innovation initiative

Today I released a small and quick side-project called LiteMySQL. It’s basically a PHP5 class which is designed to automate the boring repetitive tasks of opening and managing database connections, looping through the query result resource to get an array and so on.

I created this for a small project I’m working on which basically needs database access on less than a handful of pages. And so I’d have a ready to use MySQL solution other small projects in the future.

And sorry for the lack of information on the project page as of now, but I gotta finish off the original project which motivated me to create LiteMySQL. Once done I’ll update the project page with relevant information

Example Usage:

# general usage
$sql = new litemysql('host', 'username', 'password', 'database', 'table');
$rows = $sql->find_all();

# conditions
# - the following three uses of the find
#   function all produce identical results
$result = $sql->find(3);
$result = $sql->find(array('id' => 3));
$result = $sql->find('`id` = 3');

# insert a single row
$sql->insert(
   array(
      'title' => 'hello world',
      'body' => 'my first blog post :D',
      'author' => 'John Doe'
   )
);

It’s been a long while since i last updated here, life’s been crazy. But i’m not gonna fall into a bottom less pit ranting about everything thats been going on and keeping me busy.

Instead, I’d like to announce parseCSV 0.3.0, my fully featured CSV parser for PHP.

I recently created a Google Code project for parseCSV to bring the class some more attention and spotlight than it’s been getting here dug down in my blog somewhere. I also updated the script to fix a small bug (just plain stupid code), and add some more functionality. Namely, offset and limit options when parsing a CSV file/data. And a basic but very useful conditions option which uses SQL-like syntax to match parsed data for easy filtering.

You can download the script from the project page. The wiki pages are still not really complete, at all, but i’ll get there

Mac OS X is an excellent web-development platform if you ask most (except if you ask Windows fanatics). It’s UNIX based, comes with Apache 1.3 pre-installed and ready to rock ‘n’ roll basically. But the default factory settings for Apache and more generally don’t fill all the requirements of the average web-developer, so you change settings, install this, install that, customize a few more things, and before long you’re not sure what you did and where sometimes. And this becomes a problem if/when it comes time to reinstall OSX on your little baby, or simply when your old baby is to old and ugly and you throw it out the window from the 4th floor head first in favor of a brand new and cute little baby. *evil grin*

Whatever the reason, it’s always a pain in the ass to reinstall a system, specially when you’ve installed and reconfigured a lot of background daemons and services. Hence I thought I’d share my method of configuration which makes it quite easy just lifting it all from one system to another.

What I’m gonna outline here is installing PHP 5, MySQL and additional tools, and reconfiguring apache the way I’ve done it.

So lets start by downloading PHP 5 for your system from here:
http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/php/

It’s a no brainer, just extract the tar.gz archive and double click the .pkg installer package and follow instructions. This will leave you with a working PHP install located in “/usr/local/php5/”.

Then lets move on to MySQL, download the package for your system here:
http://mysql.org/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#Mac_OS_X_(package_format)

Again, its an easy .pkg installation. Optionally, you can install the preference pane which is an easy way to start and stop MySQL. If you want the MySQL daemon to run at system startup, use the .pkg startup item installer, as the option in the preference pane doesn’t seem to work at all

The MySQL GUI Tools are very useful, and are available here:
http://mysql.org/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html#OSX

As for Apache, there’s a few things to do, first of all you should make sure you’ve turned on “Personal Web Sharing” under the Sharing preference panel in System Preferences. Next we’re gonna add a single line to Apache’s configuration file. Use any text editor of your choice, to open “/etc/httpd/httpd.conf”, you can use the terminal based pico editor by running this in a terminal:

sudo pico /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

Then right at the bottom of the file, add the following on a new line (if you’re using pico, you can quickly scroll down using ctrl+v):

Include /Users/username/Library/httpd/*.conf

Obviously, make sure to replace “username” with your own username. The idea here is that we have apache automatically include all .conf files located in your own “~/Library/httpd/” folder.

Now, before we do anything else, I recommend you open your “~/Sites/” folder with the finder, create a new folder called “_public”, and move everything inside your Sites folder into the newly created _public folder. We’re gonna reconfigure your _public folder to be Apache’s root directory rather than “/Library/WebServer/Documents”.

Then open the “~/Library/” folder in your home folder, and create a folder named “httpd”, in there lets create “_main.conf”, and put this in it (the “Listen” settings you don’t really need unless you want them):

DocumentRoot “/Users/username/Sites/_public”
Listen 80
Listen 3000
Listen 8080

Again, replace “username” with your own username. Save the file, and run the following command in the terminal and enter your password when asked to relaunch Apache.

sudo apachectl graceful

Open http://localhost/ in a web browser, and you should see the contents of your own _public folder

Then you can continue to create an “aliases.conf”, “virtual_hosts.conf” and more in “~/Library/httpd/” and apache will automatically include them. This way, you only need to do a single modification to the bottom of httpd.conf on any new system aswell, and just place your config files in the correct dir, and you’re ready to rock ‘n’ roll

What I’ve also done myself, is that I create virtual hosts for the different projects I’m working on. So lets say I’ve got a new project now called “Banjo”, then I would create “~/Sites/banjo/” and I’d create a virtual host entry in “virtual_hosts.conf” that looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName banjo
   DocumentRoot “/Users/username/Sites/banjo”
</VirtualHost>

Then I open “/etc/hosts” with a text editor, and I create a new entry which looks like this:

127.0.0.1 banjo

Once all is saved and done, I restart Apache with “sudo apachectl graceful”, open http://banjo/ in a web browser, and I’m all set to create another world dominating merciless enemy business killing machine of a site… Heh

Myself I’ve got phpMyAdmin installed in “~/Sites/_public/mysql/”, which makes it accessible at http://localhost/mysql/. Also, I have a virtual host configured, and a entry in the hosts file so I can also access from http://mysql/

Then of course, I use TextMate, and I’ve got a TextMate project with all the Apache and PHP configuration files, which I can quickly open using Quicksilver by pressing cmd+space and typing “httpd” and pressing return cause the project file is called “httpd”. But the rest of my workflow is a story for another time

I hope some of you have found this useful, saionara fili moy…

Ok, so this is gonna sound like i’m a complete n00b, but i’ve recently fallen in love with Exception handling in PHP5 .

The reason why i never even looked at it before, is cause i’ve always strived for PHP4 compatibility, but with this latest project (more on it at a later date ), PHP4 has gone out the window .

As for updates, not much, but i did recently upload a new quick PHP function to Code Yard. It’s called dir_exists(). It’s useful for checking if a directory exists, and if not, it will create it recursively, and return true or false. It works in PHP 4 and 5, in 4 it simply loops to create all required dirs since mkdir() doesn’t support the recursive argument.

Thats it for now, more updates soon, i’ve just been really busy the last few weeks with shit… GRRR

I have to get some real work done, that i can post about, cause this is starting to feel like i’m a broken record player just, cause all i’ve posted about lately is parseCSV{}… lol

Obviously having major hard drive problems haven’t helped

Anyway, i spent the most part of today updating parseCSV{}, finishing an automatic delimiter character detection, cause the original project i created it for, requires such a function. The reason being so users don’t really have to know what a delimiter character is, or which one the file their attempting to upload uses. Eitherway, its a very handy function, and hardly slows down the script at all.

The original reason i started working on it cause i realized some versions of MS Excel for Windows uses ; instead of , as a delimiter no matter which CSV option you choose. And the script was being used to upload that from Excel, which caused issues, so to simplify matters, some type of auto-detection was required…

The auto() function works by simply analyzing a specific number of rows (15 by default) from the beginning of the csv file/data, and eliminating characters that simply can’t be the delimiter cause it doesn’t exist on every row, or the the number of times a character appears in a row isn’t the same on all rows. Rarely will any other character than the actual delimiter get past this stage of elimination, but if more then one character does, the script goes on to further analyze details to choose which character is the most likely to be the delimiter.

I just updated and added a few PHP scripts to Code Yard that might be useful for some

• Updated and fixed some bugs in parseCSV{} and parseINI{}.
• speedometer{} — Class for simplifying calculation of script execution time.
• walkDir{} — Class for recursively getting a list of directory contents. It returns both a multi-dimentional array, and a plain array with full paths, both types of output are optional increase performance. The number of directory levels to walk down into is also configurable.
• rfile() & wfile() — Functions for reading and writeing to local files. I wrote these about 3-4 years ago, and i’ve used them ever since, they’ve undergone some slight modifications since then, but their still basically the same. Their quite flexible, fast, and save a lot of time.
• randpass() — Function with a quite self-explanatory name. Generates a random password of any desired length using the character ranges you specify. It can be made more flexible, but its perfect for most situations when you need to generate a random password.

Today i’ve setup a new project, called Code Yard. All it really is, is a Subversion repository for me to collect all my small random pieces of code (classes, functions, etc.) which i reuse every now and then. It’s purpose is to let me more easily manage all the small pieces of code currently spread out a bit all over the place in old and current projects, and to allow others who might find my code useful, or just save them 5 minutes of work

And with that explained, the first piece of code i’ve added is a PHP class called parseCSV. I’ve recently written this class for a small project i’m working on, i was quite surprised to find that there was a quite lack of CSV support in PHP, and an even larger vacuum of 3rd party classes available that fully supports the most common types of CSV files.

Hence i wrote parseCSV to be fully compatible with the Wikipedia article available on the topic. Which also seems to be the exact CSV formatting MS Excel uses for example. I based my class on the processing concept of Ming Hong Ng’s CsvFileParser class.