Recently I was contacted by Richard from Packt Publication to review their new book “Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.3.x for Effective MySQL Management“. Being a PHP-MySQL developer and an avid reader of technical books myself, I instantly agreed.

It took me a bit longer to read it then I had expected. At first, I had decided to just skim through the important chapters but it was interesting enough to change my decision. I then read all chapters one by one and realized that despite using phpMyAdmin on a daily basis, there is so much more to it that we developers are unaware of.

The author of this book is Marc Delisle, who is contributing to this project for more then 12 years. The book contains 19 chapters and 2 appendices. In my opinion the book can be divided broadly into 5 parts.

Chapter 1 to Chapter 3
I will say these warm up chapters as they cover installation, configuration and overview of phpMyAdmin interface in detail. Experienced users may skip these but beginners should go through each one of them.

Chapter 4 to Chapter 7
These 4 chapters explain through data management i.e. creating database and table structures and import/export of data.

Chapter 8 to Chapter 12
You will find all information on querying tables(including multiple table queries), table and database operations, creating relations and keys etc. I liked these chapters the most.

Chapter 13 to Chapter 15
These chapters cover data synchronization, bookmarking and generation of printable reports and schemas from phpMyAdmin. Very useful chapters indeed, in case you want to synchronize data between 2 servers or you want the schemas printed or available in pdf format.

Chapter 16 to Chapter 19
Chapters for advanced and experienced users, these explain data transformation, creating views, stored procedures, executing triggers etc. Chapter 18 is specifically for versioning and tracking database changes. Final chapter is all about administering the MySQL server with phpMyAdmin. All of these chapters are extremely useful.

Conclusion

Each chapter is explained in a detailed manner which sometimes seems too much, but thats my perspective, someone who has been using phpMyAdmin for more then 5-6 years now. Beginner and intermediate users will find those details useful and easy to understand.

Overall, I liked the book and learned about few things I did not know even existed. I will definitely recommend it. For new users of phpMyAdmin, it starts from beginner level and explains each task by breaking it down in steps. More advanced users may skip initial 5-6 chapters but later chapters will be definitely helpful for them.

You can see more details on this book at Packt’s website at this link and buy at either Packt website or amazon.

This post contains some of the useful and interesting tech links I found during last week. To keep up to date with the latest information, subscribe to the feed or follow me on twitter @v08i.

How to write a simple application on jQuery Mobile : http://goo.gl/5DpOO

50 Free Tools and Apps for Web Designers and Developers : http://goo.gl/6YjNL

10 Useful jQuery Plugins for Images : http://goo.gl/VTk1F

20 less known Open Source PHP CMS-es : http://goo.gl/cM6f3

11 More Things I Learned From the jQuery Source : http://goo.gl/2zBh7

CSSReset : All the most common CSS Reset scripts in one place : http://goo.gl/8OV9E

JavaScript Slider – TinySlider 2 : http://goo.gl/526cL

I have combined the 2 previous posts for expanding and shortening goo.gl URLs and have created a small class for it. Below is the download link for the class.

Expanding a URL

<?php
include('GAPIClass.php');

$objAPI = new GAPIClass('your_api_key_here');
$result = $objAPI->expand('http://goo.gl/WlFX');
if(FALSE === $result)
{
	echo $objAPI->error;
}
else
{
	echo 'Long URL:'.$result;
}
?>

Shorten A URL

<?php
include('GAPIClass.php');

$objAPI = new GAPIClass('your_api_key_here');
$result = $objAPI->shorten('https://www.packtpub.com/php-jquery-cookbook-to-create-interactive-web-applications/book');

if(FALSE === $result)
{
	echo $objAPI->error;
}
else
{
	echo 'Short URL:'.$result;
}
?>

As I have mentioned earlier that Google recommends an API key. The class has a flag variable called keyWarning. By default it is true and it will show the following warning message if you do not pass an API key while instantiating the class:

Currently you are not using an API key. It is recommended that you use one. Click here to learn more about the API key

To turn this notification off, just use this line:

$objAPI->keyWarning = false;

If you are getting an internal server error 500 after installing wordpress while accessing admin, here is the fix.

Most likely it is caused by low memory limit on your server. To fix it, create a new file named php.ini in you wp-admin directory and put the following line in it.

memory_limit = 64M

Save the file, then reload the admin page and it will work fine.

In past 2 posts you saw how short URLs can be expanded using the Google URL shortener API. This post shows how URLs can be shortened using this API.

API key is not mandatory for test purpose. Use this link to get an API key.

For shortening URLs, 2 points must be noted. First, a HTTP POST is required and the post data should be in JSON format. Here is the code:

//This is the URL you want to shorten
$longUrl = 'https://www.packtpub.com/php-jquery-cookbook-to-create-interactive-web-applications/book';
$apiKey = 'your_api_key_here';
//Get API key from : http://code.google.com/apis/console/

$postData = array('longUrl' => $longUrl, 'key' => $apiKey);
$jsonData = json_encode($postData);

$curlObj = curl_init();

curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://www.googleapis.com/urlshortener/v1/url');
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-type:application/json'));
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $jsonData);

$response = curl_exec($curlObj);

//change the response json string to object
$json = json_decode($response);

curl_close($curlObj);

echo 'Shortened URL is: '.$json->id;

Here is the JSON response from Google:

{
 "kind": "urlshortener#url",
 "id": "http://goo.gl/lBfOH",
 "longUrl": "https://www.packtpub.com/php-jquery-cookbook-to-create-interactive-web-applications/book"
}

You can also read these:

• PHP class for expanding and shortening URLs using Google URL shortener API
• Expanding URLs using cURL
• Expand URLs using file_get_contents

Yesterday I wrote this post explaining how short goo.gl URLs can be expanded using the newly launched goo.gl API. In that code we used php function get_file_contents to get the response from API.

How about implementing the same functionality using cURL now? If you have libcurl support installed with PHP, you are ready to use the cURL functions of PHP.

Here is the code. API key is not mandatory but Google recommends that you use one. It will increase your per day usage limits too. Follow this link to get an API key.

$shortUrl = 'http://goo.gl/WlFX';
$apiKey = 'your_api_key_here';

$curlObj = curl_init();

curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://www.googleapis.com/urlshortener/v1/url?shortUrl='.$shortUrl.'&key='.$apiKey);
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);

$response = curl_exec($curlObj);

curl_close($curlObj);
$json = json_decode($response);

if($json->status === "OK")
{
	echo $json->longUrl;
}
else
{
	echo 'Bad luck.';
}

And here is the full JSON response:

{
 "kind": "urlshortener#url",
 "id": "http://goo.gl/WlFX",
 "longUrl": "https://www.packtpub.com/php-jquery-cookbook-to-create-interactive-web-applications/book",
 "status": "OK"
}

Am important point to note. Since the API is on https, set the value for CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to false. This will stop cURL from verifying the SSL certificate.

Yesterday. google launched an API for its URL shortening service http://goo.gl. Using this API developers will be able to expand/shorten URLs and get a user’s analytics and history programmaticaly.

Below is a small snippet of PHP code that expands a short URL. The response comes in JSON format, so we will use the json_decode function to convert it to object.

$shortUrl = 'http://goo.gl/WlFX';
$response = file_get_contents('https://www.googleapis.com/urlshortener/v1/url?shortUrl='.$shortUrl);
$json = json_decode($response);

if($json->status === "OK")
{
	echo $json->longUrl;
}
else
{
	echo 'Bad luck.';
}

Here is the full successfull response in JSON format.

{
 "kind": "urlshortener#url",
 "id": "http://goo.gl/WlFX",
 "longUrl": "https://www.packtpub.com/php-jquery-cookbook-to-create-interactive-web-applications/book",
 "status": "OK"
}

Finally, note that Google recommends the use of an API key. You can visit this link to read more about key and get a key from this link.

After using the key, your URL will look like the following:

$shortUrl = 'http://goo.gl/WlFX';
$apiKey = 'your_key_here';
$response = file_get_contents('https://www.googleapis.com/urlshortener/v1/url?shortUrl='.$shortUrl.'&key='.$apiKey);

Every web application requires configuration files which contain values that are used throughout the application. In this post we will look at some of the methods developers use to define configuration settings and also what should be avoided.

The ugly way

I have seen many many developers do this and am myself guilty of doing it during my initial coding days. Consider the following code.

//development
	define("HOST", "localhost");
	define("DATABASE_USER", "root");
	define("DATABASE_PASSWORD", "something");
	define("DATABASE_NAME", "UJNEEA");
	define('FILE_UPLOAD_PATH', 'C:/wamp/www/project/uploads/');

/*
	//production
	define("HOST", "localhost");
	define("DATABASE_USER", "username");
	define("DATABASE_PASSWORD", "password");
	define("DATABASE_NAME", "liveDB");
	define('FILE_UPLOAD_PATH', '/home/project/public_html/uploads/');
*/

Developers define 2 sets of same variables for each environment. First set is for development environment while second is for production. To switch the configuration developer must comment all other sets and uncomment the desired one. This is untidy and error prone. Never ever use this in your applications.

Using a flag

Above method can be significantly improved by using a variable as a flag. The example is given below.

define ('DEVELOPMENT', true);

if(DEVELOPMENT)
{
	define("HOST", "localhost");
	define("DATABASE_USER", "root");
	define("DATABASE_PASSWORD", "something");
	define("DATABASE_NAME", "myDB");
	define('FILE_UPLOAD_PATH', 'C:/wamp/www/project/uploads/');
}
else
{
	define("HOST", "localhost");
	define("DATABASE_USER", "username");
	define("DATABASE_PASSWORD", "password");
	define("DATABASE_NAME", "liveDB");
	define('FILE_UPLOAD_PATH', '/home/project/public_html/uploads/');
}

Define a variable which will tell whether it is a development environment or a production one. Now when you have to switch environments, you do not have to do that comment/uncomment stuff. Just set the flag to true or false and PHP will pick the values accordingly.

Using multi-dimensional arrays

If you have used CodeIgniter, you must be familiar with this concept. Just use multi-dimensional arrays. Here is the explanation from CodeIgniter documentation itself.

“The reason we use a multi-dimensional array rather than a more simple one is to permit you to optionally store multiple sets of connection values. If, for example, you run multiple environments (development, production, test, etc.) under a single installation, you can set up a connection group for each, then switch between groups as needed.”

$active_group = "test";

$db['default']['hostname'] = "localhost";
$db['default']['username'] = "root";
$db['default']['password'] = "pass";
$db['default']['database'] = "someDB";
$db['default']['file_upload_path'] = "C:/wamp/www/project/uploads/'";

$db['test']['hostname'] = "otherHost";
$db['test']['username'] = "root";
$db['test']['password'] = "password";
$db['test']['database'] = "hci";
$db['test']['file_upload_path'] = "C:/wamp/www/project/uploads/'";

$db['staging']['hostname'] = "evenAnotherHost";
$db['staging']['username'] = "root";
$db['staging']['password'] = "password";
$db['staging']['database'] = "dbname";
$db['staging']['file_upload_path'] = "E:/public_html/project/uploads/'";

In this method, you only have to set the value of variable $active_group to whatever environment you wish to point to. This is much cleaner and configuration for more then 2 environments can be defined.

Other methods

There are many more ways you can define your configuration files. Some of them include:

• ini files
• XML
• YAML

I will explain parsing the ini file using parse_ini_file function in an upcoming article.

Thanks for reading.

This post contains some of the useful and interesting tech links I found during this week. To keep up to date with the latest information, subscribe to the feed or  follow me on twitter @v08i

jQuery 1.4.3 Offline Learning Kit – http://goo.gl/zoAb5

What features would you like to have in PHP? – http://goo.gl/Q84B9

35 Useful and Time saving Firefox Add-Ons – http://goo.gl/ZQQhF

Beware the Trailing Comma of Death – http://goo.gl/P3LqX

2010: Yet another great year for PHP – http://goo.gl/WO0uY

The major incidents on the Internet in 2010 – http://goo.gl/lbfM1

Ten Alternative CMS Options to WordPress – http://goo.gl/1q9ly

3 Lightweight Alternatives to phpMyAdmin – http://goo.gl/izsZc

Rocking Out With CoffeeScript – http://goo.gl/5FCYl

50 Best jQuery Techniques 2010 – http://goo.gl/4TfBF

Here is one more sample chapter from my book. It explains reading, writing and editing XML files with PHP and jQuery. Below are the chapter contents.

• Loading XML from files and strings using SimpleXML
• Accessing elements and attributes using SimpleXML
• Searching elements using XPath
• Reading an XML using DOM extension
• Creating an XML using DOM extension
• Modifying an XML using DOM extension
• Parsing XML with jQuery

To read the full chapter follow this link - https://www.packtpub.com/article/working-with-xml-documents

You can also read the chapter on using JSON with PHP and jQuery.