Author Name: Tony Marston
Company: TonyMarston.net

Author Bio:
I have been a software engineer, both designing and developing, since 1977. I have worked with a variety of 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation languages on a mixture of mainframes, mini- and micro-computers. I have worked with flat files, indexed files, hierarchical databases, network databases and relational databases. The user interfaces have included punched card, paper tape, teletype, block mode, CHUI, GUI and web. I have written code which has been procedural, model-driven, event-driven, component-based and object oriented. I have built software using the 1-tier, 2-tier, 3-tier and Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectures. After working with COBOL for 16 years I switched to UNIFACE in 1993, starting with version 5, then progressing through version 6 to version 7. In the middle of 2002 I decided to teach myself to develop web applications using PHP and MySQL.

Tutorials written by Tony Marston:

A Class for Validating and Formatting Dates
This tutorial is intended for developers who want to take a user-supplied date and format it so that it can be added to the database, and then to take a date from the database and format for display to the user.
Saturday, 16th April 2005

A Flexible Method of Storing Control Data
Where an application requires certain values at runtime, and where these values may be changed at irregular intervals, it is common practice to hold these on a database record rather than having them hard-coded into any program.
Tuesday, 29th August 2006

A Reversible Encryption Routine for PHP
This tutorial is intended for those PHP developers who want a password encryption routine that is reversible - i.e. the encrypted password can be decrypted back into plain text. The reason for wanting such a routine could be that your web hosting service does not include an acceptable encryption module in his PHP build, or perhaps you want a routine that allows a certain amount of customisation that makes it totally different from the encryption routines used by others.
Friday, 15th April 2005

Client Clones and Server Sessions
The session handling functions in PHP are designed to save state between different requests from the same client. This works well if the client device is accessing the application via a single browser window, but what happens if the user decides to open up several browser windows and attempts to access the same application through multiple windows at the same time?
Friday, 6th May 2005

Creating a PostgreSQL and MySQL driver
The software that I write is not intended for just one customer who is locked into a single RDBMS. Instead it can be used by virtually any customer using the RDBMS of their choice. How is this possible?
Tuesday, 20th September 2005

Customizing the PHP Error Handler
This tutorial is intended for the novice or intermediate PHP programmer. Basic knowledge of creating and using functions is assumed.One of the last areas that developers seem to deal with in their code is error handling.
Saturday, 9th April 2005

How to Handle a Many-to-Many Relationship with PHP and MySQL
This tutorial is intended for those developers who come across the situation where they need to cater for what is known as a 'many-to-many' relationship. It will explain how to generate the database tables to deal with such a relationship, and how to design HTML forms to display and update the contents of these tables.
Wednesday, 6th April 2005

Internationalisation and my PHP Development Infrastructure
The process of internationalisation can be as simple as replacing a string of text in one language with a string of text in another language, or it can be much more complicated involving the use of different character sets, as explained in Notes on Internationalization. In the interests of simplicity I shall limit myself to the straightforward replacement of text as this is "good enough" in most circumstances I shall encounter.
Sunday, 17th July 2005

Performing Client-Side XSL Transformations
It is a feature of my software that I produce HTML output from XML documents with server-side XSL transformations. This means that as well as producing the XML document I transform it into HTML on the server before I send the result to the client.
Monday, 12th December 2005

Reusable XSL Stylesheets and Templates
When producing software it is not considered good practice to write the same code over and over again. Not only is this inefficient when writing the code in the first place, it is also inefficient when the time comes to make changes as the same change has to be made to every copy of that code.
Wednesday, 20th April 2005

Saving PHP Session Data to a Database
As you should be aware the HTTP protocol, as used for serving web pages, is completely stateless. This means that after the server has received a request, processed it and sent a response, the process which dealt with that request dies. Anything that the process had in its memory therefore dies with it, so when a subsequent request is received from the same client it is unable to refer to its memory about anything that happened previously.
Monday, 11th July 2005

Stored Procedures are EVIL
A lot of developers are taught to use database stored procedures, triggers and database constraints at every possible opportunity, and they cannot understand why an old dinosaur like me should choose to take an opposite view. The reason can be summed up quite simply...
Thursday, 7th September 2006

The Singleton Design Pattern for PHP
In software engineering, a design pattern is a general solution to a common problem in software design. A design pattern isn't a finished design that can be transformed directly into code, it is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations.
Friday, 29th July 2005

Using PHP 4s DOM XML Functions to Create XML Files from SQL Data
This tutorial is intended for developers who wish to extract data from a database and insert it into XML files so that it can be processed in some way, usually by transforming it into HTML using an XSL file.
Monday, 4th April 2005

Using PHP 5s XSL Extension to Perform XSL Transformations
This tutorial is for developers who wish to know how to generate HTML documents using a combination of XML data and XSL stylesheets. It also includes examples of how to use XSL parameters and included stylesheets.
Tuesday, 19th April 2005

Using PHP Objects to Access Your Database Tables (Part 1)
This tutorial is intended for developers who have already written code to get data in and out of a MySQL database, but who wish to discover if there are any benefits of adopting an Object Oriented approach. This tutorial will show you how to create an abstract class which can communicate with any database table, and then how to create subclasses containing the implementation details for each individual table within your application.
Tuesday, 5th April 2005

Using PHP Objects to Access Your Database Tables (Part 2)
This is a follow-up to Using PHP Objects to access your Database Tables (Part 1) in which I showed you how to create a base class to contain all the standard code to access any database table, how to create extensions to this class for each individual table, and how to access these classes from within your PHP scripts.
Thursday, 7th April 2005

What is Object Oriented Programming (OOP)?
Quite often I see a question in a newsgroup or forum along the lines of: What is this thing called 'OOP'? What is so special about it? Why should I use it? How do I use it?. The person asking this type of question usually has experience of non-OO programming and wants to know the benefits of making the switch.
Tuesday, 30th January 2007

Working with a Stateless Protocol
Before switching to web development and the stateless HTTP protocol I spent several decades developing client-server systems which were statefull. These came in several flavours...
Sunday, 13th August 2006