PHP

Phing is an awesome tool for automating things and I use it more and more for automating all kinds of different tasks. One of the tasks that I don't tend to do all that much is setting up a new local virtual host for Apache on my development machines. I know how to do it, but there is always something I forget to do, or a convention that I don't follow which means that I have to repeat myself at a later date to fix something I have missed.

So to make my life a little easier I decided to create a Phing build file to automatically create a virtual host and the everything associated with it in one go. Essentially, I would need to do the following tasks:

To make things a bit quicker when using Phing on Windows use the following registry entry to create a right click option that integrates with Phing.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Phing]
@="Phing It!"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Phing\command]
@="cmd.exe /K phing -f \"%1\""

Save the above text into a file with a .reg file extension and run it by double clicking on it (you can also right click and select Merge). You will get a message asking if you want to add information to the registry, click "Yes" to allow the entry.

DocBlox is the new defacto PHP class documentation generator. It was developed as an alternative to PHPDocumentor, but it looks as though it will replace it and become the new PHPDocumentor2. As a result I thought I would put together a quick tutorial on getting started.

This post assumes that you know what PHPDoc comments are and that you have a project that you want to generate API documentation for. To get started on PHPDoc take a look at the Wikipedia page on PHPDoc.

Whereas PHPDocumentor would scan and generate all of the code in one go, DocBlox will scan the source code and generate a series of XML files based on the code it finds. It will then use these files to generate the API documentation in a number of different formats, although HTML is probably the most common.

I'm always writing bits of script to test things out and I thought that I would start making a record of them in case I need them in the future. This is a little script that will loop through the contents of a text file and validate that a bunch of 301 redirects point to the place they are meant to point to. This script assumes that the redirects are already in place on the server, but this is what I was testing. Here the format of the redirects text file.

http://www.exmaple.com/old_page http://www.exmaple.com/new_page 
http://www.exmaple.com/nother_old_page http://www.exmaple.com/another_new_page 

The script below loads in this file and loops through it using the PHP function get_headers() to test that the first URL redirects to the second. If any problems are found then the line number and the problem is reported on.

The other day I was approached by a friend (Julie Cheung) and asked if I could create some code that would display a list of last played tracks from last.fm. Julie isn't a PHP developer and so the code I gave her had to be easily understandable so that she could edit it herself if needed. The following code is what I came up with.

Phing allows the running of SSH commands on servers and the copying of files to servers via SCP. Before you can use SSH and SCP commands in Phing you need to install the PECL extension SSH2. The SSH2 PECL extension requires the libssh2 package, so you need to install that before you can get started. The following install instructions are based on a Linux environment.

Download the libssh2 package from www.libssh2.org and install it by using the following commands. Your package version may vary.

sudo tar -zxvf libssh2-1.3.0.tar.gz
cd libssh2-1.3.0
./configure
make
sudo make install

You'll need the sudo on the last command to allow the make installer access to certain system directories.

Next, you need to install the SSH2 PECL extension, but because it's currently in a beta state you will need to give the full path to the library version along with the normal install command.

The 7^th, 8^th and 9^th of October saw the fourth PHPNW conference in Manchester, and I was lucky enough to be part of the team helping out on the day. I spent the day before the conference driving speakers from the airport to the Mercure (formerly Ramada) hotel in Manchester Piccadilly, and only partially getting lost in the convoluted mess of one way streets in the city centre.

In any list of documents in a system it is a good idea to add some thumbnails of the document so that your users can get a quick overview of what a document looks like before downloading it. This is a good alternative to just displaying an icon of the document type.

Creating Word document icons is very simple thanks to a service called LiveDocx. LiveDocx was created as a web service to allow the easy creation of most document formats from a simple template. However, it is possible to send a normal Word document as the template file and get an image of the file in return.

The best way to use LiveDocx with PHP is to use the LiveDocx class contained within Zend Framework. You can use this outside of a Zend Framework application by including the file Zend/Service/LiveDocx/MailMerge.php at the top of your script.

To desaturate an image means to remove all non-greyscale colours from it, essentially creating a black and white version. To do this you can use the function imagecopymergegray(), which is part of the GD image library. This function is a little difficult to figure out, but what is does is sample one image into another and optionally changing the amount of colours that are kept during the sampling process. The function can be made to sample just a section of the image, or the whole thing. The parameters of the function are as follows.

Note: This article assumes that you have a working Apache/PHP environment running with the latest major version of Netbeans (current 7) installed.

Xdebug is a brilliant PHP extension that provides both debugging and profiling tools. From a basic install it will vastly improve the quality of the error messages but it can also be made to interactively debug scripts using a number of different IDE's. It can also be used as a code profiling tool, but I won't be going into that in this post as that is a little beyond the scope of what I will be talking about.

Installation

If you are using XAMMP to host your Apache/PHP environment then you can skip the following step. Xdebug is actually bundled with XAMMP so you just need to enable it by going into your php.ini file and uncommenting the options you need.