. The tested packages were the pecl_http extension, the streams http wrapper, curl integration into PHP 5, PEAR::HTTP Client class and the Zend_Http_Client component. He includes the code he used for both a basic request and for something slightly more complex (posting form data). He used the XDebug and KCachegrind combination to produce the results.
On the Developer.com website today, Jason Gilmore has a new tutorial covering a important feature of any based PHP install (unless disabled, of course) that is widely taken advantage of - sending emails.
Email plays a crucial role in website development, whether you'd like to confirm a new registrant's email address, recover a lost password, or provide prospective clients with a convenient means to contact you. [...] In this tutorial, I'll introduce you to several solutions for sending email using PHP, including PHP's native mail() function, PEAR's Mail package, and the Zend Framework.
He starts with some of the fundamentals of mail - the difference between POP3 and SMTP, Sendmail, etc - before moving on to an example of the mail function's usage. He does the same with the PEAR Mail package and the Zend_Mail component of the Zend Framework.
Sameer has posted a new tutorial to his blog recently, a look at a drop-in solution for pagination in your application - the PEAR Pager package.
Pagination is a frequent requirement in web development projects. Most PHP developers must have already implemented paging in one form or other in their projects. In this post we will see how to add pagination the easy way using PEAR's Pager class. Note that in all the posts I use PHP 5.x.x, so if you are still stuck at version 4.x.x, its already time to upgrade.
He includes a simple example (just the page links), how to install the Pager package and a larger example where the results are pulled from a database table and paginated correctly based on an offset ID. There's even some CSS thrown in to make it a bit more pleasing to the eye.
Christian Weiske set out on a project - no small thing - to convert the current PEAR documentation info over to the PhD DocBook rendering system. In a new post he talks about the conversion process and some of the technology involved.
The reason for PhD to exist was that the previously used DSSSL based system was slow: a full build (all formats and all languages) took 24 hours to complete. Further, the tools the system based on were old, rusty and nobody understood why they broke on some machines, but also why they worked on other ones. Having a php-based system for PHP ensures that there is always someone around who can fix it if it's broken. This wasn't the case with the old documentation build system.
The conversion was spurred on by the fact that the PEAR documentation stopped building and more and more people were finding it hard to build on their machines too. He walks through the steps he took - installing PhD, converting over the docs to the DocBook 5 format and the first builds with the new system.
Now that at the XML was shiny, too, it was time to actually use PhD on it. The numbers were amazing: While a build for one format and one language took around 40 minutes on my system (dual core Macbook with 2GHz and 2GiB RAM), building the same with PhD takes 45 seconds!
In a new post todayStuart Herbert asks the question "is it possible to secure a shared server with PHP and FastCGI installed on it?" His answer follows...
The challenge with securing a shared hosting server is how to secure the website from attack both from the outside and from the inside. PHP has built-in features to help, but ultimately it's the wrong place to address the problem. [...] Before we can look at performance, the first question is: how exactly do we get PHP and FastCGI running as different users on the one web server in the first place?
He follows through on this, giving a little mini-tutorial on getting the environment installed on an Apache web server. He includes some benchmarks on the difference between using the Apache 1.3.x series and Apache 2 (generated using the ab benchmarking tool).
On Devollo.com the first part of a series looking at something every PHP developer (or any other for that matter) should include in their application - data filtering.
Filtering data. We all have to do it. Most, if not all of us, despise doing it. However, unbeknown to most are PHP's filter_* functions, that allow us to do all sorts of filtering and validation. Using PHP's filter_* functions, we can validate and sanitize data types, URLs, e-mail addresses, IP addresses, strip bad characters, and more, all with relative ease. This is part one of two, covering filter_var() and the different constants and flags that can be set.
This method, using the filter extension, takes a lot of the work out of making sure that user-submitted data is what it should be. They include examples of how to filter numeric types, URLs, email addresses and how to sanitize the data to be sure there's no cross-site scripting or SQL injections to be found. This is a great reference if you're looking to get started with the filter extension.
In a new tutorial from DevShed today, they take a look at some of the "networking" functions that PHP has to offer - basically anything that can make a network connection.
PHP has a great many tools for interacting with a network and also with the Internet. In this article we will look at some of those tools and functions to see how we can use them to make our scripts more useful in a network environment.
Lorna Mitchell has posted the last part of her development process towards creating a sample REST server in PHP:
This is part 3 of my article about writing a restful service server. If you haven't already, you might like to read part 1 (covering the core library and grabbing the information we need from the incoming request) and part 2 (covering the service handler itself) before reading this section. This part covers the Response object that I used to return the data to the user in the correct format.
She show how she created the object to push the response back out to the client with an output() method that displays the XML response in a manually generated format.
Lorna Mitchell has posted the second part of her series detailing her REST server development project (part one is here).
This is part 2 of my rest service writing article. In part 1 we saw the library which holds the functionality we will be using, and we also handled the incoming request and captured all the data we'll be using.
In this second part she gets into the details behind the handle() method of the class. It splits the URL into its parts and, based on the action requested, hands it off to the right method and calls the output() method to return to the user. Some error handling is also included (with custom exceptions).
