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Photo by: Mark McArdle
Hi everyone,
I came across a helpful list of PHP optimization tips, and I’d like to share it with you here: http://php100.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/php-performance/
In addition, using the XDebug profiler for collecting performance data and KCacheGrind for viewing it is highly recommended to keep your PHP applications running smoothly!
Hi everyone,
A while back, I hooked up my CodeIgniter sample application to a MySQL database. That was easy, and now I’ll show how to move your presentation code into separate view files, instead of echo’ing HTML from inside a controller file.
According to the CodeIgniter manual, views are stored in the /views (hmm, that makes sense!) directory of your application, and they can be divided up across functional areas with subdirectories. Since it’s possible to create page snippets and load them in sequence, you might have a directory structure like this:
/views /global /layout /header.php /footer.php /navigation /left_side.php /bottom_links.php /user /add.php /edit.php /delete.php ... /group /add.php /edit.php /delete.php ... /... /...
I haven’t gotten that complex yet, but I did move the code to display my user count into a view and set the value in the controller like so:
The file /views/user/showcount.php is pretty simple:
Ok, this all seems to be pretty easy. Of course, there’s a bunch more functionality in the CodeIgniter framework, but I think what I’ll do for my next post is shift gears and go through the same basic exercises using CakePHP, Prado, and the Zend Framework.
It will be interesting to see if there’s any similarity to the way the classic “Hello, world.” program varies in complexity based on implementation language!
Hi everyone,
I’ve submitted some new FreeBSD port upgrades over the past week, including new support for CodeIgniter 1.6.1. In addition to the version bump of the upstream distribution, I also added some new bits to allow customization of certain CI files. The port is also careful to avoid removing those modified files when a new port upgrade comes along.
The reference for how to handle user-configurable files installed as part of a port can be found in the excellent FreeBSD Porter’s Handbook in the Configuration Files section.
In the new CodeIgniter port, the following user-configurable files are installed:
<INSTALL_DIR>/index.php
<INSTALL_DIR>/index.php.sample
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/autoload.php
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/autoload.php.sample
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/config.php
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/config.php.sample
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/database.php
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/database.php.sample
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/hooks.php
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/hooks.php.sample
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/mimes.php
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/mimes.php.sample
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/routes.php
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/routes.php.sample
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/smileys.php
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/smileys.php.sample
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/user_agents.php
<INSTALL_DIR>/system/application/config/user_agents.php.sample
What this does is install a reference copy of each file (*.sample) that is not expected to be edited by the user. The actual file that CodeIgniter uses to render pages (no .sample suffix) is user-configurable as needed.
Then some crazy-looking shell code in the pkg-plist file makes sure that any edited files are not removed if the port is deinstalled or upgraded (reformatted for readability):
%D/%%WWWDIR%/%%CI_CONF_DIR%%/autoload.php; then \
rm -f %D/%%WWWDIR%%/%%CI_CONF_DIR%%/autoload.php; else \
%%ECHO_MSG%% "===> Customized %D/%%WWWDIR%%/%%CI_CONF_DIR%%/autoload.php \
has not been removed"; fi
%%WWWDIR%%/%%CI_CONF_DIR%%/autoload.php.sample
@exec if [ ! -f %D/%%WWWDIR%%/%%CI_CONF_DIR%%/autoload.php ]; then \
cp -p %D/%F %B/autoload.php; fi
This concept needs to be implemented in several of the other ports that I maintain, including CakePHP and Prado. If anyone has a list of files that are user-configurable in each of those frameworks, please send it along!
Hi everyone,
When I last posted about my sample application development with CodeIgniter, I had created a simple Hello, World application. The next thing I want to explore is how easy it is to connect to a MySQL database and retrieve data.
As a quick side note, the CodeIgniter User Guide is well-written and very clear with plenty of examples. That’s always nice to see and instills some confidence in the quality of the underlying code.
According to the guide, all of the database connections should be defined in the application/config/database.php file. After setting up a new database named “ci” and a database user, I opened database.php and set up my connection:
That was easy enough. Now I’ve got the skeleton of a model defined in application/models/user_model.php:
The $this->load->database() statement automatically connects to MySQL using the default connection I defined previously. Now I can use the $this->db object to run queries and process results elsewhere in my model file.
I’ll replace my original hard-coded count_users function with something that runs an actual database query:
Of course, I have to leave a newbie coding error in there for someone to notice. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Here’s my simple MySQL database schema:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `user` (
`id` INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`user_name` VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL,
`full_name` VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL,
`email` VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=3 ;
–
– Dumping data for table `user`
–
INSERT INTO `user` (`id`, `user_name`, `full_name`, `email`) VALUES
(1, ‘glarkin’, ‘Greg Larkin’, ‘glarkin@sourcehosting.net’),
(2, ‘morsel’, ‘Morsel The Cat’, ‘morsel@meow.com’);
When I navigate to my /codeigniter/user/count_users/ URL, I see:
There are 2 users defined
Great! Next up, we’ll take a look at creating an actual output page with views.
Hi everyone,
SourceHosting.net recently started a professional services contract for a new client in Maine, and they need a PHP developer to finish a project for a client of theirs. The system is a content management and e-commerce web site used to order and fulfill scientific supplies. The site is targeted to a typical LAMP stack.
I had a look at the database schema and the existing code, and it is surprisingly well-commented, indented nicely and follows a naming convention. That was a nice change of pace! I suspect that it won’t be too difficult to pick up what’s there and learn it well enough to finish the project.
This project is available to an off-site developer, and there is some time pressure to get it done. They would like a person who can work full-time over the next few weeks. If you are interested, please reply directly to me with an introduction, your resume and a description of recent LAMP projects. If that all looks good, I’ll put you in touch with the hiring manager.
Hi everyone,
I just saw that CodeIgniter 1.6.1 has been released. I guess that means I’d better get on the stick and upgrade the FreeBSD CodeIgniter port! Once I do that, I’ll upgrade my PHP Framework VM with the new version of the port and continue on with the experimentation.
Hi everyone,
Now that I’ve got my FreeBSD virtual machine set up with the various PHP frameworks, it’s time to start putting together a sample application in each one to learn their strengths and weaknesses. The sample application will be a simple mailing list manager and contain common features such as:
I think that will exercise enough of each framework to get a good handle on their functionality and ease of use.
I’m starting off with CodeIgniter. At first glance, the documentation seems excellent, and the code is commented very clearly. Looking at the index.php file in the root installation directory (/usr/local/www/codeigniter on FreeBSD), I see:
Ok, that seems easy enough. To keep the default application intact and start working on my custom application, I simply copied the existing application directory to /usr/local/www/ci_sourcehosting and updated the index.php file.
According to the welcome page displayed by CodeIgniter, I have to change the views/welcome_message.php file to change the default page contents. Ok, easy enough…
The controllers/welcome.php controller is called by default, and that’s configured in the config/routes.php file in your application directory.
To create a new controller, simply create a new class that extends Controller and name it with a capital letter. Save the new class to the lowercase version of the class name into the /controllers directory, and you’re ready to test.
My simple class is:
When I visit http://192.168.95.128/codeigniter/user, I see:
Welcome to the user controller
and http://192.168.95.128/codeigniter/user/count-users displays:
There are 0 users defined
Ok, that’s pretty straightforward, but I did have to do a bit of mucking about to get the URLs to look like http://192.168.95.128/codeigniter/user/count instead of http://192.168.95.128/<strong>index.php</strong>/codeigniter/user/count.
The CodeIgniter manual specifies a .htaccess file to be placed in the directory where the index.php front controller is located:
Normally, this works fine, except Apache 2.2 specifies AllowOverride None by default, so .htaccess files don’t work. After changing that, I had to make one small change to the .htaccess file, since my CodeIgniter installation is rooted at /codeigniter:
Next time, we’ll take a look at hooking CodeIgniter to MySQL.
Hi all,
After my last post, I realized it might be nice to provide a clean VMware image of FreeBSD 6.2 for folks who want to follow along as I try out the various PHP frameworks.
The first thing you’ll need to start up the virtual machine is one of the following free VMware tools:
Both of these tools allow you to run virtual machines on your server and/or desktop. The VMware Player is most useful if you just want to run pre-built virtual machines and use them for experimentation and evaluation. VMware Server gives the ability to create your own custom virtual machines and install your choice of operating system.
Once you have one of those tools installed on your machine, download a FreeBSD 6.2 VMware image from the SourceHosting.net BitTorrent tracker. You can find detailed instructions on setting up the VMware image in a subsequent blog posting.
The OS install is configured as follows:
Extract the downloaded file somewhere on your drive and fire up VMware Player or VMware Server and follow the prompts to start the VM.
In case you’re new to FreeBSD, there’s a wealth of information in the Handbook. After you’ve logged in and had a look around, you can use the following command to shut the VM down cleanly:
/sbin/shutdown -p now
Look for a new post soon describing how to install each of the PHP frameworks.
Hello everyone,
I recently created a FreeBSD port for each of the following PHP frameworks:
I originally started with the Zend Framework port a while back, thinking I would use it to rebuild the SourceHosting.net web site. Since I want all software on the SourceHosting.net FreeBSD servers to be installed and upgraded using the ports system, I had to build the ZF port first. The only problem with building a port is that it doesn’t always require you to learn the ins and outs of actually using the software that you are porting.
The web site rebuilding project is still in the planning phases, and now that I’ve created ports for some additional PHP frameworks, I thought it might be useful to put together a simple web site using each one. I’ve read a lot of comments about each one, the strong points and weaknesses, but I think a hands-on experiment with each one will help a lot to narrow down the final choice.
A slightly more advanced “Hello, world.” program than the one in my original dog-eared copy of K&R ought to make the final choice easy to make. I’ll post progress here, and send any comments you have along the way.
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