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2012年3月2日星期五

Site News: Popular Posts for the Week of 03.02.2012

Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:

Project: phpVirtualBox - VirtualBox Management Tool

For those fans of virtualization (and running VMs for development) you're not stranger to VirtualBox. Over on the Google Code site, there's a project that wants to make it easier to work with your VirtualBox instances via a PHP-driven interface.

An open source, AJAX implementation of the VirtualBox user interface written in PHP. As a modern web interface, it allows you to access and control remote VirtualBox instances. Much of its verbage and some of its code is based on the (inactive) vboxweb project. phpVirtualBox was designed to allow users to administer VirtualBox in a headless environment - mirroring the VirtualBox GUI through its web interface.

The tool isn't designed to be a management tool for a "hosting" type of environment, but rather to help you admin all of your VMs at once (no "ownership"). It uses the SOAP service (vboxwebsrv) that comes with VirtualBox servers to create a clean interface.

Bas De Nooijer's Blog: Benchmarking PHP Solr response data handling

On his blog Bas De Nooijer has put together some PHP Solr benchmarks around a few different ways to handle the response data.

Solr supports multiple output formats. Some are for general use (xml, json) and some are even language specific. If you're using PHP these are the most logical response writer formats: xml, json, phps (serialized php), php (php code to execute). On top of that PHP offers multiple ways to parse XML. I'm benchmarking these options to determine the most efficient decoding to implement in the next major version of Solarium, but the results should be useful for any PHP Solr implementation.

He includes a snippet of code he's using to generate the benchmarks, a PHPUnit test that pulls in two different json-based results and, for now, just runs a json_decode on it. You can see the results of his testing here, graphing out the different response handling methods and their time (in milliseconds) to parse the response. It's interesting to see that there's a direct relation to the size of the data set and how long it takes for the methods to execute.

The current code for his benchmarks is available over on github

2012年3月1日星期四

Site News: Blast from the Past - One Year Ago in PHP

Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:

PHPMaster.com: Working with Dates and Times in PHP and MySQL

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial by Sean Hudgston about working with dates and times via the PHP date functions and how they cooperate with dates/times from a MySQL database.

When working in any programming language, dealing with dates and time is often a trivial and simple task. That is, until time zones have to be supported. Fortunately, PHP has one of the most potent set of date/time tools that help you deal with all sorts of time-related issues: Unix timestamps, formatting dates for human consumption, displaying times with time zones, the difference between now and the second Tuesday of next month, etc. In this article I'll introduce you to the basics of PHP's time functions (time(), mktime(), and date()) and their object-oriented counterparts, and then take a look at MySQL dates and show you how to make them play nicely with PHP.

His examples include how to get the current Unix time, formatting dates/times, making timestamps and working with the more powerful DateTime objects. On the MySQL front, he shows the result of a normal date select, one using the "unix_timestamp" function and how to shift the result based on the user's timezone.

DZone.com: Running JavaScript inside PHP code

On DZone.com Giorgio Sironi has a new post about an interesting new PHP extension that lets you run javascript inside PHP - v8js (VERY alpha right now).

v8js is a new PHP extension able to run JavaScript code inside V8, Google's JavaScript interpreter that powers for example Chrome and NodeJS. This extension is highly alpha - and its API would probably change in the months ahead. Since documentation is lacking, I invite you to repeat the discovering process I follow in this post in case you find some differences in a new version of v8js.

He gives you the (PECL-based) commands to get the extension and it's needed dependencies installed and enabled. He uses PHP's own Reflection features to look at the extension and find its methods including: "executeString", "getPendingException" and "getExtensions".
To show it in action, he implements an old standby to test new languages - the FizzBuzz example - in Javascript, executed inside the PHP. He also includes a quick example of how to load in an external Javascript file and execute the results.