Design By Tim

Over on Developer Cast they have a recent post about Good and Bad PHP code. It may just be me - but it seems everyone has a theory on this subject - and they all say the same thing:

• structure
• consistency
• portability
• secure

This in reality should be what surrounds every language so I don’t see why PHP is so special - unless you think about how many “non” programmers use it - and then add to that all the clueless developers building web apps. I know this sounds harsh - and I by no means write the world’s best code - but again I don’t really tout to either. My English is horrid enough let alone my dev skills - I can say one thing that I do have that seems to trump the bad is experience. I know what works and doesn’t by doing - and if the one thing I’ve learned is not to release something till I’ve pounded it and then given it away to be pounded on…

That tackles the security - but what about structure  - heh that’s a joke considering that PHP isn’t really consistent itself. In reality - the 3 items listed could be just broken into structure and security. Since structure means the developer was consistent and generally has some sense of portability. In reality PHP is portable in and of itself - granted it’s definitely no virtual machine (and thank god). But simple steps can be take to abstract the code and if the programmer understands structure then portability should be part of this…

All this to say that in my opinion any breakdown in these areas inevitability  leave the project doomed.

Vincent de Lau wrote a great article on HOW-TO Import the MaxMind GeoIP Free Country CSV file into MySQL and save diskspace.

The process consists of a few steps.

• Step 0 is to download the CSV file from the MaxMind website.
• Step 1 is to make a MySQL database and set up some tables.
• Step 2 is to import the CSV file into MySQL
• Step 3 is to optimize the data
• Step 4 is our final clean-up step

Now for those who want to do this the non CSV way - follow every step but grab the CSV2SQL converter. After running the CSV file from MaxMind through this app you will then have all the sql code you could ever want (I think when I went through the steps it was somewhere around 64k queries).

To be prepared for this exercise make sure you visit the MaxMind website and get yourself a copy of the MaxMind GeoIP free country CSV. Save it in a location where you can find it again and unzip. http://www.maxmind.com/app/geoip_country

I’ve been asked on several occasions to spill the beans on my development environment. Sadly, it’s probably not the easiest setup - but it works for my stubborn mind.

• I use PHP Eclipse, ScITE, and PsPad for editing (I’m sorry Dreamweaver but you have sadly lost the battle)
• I love CuteFTP (it’s the cuteness obviously)
• XAMPP on Vista (don’t get me started - this will have to be another post)
• Subversion - because everyone isn’t perfect
• Firefox - if you need the link… come on
• And a horde of other products and since I’m not being sponsored by any of them then you’re on your own.

As you can probably tell by the majority of my posts I primarily develop in PHP (and proudly support Code Igniter). PHP has many of features built-in, along with often-cited criticism, and one I happen to agree with, is the inconsistent naming of functions. Thankfully, PHP.net has excellent documentation, including many user-contributed notes, examples and other comments. The key is to quickly access this documentation, which I find is invaluable to my productivity.

One tool that helps me is the DevBoi Firefox extension. Once installed, you will also want to install the PHP addon package. You can then access DevBoi either from the Tools menu, or press Ctrl+F9 (Linux/Windows). This will load DevBoi in the sidebar of the browser, and if the PHP package isn’t already selected, do so from the dropdown list. This will present you with an exhaustive, alphabetically sorted list of all the PHP functions. Double click on one to bring up that function’s documentation in the current browser tab window. Some hints: Ctrl+Click on the function will open it in a new tab, pressing any character will bring up the list of function names at that point in the list (b => base64_decode()). There are probably some other tricks that I’m missing—read the documentation. Bonus: Along with quick access to the PHP function reference, DevBoi is bundled with HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.1, Javascript 1.3 and DOM 2. Other addon packages include Ruby on Rails, XUL and there are more on the way.

Another great tip for quickly accessing the PHP documentation is to create a Firefox Quick Search bookmark and assign it to a keyword. The one I set-up is utter simplicity:

Name:        PHP

Location:    http://www.php.net/%s

Keyword:     php

Description: Search PHP.net

If you prefer something printed and handy on your desk, have a look at I Love Jack Daniel’s PHP Cheat Sheet, available in both PNG and PDF formats. There are a number other versions of this idea available around the Web.

While looking around for usage and performance examples of application configuration should come from a database or file system. I found an interesting example between the pros and cons of each. So whipped out the trusty IDE (PHP Eclipse) and whipped up this simple addition to the core of CI.

Since my code view seems to be crapping out at the moment I will link to the amazing code on the official wiki.