Tech Chorus

We discussed how to install LAMP in one of our previous articles. Some of you may be wondering how to create databases, users and tables on your newly installed MySQL server. This blog post introduces the preliminary steps to work with your new LAMP server.

We are going to learn the following:

• Changing MySQL user password
• Creating databases
• Deleting databases
• Creating MySQL user accounts
• Deleting MySQL user accounts
• Connecting to the MySQL server from the command line

Apache HTTP server is capable of hosting multiple websites on the same server. The feature is popularly known as virtual host.

The term Virtual Host refers to the practice of running more than one web site (such as www.company1.com and www.company2.com) on a single machine. When you configure virtual hosts your web server runs many websites at any given instance. You don't need to edit Apache configuration file and restart Apache every time you switch to a different website.

Follow the instructions below to configure virtual hosts in Apache.

Do you want to quickly test some PHP code?

Are you learning PHP?

Are you teaching PHP?

Don't miss out the PHP CLI Interactive mode. You can invoke PHP interactive shell from the terminal

php -a

Example 1: Do you want to see the output of xmlrpc_encode_request()

php > echo xmlrpc_encode_request('myIPAddress', array('username','password'));
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>myIPAddress</methodName>
<params>
 <param>
  <value>
   <string>username</string>
  </value>

If you are familiar with blogosphere you know what is Technorati.

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. You can submit your blog to Technorati and ping their servers when your blog site is updated. when you ping Technorati their web crawlers read the updated information on your site.

Technorati offers an XML-RPC ping web service to allow blogs to notify content changes.

In this article we discuss how to write a PHP script to programatically ping Technorati when there is new content in your site.

Let us get familiar with some terminology.

RPC From the Wikipedia:
"Remote procedure call (RPC) is an Inter-process communication technology that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space (commonly on another computer on a shared network) without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction."

Good definition. But what exactly does it mean?

In this article I will explain how to write an XML-RPC server and client in PHP.

To be able to understand the article, you have to have some idea about XML-RPC in general.

If you feel like gleaning more information about XML-RPC visit the following websites:

http://www.xmlrpc.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC

For an introduction to XML-RPC in PHP visit Introduction to XML-RPC In PHP

You have been writing a lot of PHP code and want to generate statistics about the number of comment and code lines in your application. Maybe you want to generate statistics about some PHP project. You can do it with just one command.

phploc helps you quickly generate numbers about the size of a PHP project.

You can install phploc from the PEAR installer. The PHP PEAR package itself is most likely available from your distribution vendor.

If you are using subversion (SVN) for your source code management you may have come across this situation.

1. You add some files to your working copy
2. You use the command 'svn add ' to add files to the be versioned
3. You commit using the command 'svn commit -m "message"'
4. When other users of your project update their working copy they find some files missing

You forgot to add certain files to the repository. It happens every now and then.

A lot of people have asked which is the best PHP framework out there. Which one suits a beginner? Which one best suits a company? How to convince a friend or boss to use Zend Framework?

In this article I present some information about Zend Framework. This is not a comparison of frameworks. When I started programming with PHP I used to roll out my own framework of sorts. As it happens to every other programmer I started exploring other's code. I started using few classes from PHPClasses.org and then from PEAR. I have been using components from Zend Framework since version 0.1. Today, at Binary Vibes we have built several applications using Zend Framework. It really has worked out well for us. We have also built a middle ware suite on top of Zend Framework which we tend to use for most of our projects. Therefore, my opinion about Zend Framework might be a bit biased. I try to be open to new ideas nevertheless.

Zend Technologies is the company that sponsors few developers to contribute to The Zend Engine, the core of PHP. The company together with the community develops the Zend Framework. Naturally, the quote, "from the makers of PHP" comes into being. One of the objectives of the Zend Framework is to promote best practices involved in application development.

A few months back, our friend Ben Scholzen wrote about setting up the environment variable in your Zend Framework powered application.

With the advent of Zend Framework 1.8 and the Zend_Application component the Zend Framework Quick Start guide recommends this setting.