php

QueryPath 2.1 is adding support for writing files directly into URLs using Data URLs. What this means is that you can encode and embed images or other documents straight into your HTML or XML.

Here's a simple example from the QueryPath 2.1 unit tests:

<?php
$xml = '<?xml version="1.0"?><root><item/></root>';
qp($xml, 'item')->dataURL('secret', 'Hi!', 'text/plain');
?>

The above will generate an XML fragment that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  <item secret="data:text/plain;base64,SGkh"/>
</root>

The important part there is the attribute secret="data:text/plain;base64,SGkh. This attribute includes an embedded text document with the contents Hi!. What we've done is encode the data and injected it as a document inside of the XML.

Sure, that's novel... but what would we want to use that for? How about adding images directly into a document?

This article describes how to build PHP from source on Ubuntu. I am doing this because I need to build PHP with the embeded SAPI -- an option not available by default. For my purposes, I don't want this PHP to replace the existing PHP. Instead, I want it to be available alongside my normal PHP. So the goal is to place this version in /usr/local/php-opt.

I've been fairly silent for the last few months. A vacation, a business trip, and a huge job change have been the primary factors. There's also a big make-over going on with QueryPath right now. With a Summer of Code project promising to bring new features to QueryPath, and a new logo to give it a fresh look, I am scrambling to bring everything to fruition early next month.

But I haven't been totally silent. Here's a recent article I wrote for PHP Architect: Never Use $_GET Again.

jQuery is a JavaScript library for efficiently working with HTML and CSS. Its chainable and compact API has made it a popular choice for web developers seeking to quickly build rich web applications. But did you know there is a PHP jQuery library? QueryPath is a PHP implementation of jQuery's interface. It provides all of the DOM manipulation functions, a full CSS selector engine, and as much of jQuery's other features as is practically implemented server-side. But that's not all. This powerful library delivers many server-side features designed to make working with XML services simple, robust, and reliable.

A few weeks ago I did a webinar for PHP|Architect and the Tek-X conference. The webinar was recorded, and is now available as a video. You can watch the presentation on A Developer's Introduction to Drupal at their site.
Drupal Intro Webinar

The presentation is aimed at developers who are just getting started with Drupal and want to know how things work and where they can dive in.

Lots of thanks to Cal Evans and the PHP|Architect crew, all of whom were awesome to work with.

To do some prototyping, I wanted to load all 32k of our Drupal nodes into MongoDB. At first, the thought of doing this seemed daunting. Then I realized that with Drush I could use a very simple script to perform an entire migration.

The result: With a 14 line PHP script, I transferred all of the nodes (CCK, taxonomy, and all) without a glitch.

Read on for the full explanation.

2010 will be remembered as the year SQL died; the year relational databases were moved off of the front line; the year that developers discovered that they no longer had to force every single object into a tabular structure in order to persist the data.

2010 is the year of the document database. While momentum has been steadily building over the last seven years or so, there are now a wide variety of stable document databases -- from cloud-based ones from Amazon and Google, to a wide variety of Open Source tools, most notably CouchDB and MongoDB.

So what is MongoDB? Here are five things every PHP developer should know about it:

1. MongoDB is a stand-alone server
2. It is document based, not table-based
3. It is schemaless
4. You don't need to learn another query language
5. It has great PHP support

Read on to learn a little about each of these.

On March 12, 2010, I will be online with the folks from Tek-X giving a webcast on A Developer's Intro to Drupal. If you're just getting your feet wet with Drupal and are still a little confused about hooks, modules, themes, nodes, or even why Drupal isn't (fully) Object-Oriented, then this session is for you.
Tek-X Drupal Webcast

Our current environment uses AWStats to analyze our HTTP server log files and build reports. Because it has privileged access to our data, and because it is open source, we can glean more information out of it than we could from proprietary hosted analytics platforms.

It turns out that there is a PHP front-end to AWStats (called BetterAWStats) that comes complete with a Drupal module. Here, I explain how we've installed and configured this module to get our AWStats data imported into our Atrium server.

Sitemap ScoresI've been tuning our sitemap during the last few months, and one thing I needed was a quick tool to check on the effectiveness of various sitemap generation strategies.

To do this, I wrote a quick QueryPath script (see a full-sized image of the output). The script is explained below.

The code is pretty straightforward. It simply retrieves a URL, parses the sitemap contents, and then sorts them. Finally, it displays the top 100 entries. I've tested it on sitemaps with over 20,000 items. While it is a little slow on such a large document, it works fine.

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
require 'QueryPath/QueryPath.php';
 
define('MAX_ITEMS', 100);
 
$sitemap = 'http://example.com/sitemap.xml';
 
$urls = array();
print "Parsing sitemap...\n";
$qp = qp($sitemap, ':root>url>loc');
$size = $qp->size();
$max = $size > MAX_ITEMS ? MAX_ITEMS : $size;
printf("Found %d entries; printing top %d\n\n", $size, $max);
 
try {
    foreach ($qp as $url) {
      $loc = $url->text();
    $score = $url->nextAll('priority')->text();
    $urls[$loc] = $score;
    }
} catch (Exception $e) {
  print $e->getMessage();
}
 
arsort($urls);
 
$filter = "%d: %0.5f  %s\n";
 
foreach ($urls as $uri => $score) {
  if ($i++ == $max) break;
   printf($filter, $i, $score, $uri);
};
?>

Basically, the script above simply fetches all of the URLs out of the sitemap, and then sorts them by their corresponding score. Only the top MAX_ITEMS (100) are shown.