I attended this weekend my first Ruby conference, Ruby Lugdunum in Lyon. Besides cool talks and the fun of meeting people like Nick, Blake, or Laetitia, my friend Camille & I did a surprise lightning talk about how PHP is better than Ruby. Here are the slides and a more detailed transcript:A lot of free hosts: it’s easy to find a PHP host, you just have to google “free php host” and you find a ton of free PHP/MySQL hostsBigger community: The PHP community is really huge, and it’s really easy to find a PHP developerEasy to learn: Most people in the IT field have so...

Frequently in web applications, we may have a request to the back end system which may trigger a long running process such as searching huge amount of data or a long running database process. Then the front end webpage may hang and wait for the process to be finished. During this process, if we can provide the user some information about the progress of the back end process, it may improve user experience. Unfortunately, in web applications, this seems not an easy task because web scripting languages don't support multithreading and HTTP is stateless.  We now can have AJAX to simulate rea...

TIOBE released the programming language index for July 2013. The highlight of this month is that PHP is coming back. It ranks the fifth and has an increase of 1.54% compared to January. There are no changes in the ranking for the top 4 languages. The reason why PHP is back may be attributed to the new PHP Zend Framework that was released in September 2012, but this reason is not very convincing. PositionJul 2013PositionJul 2012Delta in PositionProgramming LanguageRatingsJul 2013Delta Jul 2012Status11C17.628%-0.70%  A22Java15.906%-0.18%  A33Objective-C10.248%+0.91% ...

Sometimes when we need to use email service provided by WAMP, we need to use some remote mail server such as Gmail. In Gmail, if we want to use the SMTP server to send email and want to use port 465, then the SSL connection should be setup. But by default in WAMP, the ssl is not usable. So to allow use SSL, what we should do is go to system tray and click PHP->PHP Extensions->php_openssl. Then now you can use Gmail to send email easily....

It is a common task to echo messages to the user using PHP. There are lots of ways where the message can be echoed to the client terminal(browser or console window) through PHP. These includes some well know debug methods like var_dump() and var_export() etc. In this post, we will show you some other methods shared by Laruence, one of the core members of PHP development team.1. echoFirst comes with the most common one : echo.$str = "Hello PHP\n";echo $str;2. printThen comes another common one : print.$str = "Hello PHP\n";print $str;3. php://outputAlso we can use file_put_contents() t...

When using xml-rpc, server side will get the data from client with php://input method instead of $_POST. Hence today we will discuss php://input.PHP official manual has below explanation to php://input:“php://input allows you to read raw POST data. It is a less memory intensive alternative to $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA and does not need any special php.ini directives. php://input is not available with enctype=”multipart/form-data”.Here we understand the above statement from 3 aspects:Read POST dataCannot use multipart/form-data typephp://input...

1. IntroductionWriting PHP applications is pretty easy. Most people grasp the syntax rather quickly and will within short time be able to produce a script that works using tutorials, references, books, and help forum forums like the one we have here at PHP Freaks. The problem is that most people forget one of the most important aspects that one must consider when writing PHP applications. Many beginners forget the security aspect of PHP. Generally, your users are nice people, they will do as they are told and you will have no problem with these people whatsoever. However, some people...

When downloading a large file, we may encounter some network issues which causes download termination and only part of the file is downloaded. When the network connection resumes next time, we may need to redownload the file again from the beginning. In order to save bandwidth, http provides a Range parameter in its header which can control the file transfer flow. With the range parameter in the header, we can resume the download from where we stop.Here is a piece of PHP code snippet which uses the range header to control which part of the file to transfer: <?php $filename=$_GET['fi...