Take a sample database schema shown below.

CREATE TABLE `user` (
  `username` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '',
  `password` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '',
  KEY `username` (`username`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

The following is a php class automatically generated by ‘table2class’ from the above schema. The generated class file also includes additional support database initialization files. Note that some functions here may need modification to suit your particular application, but still, the major code required to get the application up and running is there. Any automation is better than nothing. And each such help to the programmer means faster project delivery time for the client.

<?php
/*************************************************************************
* Class Name:       user
* File Name:        class.user.php
* Generated:        Thursday, Sep 15, 2011 - 6:39:33 UTC
*  - for Table:     user
*   - in Database:  user
**************************************************************************/
 
// Files required by class:
require_once("class.database.php");
 
// Begin Class "user"
class user {
    // Variable declaration
    public $username; // Primary Key
    public $database;
 
    // Class Constructor
    public function __construct() {
        $this->database = new Database();
        $this->database->SetSettings("localhost", "user", "pass", "user");
    }
 
    // Class Destructor
    public function __destruct() {
        unset($this->database);
    }
 
    // GET Functions
    public function getusername() {
        return($this->username);
    }
 
    // SET Functions
    public function setusername($mValue) {
        $this->username = $mValue;
    }
 
    public function select($mID) { // SELECT Function
        // Execute SQL Query to get record.
        $sSQL = "SELECT * FROM user WHERE username = $mID;";
        $oResult = $this->database->query($sSQL);
        $oResult = $this->database->result;
        $oRow = mysql_fetch_object($oResult);
 
        // Assign results to class.
        $this->username = $oRow->username; // Primary Key
    }
 
    public function insert() {
        $this->username = NULL; // Remove primary key value for insert
        $sSQL = "INSERT INTO user () VALUES ();";
        $oResult = $this->database->query($sSQL);
        $this->username = $this->database->lastinsertid;
    }
 
    function update($mID) {
        $sSQL = "UPDATE user SET (username = '$this->username') 
                 WHERE username = $mID;";
        $oResult = $this->database->Query($sSQL);
    }
 
    public function delete($mID) {
        $sSQL = "DELETE FROM user WHERE username = $mID;";
        $oResult = $this->database->Query($sSQL);
    }
 
}
// End Class "user"
?>

‘Structy’ provides a somewhat different flavor as you can see from the code class generated by the library. This is more complete than ‘table2class’ but also a little complex. The ‘RET’ constant you see in the code below is generated by the library and is automatically defined in the other support files.

<?php
 
/**********************************************************************
user.class.php
Generated by STRUCTY 2011.09.15 08:33:41.
Copyright 2011 Structy, Frédéric Aebi. All rights reserved.
**********************************************************************/
 
define("USER", "user"); 
 
class user {
 
    private $username;
    private $password;
 
    public function setusername($pArg="0") {$this->username=$pArg;}
    public function setpassword($pArg="0") {$this->password=$pArg;}
 
    public function getusername() {return $this->username;}
    public function getpassword() {return $this->password;}
 
    public function readObject($array = array()) {
        $qry = "SELECT *".RET."FROM ".USER.RET;
        $and = "WHERE".RET;
 
        if($array['username'] != "") {
            $qry .= $and."username = '".$array['username']."'".RET;
            $and = "AND".RET;
        }
 
        if($array['password'] != "") {
            $qry .= $and."password = '".$array['password']."'".RET;
            $and = "AND".RET;
        }
 
        $record = Database::select($qry);
        if(count($record[0]) == 0) {
            return array();
        } else {
            $record = $record[0];
            $this->setusername($record['username']);
            $this->setpassword($record['password']);
            return true;
        }
    }
 
    public static function readArray($array = array()) {
        $qry = "SELECT *".RET."FROM ".USER.RET;
        $and = "WHERE".RET;
 
        if($array['username'] != "") {
            $qry .= $and."username = '".$array['username']."'".RET;
            $and = "AND".RET;
        }
 
        if($array['password'] != "") {
            $qry .= $and."password = '".$array['password']."'".RET;
            $and = "AND".RET;
        }
 
        $recordset = Database::select($qry);
        $class_objects = array();
        if(is_array($recordset) == true) {
            while(list($i, $record) = each($recordset)) {
                $class_object = new user();
                $class_object->setusername($record['username']);
                $class_object->setpassword($record['password']);
                $class_objects[$class_object->getusername()] = $class_object;
            }
        }
        return $class_objects;
    }
 
    public function insert($update = FALSE) {
        if($update == TRUE) {
            $qry  = "UPDATE ".USER.RET."SET".RET.
            "username = '".$this->getusername()."',".RET.
            "password = '".$this->getpassword()."'".RET.
    .RET;
 
            Database::insert($qry);
        } else {
            $qry  = "INSERT INTO ".USER." (".RET.
            "username, password".RET.
            ") VALUES (".RET.
            "'".$this->getusername()."',".RET.
            "'".$this->getpassword()."'".RET.
            ")".RET;
 
            Database::insert($qry);
        }
    }
 
    public static function delete($array = array()) {
        $qry = "DELETE".RET."FROM ".USER.RET;
        $and = "WHERE".RET;
 
        if($array['username'] != "") {
            $qry .= $and."username = '".$array['username']."'".RET;
            $and = "AND".RET;
        }
 
        if($array['password'] != "") {
            $qry .= $and."password = '".$array['password']."'".RET;
            $and = "AND".RET;
        }
 
        Database::delete($qry);
    }
}
 
?>

Installation

Papercut is a Windows application requiring .NET Framework 3.5 . Thankfully no installation is required as the application can be run directly. Upon activation it sits in the system tray and pops a message when a email is received from a local web application.

The messages can then be viewed in the Papercut window.

In all a simple and useful tool for any web developer.

Let us take a quick look at some features Adminer provides:

# Connect to a database server with username and password
# Select an existing database or create a new one
# List fields, indexes, foreign keys and triggers of table
# Change name, engine, collation, auto_increment and comment of table
# Alter name, type, collation, comment and default values of columns
# Add and drop tables and columns
# Create, alter, drop and search by indexes including fulltext
# Create, alter, drop and link lists by foreign keys
# Create, alter, drop and select from views
# Create, alter, drop and call stored procedures and functions
# Create, alter and drop triggers
# List data in tables with search, aggregate, sort and limit results
# Insert new records, update and delete the existing ones
# Supports all data types, blobs through file transfer
# Execute any SQL command from a text field or a file
# Export table structure, data, views, routines, databases to SQL or CSV
# Print database schema connected by foreign keys
# Show processes and kill them
# Display users and rights and change them
# Display variables with links to documentation
# Manage events and table partitions (MySQL 5.1)

I don’t know about you but all this features will get me through the day.

Compiled files

But the most interesting idea I liked about Adminer is that if you download the source zip you will see that the software is actually composed of different files (which also are executable). The root folder contains a compile.php script that when executed combines all the required files in a single adminer.php file. During compilation all the php files are compressed (by removing the spaces), the images are base64 encoded and the javascript minified. In the true sense of the word the files are really not compiled but rather compressed and squeezed together in a single file.

Skining

You can also add your own skins to the application by creating a adminer.css file and putting it in the directory where adminer.php is located.

Extensions

Adminer also allows to to override some default functionality by writing your own custom code. Although I’ve not played much with this feature yet.

In conclusion

A fine product, which I find immensely helpful when I need to quickly perform some database task on a clients server.

1. Installing phpcpd
We will be using the PEAR installer for this purpose. First the PEAR channel that is used to distribute phpcpd needs to be registered with the local PEAR environment. This tells PEAR from where the install files should be downloaded.

c:\> pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
Adding Channel "pear.phpunit.de" succeeded
Discovery of channel "pear.phpunit.de" succeeded

After this is done the PEAR installer is ready to install phpcpd.

c:\> pear install phpunit/phpcpd
downloading phpcpd-1.1.1.tgz ...
Starting to download phpcpd-1.1.1.tgz (8,078 bytes)
.....done: 8,078 bytes
install ok: channel://pear.phpunit.de/phpcpd-1.1.1

Post installation you will find the PHPCPD source files in the PEAR directory.

2. Running your first check.
Here is our first check on the admin sub directory of a project with the results. You can check for duplicate code in a individual file or a directory.

c:\localhost\project> phpcpd ./admin
phpcpd 1.1.1 by Sebastian Bergmann.
 
Found 3 exact clones with 50 duplicated lines in 6 files:
 
  - .messages.php:95-105
    .messagesgroup.php:112-122
 
  - .viewschedules.php:14-23
    .tutorbookings.php:14-23
 
  - .ampieexport.php:4-35
    .amcolumnexport.php:4-35
 
0.35% duplicated lines out of 14456 total lines of code.

3. Options
By default phpcpd will search for a minimum of 5 identical lines and 70 identical tokens. So if there are less than 5 duplicate lines in the code or less than 70 identical tokens they will be ignored. To override this you can use the –min-lines and –min-tokens switch as below.

c:\localhost\project> phpcpd --min-lines 4 --min-tokens 40 ./admin
phpcpd 1.1.1 by Sebastian Bergmann.
 
Found 9 exact clones with 187 duplicated lines in 14 files:
 
  - .actionaction.updatestudent.php:15-27
    .actionaction.updatetutor.php:15-27
 
  - .adminFunctions.php:91-98
    .adminFunctions.php:124-131
 
  - .messages.php:95-118
    .messagesgroup.php:112-135
 
  - .viewschedules.php:14-84
    .tutorbookings.php:14-84
 
  - .viewschedules.php:167-185
    .tutorbookings.php:145-163
 
  - .tutors.php:14-20
    .dimdim.php:14-20
 
  - .ampieexport.php:4-44
    .amcolumnexport.php:4-44
 
  - .geoipgeoip.inc.php:236-241
    .geoipgeoip.inc.php:272-277
 
  - .studentschedule.php:14-20
    .Copy of onetomanyschedule.php:14-20
 
1.29% duplicated lines out of 14457 total lines of code.

The report generated by phpcpd can also be exported to a PMD-CPD xml format. The following scans the admin directory and saves the report in the projectPhpcpd.xml file.

c:\localhost\project> phpcpd --log-pmd projectPhpcpd.xml ./admin

Most of the php source files have the .php extension and phpcpd uses this by default when comparing files. To add other extensions to the list you can use the –suffixes option, which takes a comma separated list of extension names.

c:\localhost\project> phpcpd --suffixes php,php5 ./admin

Concluding thoughts
There is also a Java program called PMD which can detect duplicate code. But the main advantage of a PEAR package is that you can integrate it in your project itself or use it with phpUnderControl.

But writing a coding standard document and making your team or yourself (if you are a individual programmer) stick to it is a completely different matter. Most programmers usually slip into their own style of coding after some time. A tool which scans your source code and checks it against a standard would be quite a help. PHP_CodeSniffer is one such tool.

PHP_CodeSniffer is a PHP5 script that “sniffs” PHP, JavaScript and CSS files to detect violations of a defined coding standard.

1. Installing PHP_Codesniffer
The easy way to install is with the PEAR installer.

c:\>pear install PHP_Codesniffer

By default a number of coding standards are installed against which you can check your code. You can find the installed standards by:

c:\>phpcs -i
The installed coding standards are MySource, PEAR, PHPCS, Squiz and Zend

2. Checking source file or directory
You can check a source file or directory against a particular standard. By default PHP_Codesniffer will use the PEAR coding standard. We will run the script on the following code using the default PEAR standard.

<?php
/* Hello.php */
function hello() {
    return "Hello World!";
}
 
echo hello();
 
?>

c:\localhost\test>phpcs hello.php

Which will return the following report.

FILE: c:\localhost\test\hello.php
--------------------------------------------------------------
FOUND 3 ERROR(S) AND 0 WARNING(S) AFFECTING 2 LINE(S)
--------------------------------------------------------------
 2 | ERROR | Missing file doc comment
 3 | ERROR | Missing function doc comment
 3 | ERROR | Opening brace should be on a new line
--------------------------------------------------------------

Using the Zend standard on the same code will return the following.

c:\localhost\test>phpcs --standard=zend hello.php

FILE: c:\localhost\test\hello.php
-------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUND 1 ERROR(S) AND 1 WARNING(S) AFFECTING 2 LINE(S)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
 3 | WARNING | Consider putting global function "hello" in a static class
 9 | ERROR   | A closing tag is not permitted at the end of a PHP file
--------------------------------------------------------------------

You can run the script on a directory as below with a summary report option.

c:\localhost\test>phpcs --report=summary ./ds

 
PHP CODE SNIFFER REPORT SUMMARY
----------------------------------------------------------------
FILE                                        ERRORS  WARNINGS
----------------------------------------------------------------
c:\localhost\test\ds\link_list.php             8       4
c:\localhost\test\ds\linklist.class.php        64      30
c:\localhost\test\ds\LinkListTest.php          7       0
c:\localhost\test\ds\hello.php                 3       0
----------------------------------------------------------------
A TOTAL OF 82 ERROR(S) AND 34 WARNING(S) WERE FOUND IN 4 FILE(S)
----------------------------------------------------------------

3. Your own coding standards
You can even create your own custom coding standards and add it to PHP_Codesniffer. Coding standard files in PHP_CodeSniffer are a collection of sniff files. Each sniff file checks one particular part of a coding standard only. The Coding Standard Tutorial explains it in quite a detail.

4. Subversion integration
PHP_Codesniffer also integrates with Subversion, which ensures that developers do not commit code that violates the coding standard. Instead developers are presented with the list of errors they need to correct before committing to a repository.

In this post we will take a quick look at writing a simple scraperusing the simplehtmldom library. But before we continue a word of caution:

Writing screen scrapers and spiders that consume large amounts of bandwidth, guess passwords, grab information from a site and use it somewhere else may well be a violation of someone’s rights and will eventually land you in trouble. Before writing  a screen scraper first see if the website offers an RSS feed or an API for the data you are looking. If not and you have to use a scraper, first check the websites policies regarding automated tools before proceeding.

Now that we have got all the legalities out of the way, lets start with the examples.

1. Installing simplehtmldom.
Simplehtmldom is a PHP library that facilitates the process of creating web scrapers. It is a HTML DOM parser written in PHP5 that let you manipulate HTML in a quick and easy way. It is a wonderful library that does away with the messy details of regular expressions and uses CSS selector style DOM access like those found in jQuery.

First download the library from sourceforge.  Unzip the library in you PHP includes directory or a directory where you will be testing the code.

2. Installing FireBug.
I assume you have FireBug already installed, if not head over here for the installation. You will soon see why it is required.

3. Writing our first scraper.
Now that we are ready with the tools, lets write our first web scraper. For our initial idea let us see how to grab the sponsored links section from a google search page.

Before we can retrieve the required data we need to know the HTML structure of the page so that we can know precisely where the required information is located. For this purpose FireBug is quite a handy tool. Open FireBug and click on the inspect button to check the Dom structure of the page. A sample image is shown below.

As can be seen from the FireBug pane the whole sponsored links section is inside a <td> tag with a id named ‘rhsline’. The following is a Dom representation of the ‘rhsline’ node.

The ‘li’ tags contain the actual data we are after.  With this little information we can use the following code to read all the sponsored links.

$data =  $html->find('td[id=rhsline]');
echo $data[0]->children(1);

The complete source is given below.

<?php
 
/* update your path accordingly */
include_once 'libs/simplehtmldom/simple_html_dom.php';
 
$search_term = "mobiles";
 
$url = "http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q={$search_term}";
 
$html = file_get_html($url);
 
/*
Get all table rows having the id attribute named 'rhsline'.
As the list of sponsored links is in the 'ol' tag; as can be
seen from the DOM tree above; we use the 'children' function
on the $data object to get the sponsored links.
*/
$data =  $html->find('td[id=rhsline]');
 
/*
  Make sure that sponsors ads are available,
  Some keywords do not have sponsor ads.
*/
if(isset($data[0]))
    echo $data[0]->children(1);
 
?>

In the next example we will grab the list of contents from the latest Wired magazine issue.

 
$ret =  $html->find('div[id=this_month] div[class=story]');
 
foreach($ret as $story)
    echo $story->find('a', 0) . "<br>";

This will return all the content section links from the page. To just return the links as text we can use the ‘plaintext’ modifier.

echo $story->find('a', 0)->plaintext . "<br>";

The complete source is given below.

<?php
 
/* update your path accordingly */
include_once 'libs/simplehtmldom/simple_html_dom.php';
 
$url = "http://www.wired.com/wired/";
 
$html = file_get_html($url);
 
$ret =  $html->find('div[id=this_month] div[class=story]');
 
foreach($ret as $story)
    echo $story->find('a', 0)->plaintext . "<br>";
 
?>

Now that you have seen how simple it is to scrape a web page you can read the simplehtmldom manual to get more details on the various functions available in the library and start creating your own web scrapers.

I’m available for various kinds of web scrapping projects.
Contact me with details to ‘metapix [at] gmail.com’ for price quote.

This tool allows you to draw and create E-R diagrams in your browser using Javascript without the need for any external plugins like Flash, Java or Flex.

Many database features are supported, such as keys, foreign key constraints, comments and indexes. You can either save your design , print it or export as SQL script. It is possible to import schema from existing database. The application supports MySQL, Sqlite, PostgreSQL ,MSSql.

The application allows you to:
1. Draw E-R designs
2. Edit tables and rows
3. Manage keys
4. Create relations (FK constraints)
5. Save & Load designs
6. Import DB schemas

The importing of MySQL databases can take some time, so make sure you set PHP timeout to more than 60 seconds to avoid errors. A sample WordPress 2.7 schema imported is shown below.

Installation:
Installation is simple. Just download the code from here, change your database settings in the ‘sqldesigner\backend\php-mysql\index.php’ (if you are using PHP & MySQL) file and you are ready.

A live demo of the application can be found here.

Many people confuse profiling with benchmarking. A profiler is a analysis tool that lets you measure the performance of code at runtime. Profiling an application lets you find bottlenecks in your application code. You can find which part of your code is taking most of the time, you can than optimize that part of code. For example if there are 4 functions in your application, profiling may report the following distribution:

function a: 68%
function b: 12%
function c: 1.3%
function d: 18.7%

i.e function ‘a’ accounts for about 70% of the execution time in your application; if you can optimize that function it will boost your application performance considerably. If you had executed the above code on a laptop, and than executed the same on a fast server the code may run in half the time, but the distribution will remain the same. The distribution is what is important in profiling.

Benchmarking is different. It lets you find exactly how long it takes to execute a piece of code. For example I have developed two versions of a sorting algorithm for a application : Sort1(), and Sort2(). If I’ve to find which is faster than I can use a benchmarking software for the same.

To take a contrived example, I recently implemented a Linked List class in PHP (brushing up on my data structure skills), with all the usual functions a linked-list requires – ‘deleteNode‘, ‘insertFirstNode‘, ‘insertLastNode‘, ‘reverseList‘ etc. I was quite happy with the outcome untill I ran a benchmark between two functions – ‘insertFirstNode‘ and ‘insertLastNode‘. Here is a benchmark report for the two functions for various amount of nodes, in table and graph format. The last column shows by how much the ‘insertLastNode‘ is slower than the ‘insertFirstNode‘ function.

As you can see from the report ‘insertLastNode‘ takes exponential time to insert nodes. For example, when inserting 3000 nodes, ‘insertLastNode‘ is 30 times slower then ‘insertFirstNode‘. The reason for this is that ‘insertLastNode‘ has to traverse the entire list to find the last node before adding a new node, while ‘insertFirstNode‘ always adds a new node at the beginning of the list. The simple solution as all you ‘data structure fans’ know is to add a pointer that points to the last node of the list; so every time you have to add a node to the end of the list you use the end node pointer. After making the necessary changes I ran the benchmark and here are the results.

As you can see now both the functions take an equal amount of time to insert a node. Before the code tuning ‘insertLastNode’ took more than 6 seconds to insert 3000 nodes, while after tuning less than quarter of a second.

The whole point of this exercise is to tell you that code tuning can make a tremendous difference to how your application performs.

Installation
You can download the Benchmark pacakage from here or use the pear installer like below:

c:\pear install Benchmark

Using the package:
Using the package for benchmarking is simple enough. A implementation is shown below.

<?php
 
    /* The following sample function is what we
       want to test */
 
    function someFunction()
    {
        for($i=1; $i < 1000; $i++)
            $d = sqrt($i);
    }
 
 
    /* include the PEAR::Benchmark package */
    require_once 'Benchmark/Iterate.php';
 
    $bench = new Benchmark_Iterate;
 
    /* Run the above function 100 times.
       If you want to pass parameters to the function,
       you can add it after the function name like this:
       $bench->run(100, 'someFunction', para1, para2, para n);
    */
    $bench->run(100, 'someFunction');
 
    /* Get the results */
    $result = $bench->get();
 
    /* Display the mean time the function 'someFunction'
       takes to execute */
    print $result['mean'];
 
?>

Output:

0.022045