PHP

I was at a meeting of the Manchester Web Performance Group the other day where Tom Taylor gave a talk about some of the performance testing tool he uses at Laterooms.com. He used a ruby script to set up some preferences in Firefox which then ran Selenium to open some web pages and test them with YSlow. The results of the YSlow inspection are then sent to a Show Slow server where the results can be graphed over time. I realise that I've just mentioned a whole stack of technologies there, so let me pick out the important ones:

Selenium is a remote control agent for web browsers, although it is most stable in Firefox. I have written about this tool before but it allows us to automate interaction with a website via a series of selenium scripts. These scripts can be exported into different code formats, including PHP.

I recently saw an implementation of a Twitter wall that used node.js to run searches on Twitter and post the results on a webpage. I had been wanting to create something using ReactPHP so I thought this was a good opportunity to have a go. ReactPHP, if you haven't heard of it, is an event-driven, non-blocking I/O that is essentially the PHP equivalent of node.js. The major difference is that ReactPHP is written in pure PHP with no extra components, whereas node.js is a collection of different programs, interfaces and languages. As a first attempt I wanted to create something simple so it needed to use simple JavaScript to load in the latest tweets for a given hashtag from a ReactPHP server. I have to warn that this is a simplistic implementation of ReactPHP, but it shows the basics of how to get started.

Checking Syntax Errors In PHP And JavaScript Using Phing

Running a simple syntax check over your files is a good way to save time. This can be when testing code but best practice is to not to even commit code that contains syntax errors.

You can syntax check a single file using the -l (lowercase L) flag with the PHP executable like this.

$ php -l file.php

Unfortunately this can only check one file at a time so I set about trying to find a good way of checking a whole project at once. There are a couple of scripts available on the internet, but I set about creating my own solution using the phplint task in Phing. This means that I can just create a fileset and feed this into the phplint task without having to rewrite the whole thing if I wanted to include (or exclude) a particular directory or file.

When posting happy birthday messages to developers over social media I like to write it in code, just to be geeky. The following code will print the happy birthday song using PHP.

<?php
$string = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < 4; $i++) {
    $string .= "Happy birthday ";
    if ($i != 2) {
        $string .= "to you!\n";
    } else {
        $string .= "dear %s!\n";
    }
}
print sprintf($string, 'name');

This can be easily personalised by just changing the second parameter in the sprintf() function.

The annual PHPNW conference gets better every year, and this year was no exception. I have been going to the PHPNW conference since their inception in 2008 and this year I was lucky enough to be involved in some of the pre-conference organising and helping out over the event.

When the call for papers ended in June I spent a weekend reading abstracts and bios of speakers to try and reduce the 169 talk submissions to around 32 sessions. I then sat down with Jeremy Coates, Rick Ogden and Jenny Wong to select which talks would be included in the final selection. Once the sessions were complete I sat down and started working on a blog schedule and wrote a few blog posts to garner attention.

Selenium is an application that allows automated testing of websites through a browser and consists of a number of different components. It allows the creation of browser tests that perform certain actions, which can then be run again at a later date. Three components are required to allow Selenium to run tests through PHP. These are as follows:

Creating a function to validate UK postcodes would seem like a simple task, but there is a little more to it than checking the number of characters. In fact there are several different variants of UK postal codes, especially if you include BFPO and overseas addresses. The official postcode specification details the structure of the postcode, and there is also a list of BFPO numbers from mod.uk.

I quite often find myself with the need to pull the data from a CSV file into a system. This might be to fill out essential data like postcodes or to update a site with new content. What system I happen to be using dictates how I pull in the CSV file, but writing a quick parser is quite easy in PHP via the use of the fgetcsv() function.

Unfortunately, when using this function it is quite easy to miss something quite important and creates a quite useless piece of code. Take the following example. It appears to be fine at first glance, but the output of the code is always to run once and stop.

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.