Technical stuff » PHP

PHP in the mobile ecosystem

Georgiana — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:38:04 +0000

Device detection

Mostly from the user agent.

—> http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/

—>>> ugly code, good docs

—> http://www.deviceatlas.com/

—>>> $99 / year for production

—> http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/

—>>> open-source list of mobile devices for easy detection

Don’t redirect to homepage, it’s not what the user wants.

Beware: the screen sizes vary heavily, don’t make assumptions about this.

Small demo code to show how easy it is in ZF-enabled apps to use a different layout, css and set of views.

Since ZF 1.11 one can use Zend_Http_UserAgent for easier browser detection + more info device-specific.

UI Considerations

- hover magic is unexpected for user

- HTML5, yay!

Other

jQTouch

API improvements & Security

- use versioning in the URL of the API to separate users who did not upgrade their apps

- use signed URLs ?x=1&signature=hash( secret, time limit, params)

- using https is difficult for the iPhone apps

Deploy as native apps

www.ipfaces.org : html on the server, supports php

www.phonegap.com

- not as good as the native apps

Download Curl library for CodeIgniter, ported to Kohana

Georgiana — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:14:56 +0000

I’ve ported the Curl library to Kohana, with kind permission of Alex Polski.

You can download it here: ported to Kohana.

The PHP code conventions I use

Georgiana — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:42:57 +0000


aProperties as $sProperty ) {
        if( 'price' === $sProperty ) {  // use === as often as possible; put the string first for speed reasons
            return( true );
        } // .. if
    }
    return( false );
} // END func hasPrices()

/*
 * echo tag
 */

define (CR, "\n");

echo 

	CR, 'Line1
',

	CR, 'Line2
',

	CR, 'Line3
'
;

/**************************************************************
 * Spacing convention
 **************************************************************/

// Code like this:

$sText = 'Time flies like an arrow.';
$sText .= ' Fruit flies like bananas.';

// Should be done in one statement instead of two:

$sText =
    'Time flies like an arrow.' .
    ' Fruit flies like bananas.'
;

?>

PHP on Hormones: Rasmus Lerdorf talk

Georgiana — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:26:09 +0000

Rasmus Lerdorf from Yahoo! talks at MySQL Conference & Expo 2007. Starts with the beginning of PHP and continues to more advances stuff.

Make sure you have the slides handy, too.

Spaghetti code, otherwise known as Drupal.

JavaScript for PHP developers

Georgiana — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:54:42 +0000

If you’re a PHP developer and you find it difficult to get used to all the insides of JavaScript, I think you need to take a look at PHP.JS. It’s a brilliant tool initially developed by Kevin van Zonneveld, and which aims to port most of the usual PHP functions into equivalent JavaScript ones.

There are two ways of using this excellent codebase:

grab all the available PHP.JS functions and use them as you need them
take each function you really need and put it into your JS codebase for the project

The advantage of the second method is that you don’t have code you don’t need included all over the place, but it also means you will search each time the codebase to discover the code you need. Meanwhile, the first solution seems appropriate for the ones in a hurry, you just try to use one function like you’re accustomed in PHP and it’s there already included, you’re developing fast and safe, with just a small performance issue you can always address later.

Let’s say you’ve using the long2ip and ip2long PHP functions for storing IPs as numbers, and have a strong preference for using them for performance reasons, as all your IPs are stored as numbers in the database. What if you need similar functionality in JavaScript? Well, just take the code you need and use it! It’s that simple