Refulz PHP

Special characters in Regular Expressions – Part 1

Refulz — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 14:29:20 +0000

With this post, we continue to explore the Regular expressions. The first post of the Learning Regular Expression series introduced Regular Expressions. The first post covers the regular expression delimiters and the “i” pattern modifier. In the language of regular expression, there is a special meaning of certain characters. In the first post, the expressions matching Continue reading...

jQuery Plugin – Generate customizable tooltips with qTip2

Refulz — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 16:36:10 +0000

jQuery is the popular Open source JavaScript library that makes JavaScript development easy. The core functionality of the jQuery can be extended by using various plugins. Like jQuery, its plugins are also Open source and free to use. Various jQuery plugins can be used to add new features to the core jQuery library. qTip2 is one Continue reading...

Traits – Method Precedence and Conflict resolution

Refulz — Thu, 31 May 2012 03:48:34 +0000

In our previous post about the multiple and nested traits, we read how nested and multiple traits can be used in a class. In such cases, there is a possibility of the same method name existing in the trait, and the class using the trait. Furthermore, the same method name might also be present in Continue reading...

Fixed, Fluid and Responsive Grid CSS Frameworks

Refulz — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:36:25 +0000

When creating a website, the layout of the website is the most crucial decision. The layout decides how the information will be conveyed to the visitors. So, the layout has to be well structured and simple. To quickly generate standard structured layout, the web designers use the Grid systems. The Grid systems act as a reference Continue reading...

Regular Expressions – Starting from basics

Refulz — Mon, 28 May 2012 02:40:21 +0000

After taking a quick look at few common examples of regular expressions, we are taking another dig at regular expressions. The Regular expressions originated from the grep program of Unix systems. The grep program helps in working with strings and manipulating text. PHP has support for regular expressions. Before the release of PHP 5.3, PHP supported Continue reading...

Traits in PHP – Multiple and Nested Traits

Refulz — Sat, 26 May 2012 08:28:30 +0000

Traits is a good new addition to PHP language. In our series about the new features of PHP 5.4, we reviewed the concept of Traits in PHP. The introductory article talks about what the traits are and what is the general syntax of Traits in PHP. The second article attempts to explain why we need traits. Now, Continue reading...

Choosing a Blogging CMS

Refulz — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:47:27 +0000

We are running a Choose CMS series to identify the features of various categories of PHP CMS. As is evident from the title of series, the target is to choose the right CMS that suits our requirements. The first post of the series talks the qualities of a good CMS and identifies different genres of Continue reading...

PHP 5.4 – built-in web-server, closures, callable and other new features

Refulz — Sun, 13 May 2012 05:52:48 +0000

I am taking too long to close the New in PHP 5.4 series. PHP 5.4.3 is already released on 8th May 2012!!! Looking back, we are already familiar with the improvements in session handling, array syntax dereferencing and introduction of traits in PHP. Traits is an alternative approach for multiple inheritance. In another post, we Continue reading...

Adjusting content with the Overflow property of CSS

Refulz — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:25:22 +0000

On an HTML page, there are two types of container elements, i.e. block and Inline elements. In our article about the two types of HTML container elements, we noticed that both are essentially rectangular boxes. These container elements contain other HTML or text. The behaviour and position of the containers can be controlled by the Continue reading...

Configuring Session in Yii Framework –CCacheHttpSession

Refulz — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 06:03:50 +0000

Yii framework has three different possibilities for configuring the session. In the Yii Session series, we are already familiar with the session configuration by using the regular server side session and the database based session handling. This is the last article of the series and it talks about the session handling by using cache as Continue reading...

Unified Event Handling API in jQuery – .live() Vs .on()

Refulz — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:31:28 +0000

We have been reading about the unified event handling model that brings the event handling under two main methods, i.e. .on() and .off() methods. In the first post of the Unified Event Handling Series, we compared the .on() method with the .bind() method and saw how the .on() method replaces the .bind() method. In the Continue reading...

Yii Framework – Scenarios for Conditional Multiple Validation Rules

Refulz — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:08:25 +0000

I am yet to write the last article of the Yii Session series. I just decided to write something about the scenarios in the Validation feature of Yii framework. Scenarios are a very useful tool for adding different validations rules for different cases on the same model. In a real life situation, you would require one Continue reading...

Joomla 2.5 is here – What’s New?

Refulz — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 10:53:37 +0000

Joomla and Drupal are the most popular General Purpose CMS written in PHP. Like Drupal, Joomla tried to innovate by stretching its wings beyond the scope of a regular CMS. The separation of the Joomla Platform from Joomla CMS was an interesting step in this direction. However, Joomla 1.7 was just a stepping stone towards Continue reading...

Overloading – The PHP Way

Refulz — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:47:40 +0000

In terms of regular OOPS concept, Overloading means the ability to have multiple methods having same signatures but with different number and/or type of arguments. However, PHP’s interpretation of overloading is different than other Object Oriented languages like Java. In PHP, overloading is the ability to add properties and methods at the runtime. This is Continue reading...

Unified Event Handling API in jQuery – .delegate() Vs .on()

Refulz — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:47:50 +0000

JavaScript is an event driven language. Most part of the JavaScript code is event driven. The page load, the click of a button or a link, moving mouse cursor, everything is an event. So, handling of events is a very important topic and jQuery 1.7 has new methods to handle all the events in a Continue reading...

Configuring Session in Yii Framework – CDbHttpSession

Refulz — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:40:01 +0000

The first post of the series explained the storing of the session data in the files using the CHttpSession component. This is the default method for managing sessions. However, saving the session in database is considered to give be a better option for handling sessions. In a Yii application, you can store the user session in Continue reading...

Unified Event Handling API in jQuery – .bind() Vs .on()

Refulz — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 03:14:30 +0000

In the article about the new features in jQuery 1.7, we read about the new .on() event that replaces the .bind(), .live() and .delegate() events. jQuery had a strong Event Handling mechanism with a set of methods for handling various events. The number of these event handlers kept growing with each new release and the Continue reading...

Configuring Session in Yii Framework – CHttpSession

Refulz — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:56:50 +0000

Sessions are used to store the user information on the server. The information is used primarily for identifying the user on subsequent accesses. Thus, we can say that the sessions maintain the state in a web application. Sessions create a Unique ID for each visitor and store the information based on this UID. The session Continue reading...

The __call Method – Call Inaccessible and Non-existent Methods

Refulz — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 02:48:27 +0000

Among so many on-going topics, today we will continue with the Magic methods series. We have already read about __toString(), __get() and __set() methods. A __get() method is invoked when a call is made to an inaccessible property of a class. Drawing similarity with the __get() method, a __call() method is invoked when a code Continue reading...

Automatically add Vendor specific CSS3 Properties – CssFx.js

Refulz — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:47:29 +0000

Almost a year back, we read about the Vendor specific CSS properties. The vendor specific properties are included primarily to test new CSS features in the browsers. Once the feature is tested and stable, then a generic CSS property replaces these vendor specific properties. These days the CSS3 properties are being extensively tested across various Continue reading...

Traits in PHP 5.4 – Why we need Traits

Refulz — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 02:45:28 +0000

Traits is one major addition to PHP. We read an introductory article about Traits in PHP 5.4. In the post, we saw an example code which only resembles single inheritance. So, what is the actual purpose of Traits and why do we need to use Traits in our code. Suppose a website has two types of Continue reading...

Traits in PHP 5.4 – Introduction

Refulz — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 15:05:32 +0000

The languages like C++ and Python allow the maximum reusability of the code by allowing multiple inheritance of classes. Mixins is an alternative for increasing code re-usability in the languages that don’t support inheritance. Ruby and Ext JS 4 have Mixins to mix the functionality of one or more classes without using inheritance. We read about the introduction Continue reading...

DOM Insertion with jQuery – .prepend() and .prependTo() Methods

Refulz — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 03:32:42 +0000

There are various options to insert new DOM elements using jQuery. In the first post of the DOM Insertion series, we read about .append() and .appendTo() methods. The two methods add the new DOM element as the last child of the DOM elements matched by jQuery filter. The two methods produce same results, but differ Continue reading...

CodeLobster PHP Edition – Innovative IDE for PHP Development

Refulz — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 15:00:13 +0000

A good Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is the primary tool that facilitates the rapid development. An IDE provides features like syntax highlighting, code autocomplete, class reference and debugging etc. Most of the IDEs for Windows OS are not free to use and you are supposed to buy license to use them. CodeLobster PHP Edition is Continue reading...

Yii Framework – Application Skeleton Continued

Refulz — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:52:54 +0000

In the concluding section of the first post of Yii Application skeleton, we used the webapp command to generate the application skeleton. The application skeleton is the way the framework expects the developers to organize their code into different files ad directories. The framework would expect view files to be saved in a certain directory Continue reading...

Yii Framework – Application Skeleton

Refulz — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:05:55 +0000

About a year back, we read about some of the emerging lightweight PHP frameworks. Yii was one of the frameworks in that list. Since, then Yii framework has grown from strength to strength. Yii is the brainchild of Qiang Xue, the noted developer behind another popular Prado framework. Yii, pronounced as i:, stands for easy, Continue reading...

Styling HTML – ID vs Class

Refulz — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:19:33 +0000

We had an exhaustive series explaining DOM selectors and filters with jQuery. We have already seen how different methods of jQuery can be used to modify the style of a web page. Today, we will start reading about the basics of HTML styling with CSS. There are various ways of selecting and filtering DOM elements Continue reading...

phpThumb – Generate Thumbnails on the Fly

Refulz — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 02:05:01 +0000

Different sizes of the same image are often required on different webpages of a website. At some places, you might show full size image while other webpages will need a thumbnail size display. Working with image sizes can be a challenge because of the calculations involved for maintaining aspect ratios. You might want to resize Continue reading...

Array Syntax and Dereferencing in PHP5.4

Refulz — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 07:25:00 +0000

PHP saw a major facelift with the release of PHP 5.3 on 1st July 2009. PHP 6 was supposed to be the next major release of the popular web development language. However, some issues with Unicode delayed PHP 6 and most of the features of PHP 6 were moved to PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 was Continue reading...

How to select multiple DOM elements with jQuery

Refulz — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:08:43 +0000

We had a series of articles explaining various ways of selecting the DOM elements with jQuery. We read about basic and hierarchical selectors, DOM filters and a special case of form filters. We saw an example of multiple selections in the post about the basic and hierarchical selectors. It is a very common requirement to Continue reading...

Auto Getters and Setters in Ext JS 4

Refulz — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:18:02 +0000

Having read about the concept of Mutator and Accessor methods, today we will relate the concept to Ext JS 4. In the earlier versions of Ext JS, there was no in-built support for getter and setter methods. One had to write the getter and setter functions for common tasks like getting and setting a Window Continue reading...

Mutator and Accessor Methods in PHP

Refulz — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 07:05:43 +0000

In Object Oriented Programming, a mutator method is also called a setter and an accessor method is called getter. The common use of a mutator method is to initialise the value of member variables of a class. Complementing the mutator method, the accessor method is used to get the value of the private data members. Using Continue reading...

CakePHP – Saving alias in ACO and ARO

Refulz — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:13:26 +0000

After doing the configuration for the CakePHP Acl, I found it strange that the the alias names were not setting in either of the two list tables. The AclBehavior doesn’t set the alias values in the ACO and ARO tables. However, the alias values are used to set and check the permissions. Later, I realized Continue reading...

Adding ARO and ACO – Adding AclBehavior

Refulz — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:28:06 +0000

We have already set up Acl tables in the database and setup our model with the suitable definition of parentNode() method. Now, we move on to add the AclBehavior to the model. This step will start adding ACOs and AROs without any additional code to insert the rows into the respective tables. The way we had Continue reading...

Adding AROs and ACOs – parentNode() Method

Refulz — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 09:33:33 +0000

Since last few days, we are reading about the AclComponent of CakePHP and how it provides a simple mechanism for the handling of user permissions over various resources on a website. After creating the required database tables and including the Acl Component into our application, now we start the real thing. We start defining permissions Continue reading...

CakePHP AclComponent – ACOs, AROs and Mapping

Refulz — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 04:30:39 +0000

Continuing with Access Control Lists, we will read about the two Access Control Lists and their mapping. The Access Request Objects (AROs) are a list of the things that seek permissions and the Access Control Objects (ACOs) are the resources on which permissions are required. Both the lists are maintained in the tow tables, namely Continue reading...

CakePHP Access Control Lists

Refulz — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:49:20 +0000

In every CMS, there are going to be users having different levels of permissions. Say in a forum, there are members, moderators and admins. Each category of users has a certain set of actions that the user is allowed to perform. A member can’t moderate the content like a moderator. There is a mechanism to Continue reading...

Send SMS with PHP 5+ – Integrate TextMagic SMS Gateway

Refulz — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 13:48:09 +0000

Sometime back, we introduced the TextMagic SMS Gateway. The API supports more than 700 mobile networks across 200 countries. TextMagic offers two-way integration with email and you can send, receive and manage your SMS messages from a web browser as well as PC and Mac software. On top of these features, the TextMagic SMS API Continue reading...

Drupal Taxonomy

Refulz — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:45:22 +0000

After a series introducing Drupal terminology, we move on to Drupal Taxonomy. In the Part 1 of the series, we defined Taxonomy as the Drupal’s way of organizing the content into categories. Each Taxonomy has its own vocabulary. You can define vocabulary and add terms to it. The case can be compared to any sphere Continue reading...

DOM Insertion with jQuery – .append() and .appendTo()

Refulz — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:03:47 +0000

jQuery makes it really easy to add new stuff to existing DOM elements. There are various methods provided in jQuery to perform different types of insertions. The .append() is one such jQuery method that inserts the specified content to the end of each element in the set of elements matched by the jQuery filter. The Continue reading...

The __set() Method – Writing Inaccessible Properties

Refulz — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:44:13 +0000

The __get() method is called when data from an undeclared/inaccessible property is to be read. The __set() magic method complements the __get() method. The __set() method is called when data is to be assigned to an inaccessible property of a class. [php]class Employee { public $name; private $_values = array(); public function __set($name, $valuel) { $this->_values[$name] = $value; } public function __get($name) Continue reading...

Other changes in CakePHP 2

Refulz — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:13:32 +0000

Today, I am continuing with the features of CakePHP 2.0. We already read about the Lazy loading, CakeRequest and CakeResponse models, CakeEmail and PSR-0 Standard Compliance. In a separate post, we will also try to explore these standards. In today’s post, we will explore other changes and improvements that CakePHP team has made in the version 2 of the popular Continue reading...

CakePHP evolves to 2.0

Refulz — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:50:11 +0000

I wasn’t using CakePHP since past 6-8 months. I was a big fan of the framework but it seemed heavy to me. Among other issues, the most crucial factor was building and loading model associations. The process required time and was still high on resource consumption. Few days back, I came back to see how Continue reading...

The __toString() Method – Objects as Strings

Refulz — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:17:40 +0000

We started the study of PHP magic methods by learning about __get() magic method. All the names of magic methods are reserved and cannot be used for any other purpose. Moreover, all functions starting with double underscore (__) are reserved for an object in PHP. A very common example of magic methods is constructor and Continue reading...

Ext JS 4 Class System – Mixins

Refulz — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:04:56 +0000

We have started reading how Ext JS 4 revolutionized the UI Development. After an overview of the Ext JS 4 Application Architecture, we went on to reading the Ext JS 4 Class System, starting with Creating and Extending a Class. Among many new concepts, Mixins configuration is a new addition to the Ext JS 4 Class System. Mixins Continue reading...

New in PHP 5.4 – Improvements in Session Extension

Refulz — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:47:53 +0000

The PHP 5.4 RC6 was released on 24th Jan 2012. The next release is expected on 2nd Feb 2012. The version is not final and thus, not recommended for production use. However, there are many interesting improvements that are already a part of the RC6 version. PHP 5.4 includes the best parts of the PHP Continue reading...

CSS Box Model – Margins and Padding

Refulz — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:54:06 +0000

The CSS Box Model refers to the content contained in a padded box having certain border and margin property values. CSS provides two options to add space between the HTML block elements. The two properties for defining the spacing are padding and margin. Both are meant to add space between the HTML block elements. Yet, Continue reading...

Custom Events in jQuery

Refulz — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:43:58 +0000

JavaScript recognizes many DOM events. There are many standard JavaScript events that are supported in popular libraries like jQuery. By standard events, we mean the browser events, DOM events and page load events. The most common examples of such events are click and mouseover events. Events are used to trigger certain actions. Very often you need to define some Continue reading...

What is CSS Reset?

Refulz — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:45:52 +0000

Every browser has a default stylesheet that it uses while rendering the content. These styles are useful in setting some kind of look for a plain HTML page. For example, an anchor tag always gets blue font color on most browsers. The user agent stylesheet is responsible for this. However, there are no defined standards Continue reading...

The __get() Method – Reading Undeclared Properties

Refulz — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:37:05 +0000

Magic methods are the PHP methods that get fired in response to particular PHP events. For unique identity, the name of each magic method begins with double underscore (__). Each magic method is a member function that is available to all instances of a class. So, before calling any magic method, it should be defined as Continue reading...