Silvia’s Blog

Since I started to be a PHP fan I’ve always wanted to be at this PHP Conferences. Finally I’m able to go to my first one (in London) and for those who are interested here is the link.

http://www.phpconference.co.uk/

The Conference will take place at the Olympia Conference Centre, London, the 27th of February. Definitely there are some talks I really want to look at:

The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades!

by Aral Balkan

This is an awesome time to be a developer! The distinction between rich-client web, desktop, and mobile applications is narrowing. Web developers can now build cross-platform desktop apps using web technologies. Mac developers can now develop for the sexiest mobile phone on earth, and you have access to APIs and services that let you map the world, create real-time, multi-user experiences, and augment and expand reality in previously unimaginable ways.

Are you excited yet? You’ve got dynamic, rapid languages and frameworks like Python, Django, PHP, Rails, Objective-C and mature development environments like XCode, Visual Studio, and Eclipse. You have commodity hardware, commodity software, and free access to more information at your fingertips than has ever been available. And you have access to infinitely-scalable utility computing resources the likes of which only the largest corporations have hitherto been able to afford.

Yes, this is definitely a wonderful time to a be a developer. Join Aral as he shares with you the tools, technologies, and trends that excite him the most in 2009 and beyond. Get inspired, get motivated, then go out and build the next great thing to add your own page to this most exciting chapter in the history of the Internet.

Of Lambda Functions, Closures and Traits

by Sebastian Bergmann

Lambda functions and closures allow the quick definition of throw-away functions (for use with array_map(), for instance) that are not used elsewhere. Traits reduce some limitations of single inheritance by enabling the reuse method sets freely in several independent classes. This talk introduces the audience to the implementation of lambda functions, closures, and traits for PHP 5.4.

PHP powering Social Media

by Markus Franz

Social media services have become an integral part of the World Wide Web, and PHP is the premier application language for dynamic web applications. This talk shows how both worlds go together:

• How does PHP help Web 2.0 to evolve?
• What makes PHP so great for new web services?
• Who has migrated from proprietary technologies for social media to PHP?

This is an introduction to media services and their specific project requirements, including case studies from large enterprises.

I hope to get some good stuffs to tell after this conference! I’m crossing fingers See you then…

There is a lot of information about how to deal with pagination of multiple records. The “issue” comes when you have to use it on different tables, which means you have to write different functions for each one, right? not necessarily!

I will show you my solution reusing the same function no matter what table are you paginating.

1.- Get the column names of the table and return an array within the names:

function getColumnsNames($tableName){
 
$query = "SELECT COLUMN_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Columns
                where TABLE_NAME = '$tableName'";
$this->db->query($query);
if($this->db->num_rows()!=0){
		$i=-1;
		while($this->db->next_record()){
	                 $i++;
                        $columnsNamesArray[$i] = $this->db->Record["COLUMN_NAME"];
               }
                return $columnsNamesArray;
      }
     else
	  return false;
   }

2.- Implementation of the pagination itself for any table:

function pagination($tableName, $columnsNames, $recordSize, 
                           $startIndex, $orderBy, $orderMode){			 
 
        $query = "SELECT * 
                       FROM $tableName 
                       ORDER BY $orderBy $orderMode 
                       LIMIT $startIndex,$recordSize";				 			
	$this->db->query($query);				 
	if($this->db->num_rows()!=0){  
		$t = -1;
		while($this->db->next_record()){	
			$t++;
			foreach($columnsNames as $key => $name){
				$fieldValuesArray[$name] = $this->db->Record[$name];								  	
	 		}
			$finalResultArray[$t] = $fieldValuesArray;
			unset($fieldValuesArray);										
		}
		return $finalResultArray;
	}
	else{			  
	    return false;		
        }
}	
 
}

3.- Calling final function to invoke the two previous functions:

function getPagination($tableName, $recordSize, $startIndex, $orderBy, $orderMode){
 
$columns = $this->getColumnsNames($tableName);
return $this->pagination($tableName, $columns, $recordSize, 
                                    $startIndex, $orderBy, $orderMode);
}

Example: $this->getPagination(”USERS”, 100, 0, “USR_ID”, “ASC”);

And voila!

To save some lines of code when returning a big amount of DB fields (over 10 is big for me :)) try something like this:

function getFieldsValues($db_record){
    foreach($db_record as $key => $value){
       if(!is_numeric($key))  $resultArray[$key] = $value;
     }
     return $resultArray;
}

Basically what it does is to take each record (parameter) and goes through it to get all the fields with their respective values, putting them into an array (resultArray).