Posts tagged PHP
An Argument for PHP
May 11th
Currently, over on Slashdot, there is an article on forthcoming features in PHP version 6. And, like most PHP articles, the comments section is flooded with jackasses arguing that PHP sucks as a language. I get frustrated by the entire “PHP sucks” campaign, largely because it’s like the HTML e-mail argument – mostly driven by the fact that it’s stylish to hate them – but I’m going to go further. I argue than everyone posting about how PHP is a bad language as a whole is an idiot. Every single one. Each is a foolish, arrogant, nerd sheep who can’t think for themselves. Update 5/14/08 20:39 UTC: Okay, this piece was linked by several sources, and the truth is, I had just read some George Carlin, so I was probably more aggressive than I intended to be. What I really mean is that people posting about how PHP is a bad language as a whole without citing any reasons are generally following a trend, trying to look cool, or too narrow-minded to be considered credible. And the responses I’ve seen across the net have, thus far, supported this argument.
Why? Let’s argue for a second that everything people say about PHP is true, as many of the complaints are sound.
It’s true the primary namespace has way too many functions – over three thousand, I’m told. It’s true that the function names are inconsistent, some have underscores, some don’t. It’s true that the function names are often verbose. It’s true that OOP was weak until recently, it’s true that register_globals was a security nightmare. All those things are potential issues, and all languages have them. As the “real programmers” who write Perl would never admit, reading other people’s terse Perl is often a f’ing disaster, even for seasoned Perl-ites. And when using compiled ASP.net – for best performance, natch – you must update your entire site (well, all the concerned ASPX pages and DLLs) to make elementary changes.
That said, PHP is easy. Really easy. And it’s a trivial task to get a website up and running fairly quickly. And you can serve enormous amounts of traffic as proven not only by OSNews (who have been dugg and Slashdotted concurrently), but by Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, and many, many others. And why are there so many open source PHP frameworks, apps, CMSes, etc? Because PHP is installable virtually everywhere, it’s very portable, and it’s really simple to hack up. Try installing something dependent on mod_perl (e.g. Slash or Scoop) and get back to me on the ease of the install.
The fact is, even if everyone’s fears about writing insecure code is true, the ability to make mistakes does not mean everyone does, and those who would forsake “the right tool for the job at hand” shouldn’t be trusted even to water your plants, because they are obviously nitwits. If you can’t concede that PHP can be the right tool some of the time for some situations, you shouldn’t be trusted to code or make adult decisions. No, I argue that the reason they dislike PHP is because many start with PHP and thus, admitting to liking it would make them appear to be a “noob.” It’s because they must appear to be seasoned pros. It’s the bragging rights on the 21st century.
Nobody has ever claimed PHP is the solution to everything, but it is a remarkably easy tool for scripting dynamically generated HTML. And, in my opinion and experience, it does so better than Perl, better than Ruby, and a hell of a lot better than both ASP.net and JSP.
How To REALLY Survive Digg on a Shared Host
Jan 2nd
After reading a ridiculous post on “surviving the Digg effect on a shared host,” (and then laughing ridiculously at it), I decided to write a real tutorial on real-live ways not only to survive the Digg effect, but also a simple but powerful way to improve your site’s performance. Read more within.
Integers on the Intertubes
Dec 12th
Some time ago, I wrote an application for my company. Like most weblets I’ve written, this used PHP and either MySQL or MSSQL for the backend. This particular application logged all phone calls. As part of the record, it would record the caller’s account number, which is a 5 or 6 digit integer.
So, I got a phone call from the director of our customer contact department this week. He was concerned about the reports. He made a decision last week that when a call came in that was a lead – in other words, a non-customer, that his people would fill the phone number from the caller ID into the account number field. But when he ran his export reports, he found that hisn techs had entered this phone number for ALL of the calls: 429-496-7295. That’s weird, he said. So he called me and asked why that was. I checked all the calls and most were from one woman, so my first instinct was “Check if her browser has autocomplete turned on”. But he swore that he tried it too and gotten the same result.
I checked the database and sure enough, it was right there: 429-496-7295, in all of the fields. So I went back to the code. In short, I took the input from the form, and declared it like this:
$accountnum = (int) $_POST['accountnum'];
Pretty straightforward: explicitly declare the type. So, I started my debugging by attempting to manually enter the data into the database. Sure enough: the account key field showed this: 4294967295.
So, I went back to the PHP and started by dumping out the raw SQL query:
INSERT INTO calls ('','x','x','x','4294967295','x','x');
What? So the database automatically converts it to this weird phone number and PHP does too? Suddenly it occured to me. One of the benefits of 64-bit computing is the ability to address more memory. There are limits to what can be done in 32-bit computing, and one is that integers have a limit! In this case, a database field called “integer” is limited to numbers between -2,147,483,648 and +2,147,483,647. It just so happens that the number is the same length as a US phone number – 10 digits. Changing the db field to “BIGINT” allowed me to manually run the SQL query and it worked. But the app still didn’t.
PHP’s int() and (int) $var syntaxes both conform to the integer limit. So I devised a work around:
$ac = $_POST['accountnum']; if(!is_numeric($ac) { $ac = (int) $ac; }
It’s not gorgeous, but it will more than suffice for an internal app. We web programmers don’t usually have to deal with big integers, so it’s totally possible that web developers would never have had occasion to handle a situation like this. Here’s looking forward to native 64-bit for our next server, though.
PHP vs. ASP.NET
Apr 27th
We have a new web-based client portal application we are going to use for my company extranet. However, because it was originally designed to be a hosted application, there are several variables involved in all areas that don’t apply to us, since we host it ourselves.
When using said portal, every URL looks something like:
domain.com/login.aspx?QS=jasbndfiaubnfoaeuifwoeifbwfe
The only difference is that the “QS” GET variable is even longer. I made the request of our developers to get rid of this query string for the login page, and the login page only. This is what that code looks like in PHP, inserted at line 1.
if(!$_GET['QS']) { $_GET['QS'] = 'jasbndfiaubnfoaeuifwoeifbwfe'; }
That’s it. One line of code. In ASP.net, this cost me 3 hours of developer time. THREE hours.
Then I asked our old developers to make a change to their code. It was doing a check in login if they are customers from the new app or the old one. If they are old, it processes the login. If it’they are new, it gives them an error message. So I said, instead of giving them the error, let’s redirect them to /new-directory/login.aspx?email=[base64_encoded email]&password=[base64_encoded password].
This is that code in PHP:
if($is_new) { header("Location: /newdirectory/login.aspx?email=" .base64_encode(stripslashes($_POST['email'])) . "&password=" .base64_encode(stripslashes($_POST['password']))); } else { //process login }
This cost me 2 hours at $165. Am I getting taken for a ride? I keep telling them – this would take 30 seconds in PHP. And they tell me, yes but ASP.net doesn’t work that way, and we need to change the web.config, and we need to recompile the entire site, etc, etc. If it were just one vendor, I’d be more suspicious, but two separate, unrelated developers are giving me crazy quotes like this.
I hear people bitch about PHP online ad nauseum. Every time I see real code, it appears PHP is FAR faster and far more friendly when it comes to customization.
PHP Lesson 1: Pretty URLs!
Sep 28th
I am going to start a new practice here. Every now and again I’m going to post some PHP code with some explanation. Today, I’m going to write about what I’ve been calling “pretty URLs” and how to create and manage them in PHP.
PHP includes a variable in the superglobal scope $_SERVER called “PATH_INFO.” PATH_INFO includes information entered after the name of the requested script.
Let’s use firsttube.com as an example. The URL of a story is constructed as such:
http://firsttube.com/read.php/[id]/[url_friendly_title].html
The story is also accessible as /read.php?id=[id]
So how do we construct this so-called “pretty URL?” Using PATH_INFO. Read on for details.
More >
Linky see, linky do.
Sep 14th
Posted by Adam S in [...]
Comments
More links assembled from the annals of the browser history of AS.
Goodbye Microsoft, Pete has now left the building
A fellow Floridian, an Microsoft insider, describes why he finally ditched Microsoft and Windows for Apple and Ruby-on-Rails. For the record, I still think Rails is a fad. It’s very cool, but the catch is, ya gotta learn Ruby to use it. A lot of these frameworks are very powerful and great RAD tools, but I’m sticking with PHP5 for now.
Do NOT watch this
*Suriously*. It’ll make you dizzy, and you’ll feel a hollowness in your stomach. I don’t usually get queezy, this is the worst video I’ve seen in ages. Yikes.
“We Have Not Forgotten, Mr. President.”
Keith Olberman tears President Bush a new arse.
Asshat flies out of truck
Truck + Dunes + Guy being douche-bag = ?
Why Vista will be the end of Microsoft
Of course, we all know it won’t be. On the contrary, it will be a success. But I agree, it will certainly be the first chipping of the wall. Start the timer. Microsoft’s dominance will be majorly altered in the next decade.