TermKit is graphical replacement for the old Unix terminal developed by Steven Wittens. It is based on the WebKit HTML rendering engine used in Safari and Chrome. The only ‘problem’ with TermKit is that you need a Mac with OS X to use it. Since we are Linux users we wanted to at least give it a try and found that you can test it using Chrome. In this post I cleaned up the instructions for testing TermKit on a machine with Ubuntu.
Continue reading “Playing with TermKit in Linux with Chrome” »
It often happens that you are trying to debug a PHP script running from command line or a part of your code and the script mysteriously dies. Depending on your server configuration (or command line) errors may be being silently being hidden. In those cases I recommend you add the following lines to your code to guarantee that all errors, notices, etc will be printed.
// set error reporting para que reporte TODO
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set(‘display_errors’, ‘On’);
// The rest of your code …
This post is really for reference since most PHP developers already know this …
We do a lot of development in PHP here at Easytech. Many times you need to test a bit of PHP code. If you played around with python you surely used the python shell. Fortunately the people at Facebook have created a similar shell for PHP (ironically written in python!). You can find it here: http://www.phpsh.org/. From there you can access the GIT repository or download a tgz or zip file.
Currently I couldn’t find a DEB package for Ubuntu. If you want to install it just follow the following steps (you need python installed)
thats it! To test some PHP weirdness…
Very often when I review other peoples PHP code I come across an old problem: generating a list of comma separated values from a list of things. This happens often when you want to, say, write an SQL query with a WHERE field IN (a,b,c,…,x) and you have an array with a, b, etc.
Another example is when you want to create an include path by concatenating a list of directories with the PATH_SEPARATOR. Yet another example is when you want to build a path concatenating them with the DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.
The usual code to accomplish looks something like this:
If you are developing a module for Drupal you might need to use tabs to simplify a bit a screen which has too much functionality. Typically a settings page that might need too many options to comfortably fit on a single screen. Since I had to search and experiment a bit to find out how to do it I decided to write a short post with my findings. In this article I assume you have a basic understanding on writing Drupal modules.
Drupal has a sophisticated module system that allows developers to extend the CMSs functionality very easily. Each module “hooks” into Drupal by implementing hook functions. On way to use this feature is to hook different URLs to module functions. Essentially the developer in his module declares an array of url paths and what function should be called when that path is requested. This small post will show you how you can determine which module handles a specific URL. This can be quite useful for debugging and/or browsing other peoples source code to learn how to do something.
Every module in Drupal that hooks to a URL path needs to implement the hook_menu function. This hook basically tells Drupal what paths will be handled by this module. This information is read when the module is enabled and stored in a database table. In Drupal 6 this information is cached so if you modify the array returned by the hook_menu function you need to clear the cache. To determine what module is handling what path you simply need to query the menu_router table. A simple query to do this is:
Continue reading “Drupal Tip – How to determine what module handles a given path” »
Today I needed to generate source code documentation for a webservice APIs we are in coding. One of the guys in the office suggested I take a look at Zend_Reflection. It turns out its quite simple to write PHP code to parse source files and extract the documentation from them. I took a little time to write this sample program.
This program is quite simple: it has a single class called TestClass with one method: addIntegers(). Below this class I wrote a little code which parses the file and then outputs the information. You can use this and a templating system to generate doc. I used it to write the documentation so that we can easily add it to our Wiki.
The script I wrote parses the documentation style used in Zend Framework. Here’s a sample class:
/**
* This is a sample test class.
*
* This class has only one method: addIntegers() which adds
* two integers. Its a sample class for our test.
*
*/
class TestClass
{
/**
* This method adds two integers.
*
* This method adds the two given integers and returns
* its sum. If only one integer is given it sums zero.
*
* @param int $number1 The first integer
* @param int $number2 The second integer
* @return int The sum of $number1 and $number2.
*
*/
public function addIntegers( $number1, $number2 = 0 ) {
return $number1 + $number2;
}
}
Read the rest of the post to see how to easily parse this code…
Continue reading “Using Zend_Reflection to generate API docs” »
When developing multi-organization web applications it is of utmost importance that data from one organization is not visible to the other. There are several software aproaches for this. Usually this can be solved by having an organization ID and whenever a query is made a ‘where’ clause is added to filter by organization. Although this approach works fine it is up to developers to always filter by org_id but its certainly error prone.
To solve this problem there are other approaches. One is that each organization gets a copy of the database and a single database user to log to this database. When the user logs in the application uses the URL to determine the organization (say: http://organization.domain.com/login). With the organization name extracted from the URL, the aplication determines which database instance, database user and password to use for the application to use. This obviously solves the problem since, by definition, there is no way data from the two organizations can mix: they live in different databases alltogether.
Continue reading “Filtering table data by user in PostgreSQL” »
In the Oracle world, a lot of the code of an application is stored in procedures inside the database. This gives the best possible performance since the data never leaves the database avoiding data to be sent to and from the client. Code in stored procedures in Oracle is written using the PL/SQL language.
On the other hand, writing web applications is best done in scripting languages like PHP or Python. In addition, it is always recommended to use some type of framework. In PHP you can use CakePHP, Symfony, Codeigniter or, the one we are currently using: Zend Framework.
Calling PL/SQL code from PHP can be tricky sometimes, specially when the PL/SQL procedure has input and output parameters. In this posting I will show you how to call a procedure from the PHP using Zend Framework. I will assume you have some experience using Zend Framework, specially the Database module (Zend_db).
Lets start by creating in the database a simple PL/SQL procedure. Log into sqlplus or sqldeveloper and create the following package and package body:
CREATE OR REPLACE
package body test_pk AS
/* Return a greeting message. */
procedure say_hello(
name IN VARCHAR2,
greeting OUT NOCOPY VARCHAR2)
IS
lResult VARCHAR2(40) := ”;
begin
lResult := ‘Hello, ‘ || name;
greeting := lResult;
end;
end test_pk;
This code will create a procedure say_hello which receives two parameters: as input, name and an output variable, greeting. The procedure will write in the out parameter ‘Greeting, XXXXX‘ where XXXXX will be replaced by the name input parameter.
Now lets see how we can call the PL/SQL code from PHP. Take a look at the following code:
// SQL which will call the PL/SQL code.
$sql = ‘begin test_pk.say_hello(:p1, :p2); end;’;
// we create a statement with the DB connection
// and the SQL code.
$statement = new Zend_Db_Statement_Oracle( $db, $sql );
// create output variable. Reserve enough space for answer
$greeting = sprintf( "%20s", ” );
// write params (notice the ‘&’!)
$params = array(
‘p1′=> ‘Cesar’,
‘p2′=> &$greeting
);
// execute the PL/SQL code
$statement->execute( $params );
// display results
var_dump( $params );
To execute the code you need a database connection called $db. When you run this PHP code you will get:
array(2) {
["p1"]=>
string(5) "Cesar"
["p2"]=>
&string(12) "Hello, Cesar"
}
It is important to note a couple of things:
Hope this helps someone!
Written by Cesar Miquel
Many times you will need to quickly executa a query in PostgreSQL and dump
the results to comma delimited value (CSV) file. In this post I’ll show you
a quick way to do it with the psql command in PostgreSQL.
Just copy the following to a file called dump2csv.sql
– query
SELECT ..
To dump the result of the query to a file do:
$ psql -h -U -d -W -f dump2csv.sql
the result of your query will be stored in /tmp/result.csv.
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