While building web applications, it’s often important to keep an eye on the other services running on your server. Having access to the current status of public servers can empower your applications to make decisions and respond to problems automatically. Acknowledging a service is offline can also save endless support emails. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to keep track of your server status by scanning ports on your server with PHP.
Over on the AVNet Labs blog, Ekerete Akpan has posted a few results from his recent framework benchmarks to much controversy. His tests covered a few major PHP frameworks, such as CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Zend Framework, along with baseline results for serving static HTML and procedural PHP versions of the same page. He also covered [...]
It’s not easy being a web developer – in addition to a server-side language, we also have to learn a markup language, yet another (client-side) language and a presentation system. As a result, we tend to focus on what we’re closest to – the business logic – and neglect the front-end. But you don’t have [...]
After I recently upgraded to Zend Studio for Eclipse, I noticed one troubling feature of my setup – I couldn’t debug applications with “pretty urls”. Zend Studio for Eclipse has a great debugging platform setup, even with a dedicated IDE layout for debugging, and the Zend Studio Debugger backend on the server is quite powerful [...]
For anyone who’s ever tried to fetch multiple resources over HTTP in PHP, the logic is trivial, but one key challenge is ever-present: latency delays. While web servers have perfectly good downstream links, latencies can increase script execution time tenfold just by downloading a few external URLs. But there’s a simple solution: parallel cURL operations. [...]
When it comes to making your site important, platforms trounce software hands down. Facebook learned this the easy way; today, the myriad of Facebook applications available make the social networking site a typical destination for a significant proportion of internet users. Indeed, many users now browse new content on their favourite sites via their respective [...]
FirePHP is a plugin for Firebug, the web development plugin for Firefox, that allows PHP scripts to talk to a Firebug panel. FirePHP installs alongside Firebug, and provides a simple PHP library to bridge the two. FirePHP provides a window of insight into your PHP applications, with a simple debugging interface that won’t interfere with [...]
So you’ve just built a fantastic processing routine for your application. You’ve checked and double checked the integrity of user input, and you’re doing some serious processing. There’s only one problem: it’s too slow. There’s a simple solution: forking your processing script, and running the code as a background process asynchronously. It can email your [...]
Scheduled tasks are a fairly common feature in modern web applications. From cleaning out caches every 24 hours to checking subscription periods and even generating reports, more web applications live by the clock than ever before. But how do we schedule the execution of a PHP script on the server side? The answer, for Linux-based [...]
WordPress Comment Styling Round Up
One question I hear people asking a lot is how to style the comment section in WordPress. I didn’t have time to go in depth in my tutorial Designing and Coding a WordPress Theme from Scratch but here are a few links from my del.icio.us to some blogs that break it down in far more [...]