PHP Archive
Some tricks with Autoloaders
Autoloaders are a great feature of PHP5. Used properly they can help to really 'clean up' your code, negating the need for include or require statements. They can also lead to a real increase in performance as class files are only loaded and parsed when needed (lazy loading) instead of...
Read MoreRecursive Closures in PHP 5.3
With the release of PHP 5.3.3 the other day and the announcement of the end of active support for the PHP 5.2 branch I thought it would be a good time to do a bit more experimenting with the new features in PHP 5.3. I would have done this sooner...
Read MoreCreating 50,000 unique values
A client at work wants to run a promotion where a customer will receive a card with a unique 8 digit code on it when they buy something. They will then be able to visit the website to find out if they are a winner or to get a chance...
Read MoreGoogle Custom Search Engine
I recently published my first class on PHPClasses and thought I would write a brief post about it here. The class allows a developer to send a query to a Google Site Search custom search engine, using the XML API. Google Site Search Google Site Search can be used to create a...
Read MoreInstalling Imagick under Apache on Windows
After a few weeks of experimenting on and off I've just managed to get the Imagick extension installed under Apache on Windows (my development environment). While discovering how to make it work was not at all simple the final process of getting all the pieces to...
Read MoreCreating Professional Documents the Easy Way
Have you ever tried to create a professional quality document programmatically from within PHP? It's a real pain and surprisingly tricky to do. There are limited options for PHP developers to produce files in the formats most often used in business. There are libraries for producing PDF files in PHP...
Read MoreA Quick Tip
I haven't written anything here for ages due to illness, work and life getting in the way. I've got a longer post brewing that I'll hopefully add in the next couple of days but for now here's a quick tip that I hope someone will find useful.I recently had a...
Read MoreCreating a Persistent Login Mechanism
I've been working on a project recently where one of the requirements was to have a persistent login mechanism. I'm not a great fan of this kind of feature simply because it significantly degrades the security of the application. As the only mechanism whereby data can be persisted across sessions...
Read MoreHandling Binary Data with PDO
I'm a great fan of the PDO database access library in PHP 5 and use it for all of my database work in PHP. I love its' clean, object oriented syntax and great support for prepared statements. I also like the fact that it supports most of the most common database...
Read MoreLocation Aware Webpages
I'm working on a site for a client at the moment who has around 35 store locations across Canada. The client was keen to have a 'your local store' feature on the home page where the store closest to the visitors location was featured. I thought I'd write briefly about...
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