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Development Articles
Thanks to the good people of Dev Shed for the development article RSS feed.
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In this second part of a five-part series on Web Services, you will learn how to install and use MagpieRSS, a popular RSS parser. This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of the book Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional, written by W. Jason Gilmore and Bob Bryla (Apress; ISBN: 1590597702).
- MagpieRSS
MagpieRSS (Magpie for short) is a powerful RSS parser written in PHP by Kellan Elliott-McCrea. Its freely available for download via http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/ and is distributed under the GPL license. Magpie offers developers an amazingly practical and easy means for retrieving...
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Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) is a captcha technology developed by Microsoft. This article will explain how it's different from other captcha systems, the benefits of using Asirra, and how to set it up on your PHP-based website.
- Unlike other types of captcha that utilize difficult text obfuscation techniques (such as Google reCaptcha), this system utilizes images of dogs and cats, such as those shown in the screen shot below:
The following are the main benefits of using the Asirra captcha system:
1. It is very...
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If you are planning to use PHP to create and interact with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application, then you can use the PHP Excel class. It can be a little tricky to use, however, especially for beginners. This tutorial will walk you through the basics and show you how to customize it for your own Excel implementation.
- The class is complex, and sometimes getting started on the basics is hard, because PHPExcel is a complete class that interacts not only with MS Excel but with other formats such as PDF, CSV and the OpenDocument Spreadsheet.
The documentation included by the developers is broad, and does not cover...
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If you are looking for a solution to create MS Word documents without the use of .COM objects, then this tutorial will be helpful. In it, you will learn how to build an actual PHP application that can convert a .txt file into a .doc file online.
- Important Requirements
Before you implement this application in your own test server, bear in mind that this was tested to work on the following setup:
PHP Version: 5.2.5
Server: Apache
OS: Linux
MS Word version: MS Word 2002
You will need the following PHP functions/components to ma...
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This five-part article series will introduce you to Web Services. If you've ever wanted to incorporate them into your web sites, this is a good place to start. This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of the book Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional, written by W. Jason Gilmore and Bob Bryla (Apress; ISBN: 1590597702).
- This chapter discusses some of the more applicable implementations of Web Services technologies and shows you how to use PHP to start incorporating them into your Web application development strategy right now. To accomplish this goal without actually turning this chapter into a book unto itself, th...
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Welcome to the conclusion of a three-part article series that shows you how to implement the Registry design pattern in PHP. In this part, we'll take all the classes that we've created so far and put them to work together.
- So, if you're a PHP developer who wants to expand your current programming skills by learning how to implement the Registry design pattern in a few simple steps without having to deal with obscure and hard-to-grasp concepts, then you've come to the right place.
And now that you know what to expect...
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This is a basic tutorial on the application of PHP to get text information from a web form and write it to a text file.
- This article will illustrate a number of features to be included in this application which are useful in actual project implementations, such as:
Restriction of user input to text while blocking unwanted and malicious form inputs.
Limiting the number of words of input that can be written to ...
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In this second part of a series, I demonstrate how easy it is to define a session-based registry class based on the abstract parent created in the first tutorial. The straightforward creation process means you shouldnt have major problems building your own registry classes or even improving the ones that you've learned so far in this series.
- Even now, many PHP developers are reluctant to implement the registry design pattern. Using the pattern seems similar to using the quot;evil quot; and deprecated global variables. But the truth is that, when used in a conscientious and responsible manner, the pattern can be really helpful. Its ...
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In this conclusion to a five-part series on strings and regular expressions in PHP, you'll learn about padding and stripping a string, trimming characters from a string, counting the characters in a string, and more. This article is excerpted from chapter nine of the book Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional, written by W. Jason Gilmore and Bob Bryla (Apress; ISBN: 1590597702).
- Padding and Stripping a String
For formatting reasons, you sometimes need to modify the string length via either padding or stripping characters. PHP provides a number of functions for doing so. This section examines many of the commonly used functions.
Trimming Characters from the Beginning o...
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In this first part of a series, I provide a basic introduction to implementing the registry design pattern in PHP. I'll define a simple hierarchy of classes comprised of an abstract registry, and a concrete implementation of it, which uses a private array to save and fetch resources across different points of an application.
- Design patterns are well-trusted and reusable paradigms that allow you to solve common problems present in software development. This is not the only benefit to using design patterns. Many design patterns have intuitive names that permit you to grasp fairly easily what they do or what kind of iss...
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PHP can be used to write text to images or even merge a source image to a target image. With this concept, it is possible to create open source ID creation software. The ID can contain a picture of a person and a name tag written in text (or even include an ID number). Keep reading to learn how this can be done.
- To develop and use this application, you will need to have the following:
An ID image template - This will contain a company logo and the text input fields. See sample screen shot below:
The picture of the person can be inserted/merged into the spacious area at the right of the image ID ...
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Welcome to the final installment of a series that shows you how to build a simple MVC-based framework in PHP 5. This series walks you in a step-by-step fashion through the development of a stack of reusable components, which can be easily put to work together under a strict MVC-based layer.
- Learning how to implement the Model-View-Controller design pattern within a real-world project can be of great help in sharpening the skills of any web developer who wants to be in touch with modern software programming trends.
So, if youre a PHP coder who wants to grasp the key concepts that sur...
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In this fourth part of a five-part series on strings and regular expressions in PHP, you'll learn how to perform complex string parsing, find the last occurrence of a string, and more. This article is excerpted from chapter nine of the book Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional, written by W. Jason Gilmore and Bob Bryla (Apress; ISBN: 1590597702).
- Converting an Array into a String
Just as you can use the
explode()
function to divide a delimited string into various array elements, you concatenate array elements to form a single delimited string using the
implode()
function. Its prototype follows:
string implode(string delimiter, ar...
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In this next-to-last part of the series, I finish building a MySQL-driven application that uses the functionality of the framework we've created to perform CRUD operations on a database table populated with user-related data.
- Learning how to successfully implement a number of design patterns is definitely a great idea for PHP coders whose main goal is to develop solid and efficient web applications. This includes using the popular Model-View-Controller triad, or expressed in programming jargon, the MVC pattern.
True ...
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In this twelfth part of the series I finish building the controller class that permits you to run CRUD operations against the pertinent users MySQL table. This class uses the model to interface with the data layer, the input class to filter incoming data, and the view class to display output on the browser. This process demonstrates the real functionality of the MVC framework developed in previous tutorials.
- Any PHP coder who wants to build thorough, scalable web applications must understand how to implement certain design patterns. This doesnt mean that mastering these patterns will guarantee writing bullet-proof code that scales well in different contexts. But, as the web continues to evolve, desig...
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