Tag Archives: PHP

PHP: One way of differing between DEV and PROD environments with Kohana

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Usually when I develop websites, they will be deployed to a domain, for example www.geekality.net. But when I develop this site locally, I usually want it to be in some sub-folder of localhost, since I usually have more than one website going on, and I don’t want the trouble with virtual-hosts. So, to solve this for my Kohana websites I do the following simple thing. This technique would work for other websites programmed in PHP as well, but the PHP part would probably be a bit different.

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Measure upload time and speed with PHP and Javascript

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Stumbled upon a question on StackOverflow the other day which got me curious. The question was about how to measure how long it takes to upload a file to a PHP script. This is what had been tried out:

$upload_time = time() - $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'];

This pretty much always returns zero, even though the uploading actually took many seconds, because the request start time is after the server has received the post data. That we actually just get how long the script took to run, which of course is pretty close to zero seconds. So, what can we do?

  1. Right before data is posted, nudge the server with an AJAX call which stores the current timestamp in a session variable
  2. Post the data
  3. Compare current timestamp with the one stored in step 1

Wasn’t sure how it would work, but seems to work pretty well. There will of course be a very tiny difference since the AJAX request will be a bit part of the time, but compared to the upload time it shouldn’t matter much. Anyways, here’s how you could do it :)

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PHP: Simple compression of JSON data

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Just discovered how super simple it was to add some gz compression when for example providing JSON data from PHP.

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Quick installation of LAMP for Kohana on Ubuntu

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Needed to get a LAMP environment up and running for some Kohana development. Starting with a more or less fresh install of Ubuntu, here’s what I did.

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PHP: What’s a valid JavaScript identifier (or function name)?

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After another reply to a question I’ve had on StackOverflow for a while, I decided that I perhaps should add another level of security to my method of providing JSONP from PHP. The way I did it before, I didn’t do any checking on the provided callback. This means that someone could technically put whatever they wanted in there, including malicious code. So, therefore it might be a good idea to check if the callback, which should be a function name, actually is a valid function name. But,

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PHP: Proper age calculation

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Always struggle with calculating age in PHP for some reason. And there seems to be quite varying ideas on how this should be done. So decided to once and for all sit down and figure out how I could do this.

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PHP Tutorial: PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN)

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Got a letterIn a previous post I tried to give an introduction on how to get started with PayPal Payment Data Transfers (PDT). PDT is very handy in several cases, but you can’t always rely on it since it requires the user to return to your page after doing the payment. That will often happen, but it’s not guaranteed to happen. If you for example want to mark an order in your system as paid or something like that, you most likely want to use PayPal Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) in addition to PDT.

Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is a message service that notifies you of events related to PayPal transactions. You can use it to automate back-office and administrative functions, such as fulfilling orders, tracking customers, and providing status and other information related to a transaction. — PayPal

Once again the documentation, tutorials and code samples I found on this was a bit all over the place. Sort of messy and outdated. So, once again I decided to do my own thing and just follow the steps required and implement them myself. And since the tutorial on PDT turned out to be a bit of a success, I decided to share this too. Hopefully it can make the lives of fellow developers easier :)

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