Php set_time_limit Php has a function called set_time_limit which can be used to dynamically adjust the maximum execution time permitted to a script. It allows specifying the time in seconds and limits the script execution time to that many seconds. The set_time_limit function whenever called, effectively extends the script execution time by that many seconds…. Read More »
SOAP and PHP SOAP is a protocol to exchange objects over http. It is used to implement apis and the data being exchanged is in xml format. Sometimes it might be required to modify the soap request to add custom http headers for example. Since SoapClient is a class, it can be extended and the… Read More »
Socket Programming Socket programming involves connecting to remote machines on LAN or over the internet using ip addresses and port number. For example google.com has an ip “173.194.36.3” and runs http server on port 80. So a socket application can connect to that ip address on that particular port number and start data communication. Socket… Read More »
In your web application you might need to parse the user’s user-agent string to find out the browser/OS/device being used. This is necessary specially when your webapp tries to adapt to the user’s platform in a better way. For example a different layout for mobile device or restricted features/graceful degradation on a non supporting browser…. Read More »
Html to pdf If your php application needs to generate some kind of pdf report then the simplest approach would be to generate the report as an html and then convert it to pdf using some library. Plenty of libraries are available that can convert html to pdf in php. To name a few -… Read More »
Proxy with Curl Curl is a very useful library for transferring data over various protocols like http, ftp, https etc. In other words curl can be used to programatically download a web page, or upload file to ftp etc. It also supports using a proxy. This means that curl requests can go through a proxy… Read More »
When working with data import and export for example, file formats like csv and excel are commonly used. Data can be exported to csv format and imported elsewhere. Also data might be entered manually in an excel file and then imported in the database. So there might be a need to convert excel files to… Read More »
Tcpdf is a pdf creation library for php that is written in pure php and works without the need of any external library. It also has the feature to generate 2d barcodes like qrcode and pdf417. The 2d barcodes can store much more information than the 2d ones like code39 and ISBN. It is recommended… Read More »
Consider a long running php script that does many tasks and after each task it outputs the status. echo 'Task 1 complete'; …. some delay … echo 'Task 2 complete'; …. more delay and more tasks … Now for such scripts it may be important to load the contents in browser as quickly as they… Read More »
Server sent events When running a long serverside task inside a web application it becomes very useful, if not necessary to report the progress of that task in realtime to the clientside, that is the browser. Earlier there was no easy way to do this and hacks had to be constructed to achieve such a… Read More »
If your php application is processing media files like mp3, then it might need to find details of the mp3 file like its playtime, bitrate, encoder etc. There is a very useful php library called Getid3 that can extract information from mp3 files. Its written in pure php and does not have any dependencies. Needs… Read More »
Websockets Websockets is a new feature available in browsers as a part of the Html5 specs that allows javascript clients to open bi directional socket connections to a server. Currently all major desktop browsers support the api. Websocket is not an independant socket protocol, but is based on the TCP protocol just like HTTP. Therefore… Read More »
Imagick In a previous article we saw how to use to create a snapshot or thumbnail of the pdf. Now we are going to do the same in php using the Imagick class which provides the bindings for imagemagick library inside php. The library is available in the form of a class Imagick that does… Read More »
Curl According to the official website. curl is a command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, SMTPS, Telnet and TFTP. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload,… Read More »
Barcodes Barcodes are used in various business class applications to print information in encoded format such that it can be read later by barcode reading devices. Common places to see barcodes are product covers in shops, membership cards and documents like invoices etc. As php is now increasingly being used to develop such applications, barcodes… Read More »
Php is today the most widely used language/platform for development of web based applications and websites. At the same time it is the easiest to learn and use. There are lots of free tutorial websites out there that can be followed to learn php without much effort. Along with these tools having the right approach… Read More »
Domdocument The domdocument class of Php is a very handy one that can be used for a number of tasks like parsing xml, html and creating xml. It is documented here. In this tutorial we are going to see how to use this class to parse html content. The need to parse html happens when… Read More »
UDP Sockets in Php In a previous article we learnt about writing simple server and clients using TCP sockets in php. In this article we are going to use udp sockets for the same. UDP sockets are much simpler to work with since they are connection-less. A udp server just has an socket that waits… Read More »
Php and tcp/ip sockets This is a quick guide to learning socket programming in php. Socket programming php is very similar to C. Most functions are similar in names, parameters and output. However unlike C, socket programs written in php would run the same way on any os that has php installed. So the code… Read More »
What are callbacks Callback is a piece of code that is passed to some other functions as a parameter, such that it can be executed before or after a certain event or change of state. A common example of callbacks can be seen in javascript when using the jquery ajax function. $.ajax({ url: 'ajax/test.html', success:… Read More »