AmiteshBharti's PHP Learning blog: February 2014

Monday, 3 February 2014

How to Become an Unrivaled PHP Developer?

The world of PHP development is as capricious and fickle as can be. New frameworks get added before we know it, and should we decide against keeping ourselves updated about it, soon we would run the risk of going obsolete. As developers, it is important that we remain in the very best of our league and continuously strive towards improving our current knowledge about the technology.

If you have been on the look out to learn new ways of improving your PHP knowledge and skills, you have landed on the right place. Here we shall discuss various ways in which you can improve your coding expertise and render better results to the applications that you develop. Please read ahead to know more.

Plan before you code

When was the last time you draw an outline of the structures or the modules or built a complete map before actually getting down to the coding? We are guessing almost never after the first few months of you turning into a full time PHP developer? Well no wonder you are here reading about the ways to improve your coding prowess. We don’t mean it as an insult, it is an excellent thing that you are, but the point here is to go old school. Perhaps one of the best things that we can offer you today is to get back to the old ways of coding, where you would plan the whole thing first, draw a functional diagram and revise the same before coding. So no more speeding in the dark, gracefully embrace the PHP development tasks with proper planning and execution of the same.

Make us of a Good Editor

A good editor goes a long way in ensuring that you write the correct codes and it takes you less time in doing so. Also, it make certain that errors are detected at an early stage in the development cycle, so that the same do not get carried forward eventually in the development life cycle. Below we shall mention various editors that you may use for your project and enjoy a health and intuitive virtual assistance.

Dreamweaver – an amazing product of Adobe, it also renders complete support to various database connections within the editor. And also include Notepad++, PHPDesigner, WebMatrix, Jedit amd PHPStorm etc. While some of these editors are free, others come at a premium price. Also, these editors work best with PHP IDE.

Use optimal comments in the codes that you develop

What do all of the great and passionate PHP developers have in common? Along with loving PHP they all have a strong affiliation towards commenting while coding. They often come up with codes which are well documented and have additional inputs in the form of comments, which makes the code easy to comprehend. However, one should try to steer clear of over commenting and should only comment as and where applicable, anticipated or necessary.

To understand the same, refer the example below:

Optimal Commenting	Over Commenting
<?php //Mysql connection; $host = “localhost”; $pass = “password”; $user = “root”; $db = “Database”; mysql_connect($host,$user,$pass); mysql_select_db($db); //End of Mysql connection ?>	<?php //Starting Mysql connection; $host = “localhost”;//hostname $pass = “password”;//mysql password $user = “root”;// mysql username $db = “Database”;//mysql database mysql_connect($host,$user,$pass);// mysql connection mysql_select_db($db);// selecting database //End of Mysql connection ?>

Use globally configured templates or static files

Another significantly strong and good PHP development practice followed by various developers is to come up with global template files that configure all of the web pages. As a mark of good practice, keep all of the logos, footers and navigation bar in a separate file. One may use the require_once command for including all of the web pages under one file.

In this way, the entire work required in updating the web pages will be notably reduced. Should you, as the developer, forget to take care of the same, your clients would have to open and edit each of the pages one after the other. Hence, clients should only Hire PHP Developers who are in the habit of creating global files.

Drop your coding in the online community

We wonder why so many developers do not share their work online. Okay, we get one obvious reasons that this may take away the intellect and concept behind the codes, but really, if you wish to improve your codes, feedback and criticism of fellow developers are important. Besides, make it a practice to submit your codes only in various reliable websites.

Be active in the online community

No man is an island, not in the world of PHP Development Services anyway. Hence, make it a practice to follow few of your favorite PHP bloggers and also to stay connected with the entire community of the passionate and earnest PHP developers. No matter how efficient you are with your coding styles, and regard less of how far you have come with the coding expertise, there is always a thing or two to be learned from the community. You can avoid the mistakes which others are making by keeping yourself updated about the global scenario – also, you can learn various new tricks and hacks and eventually you may also help others to fine tune their codes, help them learn from your experience and expertise.

Hence, mark your presence in the online community and go and prosper in the world of PHP.

Never ever say “I Quit”

Last thing that you need to know in order to survive and thrive in the world of competitive PHP development services is to have a “never say quit” attitude. If you quit now, the same would keep on bothering your forever, and you will not be able to get over the same. Instead go online and discuss; get back to your books and retry various codes; practice as hard as you possibly can and soon you would master the codes that used to trouble you in the past.

This was all that we had to offer you today. Please let us know how helpful did you find our tips in the comments section below.

Tutorial on how to store images in Mysql BLOB field

mysql

Sometimes in our web application we need the image upload feature. User can browse an image from his/her PC and clicks the upload/submit button to upload this image to the server. Basically this happens when we create web applications like photo gallery or user avatar selection etc.
There are two ways uploaded images can be stored in server- In server’s physical directory or in the database. Storing in physical directory is like copying the image from user’s machine to server directory. The advantage is that it only takes spaces from the server’s physical directory. But disadvantage is the extra headache of taking backup for website administrator. In database we can store the images easily and taking backup of database is sufficient. But here the disadvantage is that large volume of data might slow down the database operation.
In this tutorial we’ll discuss about image upload in mysql database and how to display it. In MySQL images or any files can be stored in a specific field called BLOB (Basic Large Object or Binary Large Object). BLOB fields are designed to store any binary files. There are 4 types of BLOB fields are available in MySQL: TINYBLOB, BLOB, MEDIUMBLOB and LONGBLOB. The descriptions are self explanatory.
In our sample PHP-MySQL code we’ll use only BLOB field. So open your phpmyadmin and execute this SQL to create the table.

CREATE TABLE `img_tbl` (
 `id` INT(4) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `img_name` VARCHAR(255) COLLATE latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
 `img_type` VARCHAR(4) COLLATE latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
 `img_size` INT(8) NOT NULL,
 `img_data` BLOB NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_general_ci;

`id` is the unique id for the table row. This is the primary key. `img_name` field stores the image name. `img_type` stores the information about the type of images like JPG or GIF etc. `img_size` holds the size of the image and img_data stores the actual image file.
Now we need a HTML file which will allow the user to browse and select the image to upload. Elow is the code snippet for this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> Image Upload to BLOB field </TITLE>
</HEAD>
 
<BODY>
<FORM NAME=”f1″ METHOD=”POST” ACTION=”upload.php” ENCTYPE=”multipart/form-data”>
<table>
<tr><td> Image Upload Page </td></tr>
<tr><td> <input type=”file” name=”imgfile”/></td></tr>
<tr><td> <input type=”submit” name=”submit” value=”Save”/> </td></tr>
</table>
</FORM>
</BODY>
</HTML>

Remember always put the ENCTYPE attribute to be “multipart/form-data” to make it post files to the server. If you forget to add this attribute in the HTML <form /> tag, then no files will be posted to the server. The HTML element that displays the file select dialog box to the user is the tag <input type=”file” name=”imgfile” />. When user submits the selected image to upload to the server the control goes to the PHP script upload.php which handles the upload of the image file to the server. The code snippet of upload.php is given below:
upload.php

<?
include “dbconfig.php”;
 
$dbconn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbusr, $dbpass) or die(”Error Occurred-”.mysql_error());
mysql_select_db($dbname, $dbconn) or die(”Unable to select database”);
 
if(isset($_REQUEST[submit]) && $_FILES[imgfile][size] > 0)
{
          $fileName       = $_FILES[imgfile][name]; // image file name
          $tmpName     = $_FILES[imgfile][tmp_name]; // name of the temporary stored file name
          $fileSize           = $_FILES[imgfile][size]; // size of the uploaded file
          $fileType         = $_FILES[imgfile][type]; // file type
 
          $fp                    = fopen($tmpName, ‘r’); // open a file handle of the temporary file
          $imgContent  = fread($fp, filesize($tmpName)); // read the temp file
          fclose($fp); // close the file handle
 
          $query = “INSERT INTO img_tbl (`img_name`, `img_type`, `img_size`, `img_data` )
                        VALUES (’$fileName’, ‘$fileType’, ‘$fileSize’, ‘$imgContent’)”;
 
          mysql_query($query) or die(’Error, query failed’);
          $imgid = mysql_insert_id(); // autoincrement id of the uploaded entry
          mysql_close($dbconn);
 
          echo "<br>Image successfully uploaded to database<br>";
          echo "<a href=\”viewimage.php?id=$imgid\”>View Image</a>";
 
}else die(”You have not selected any image”);
?>

dbconfig.php

<?
  $dbhost           =             “localhost”; // server host name
  $dbusr            =              “root”; // mysql username to connect
  $dbpass           =             “”; //password
  $dbname           =            ”compass”; //database name to select to
?>

Let me explain the script step by step. dbconfig.php script contains the database connection information like host name, userid and password and database name to select. The script upload.php first includes the dbconfig.php in order to include the database information because we’ll be executing the SQL to insert the uploaded image file into the database BLOB field.

$_FILES is the global variable which is created by PHP itself to hold the information about the uploaded file object. First the uploaded image is stored as a temp file in the temp folder of the server. The temp name can be retrieved from $_FILES[imgfile][tmp_name]. Now the temp image is read and stored in the BLOB field.

The next script will show you how you can download the image from the BLOB field of the MySQL database and display to the browser.
showimages.php

<?
    include “dbconfig.php”;
    $dbconn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbusr, $dbpass) or die(”Error Occurred-”.mysql_error());
    mysql_select_db($dbname, $dbconn) or die(”Unable to select database”);
 
    $query = “SELECT `id`, `img_name`, `img_type`, `img_size`, `img_data`
                     FROM img_tbl ORDER BY `id`”;
 
    $result = mysql_query($query) or die(’Error, query failed’);
 
    while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
               echo “<img src=\”viewimage.php?id=$row[id]\” width=\”55\” height=\”55\” /> <br/>”;
    }
 
    mysql_close($dbconn);
?>

This script is actually fetching all the data from database and printing the images in the <img src=””/> tag. So the content is written to the browser by the viewimage.php script.

viewimage.php

<?
if(isset($_REQUEST['id']))
{
   // get the file with the id from database
      include “dbconfig.php”;
      $dbconn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbusr, $dbpass) or die(”Error Occurred-”.mysql_error());
      mysql_select_db($dbname, $dbconn) or die(”Unable to select database”);
 
      $id    = $_ REQUEST ['id'];
      $query = “SELECT `img_name`, `img_type`, `img_size`, `img_data`
                       FROM img_tbl WHERE id = ‘$id’”;
 
      $result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
      list($name, $type, $size, $content) = mysql_fetch_array($result);
 
      header(”Content-length: $size”);
      header(”Content-type: $type”);
      print $content;
 
      mysql_close($dbconn);
}
?>

In this script the header () function is playing an important role. This function actually tells the browser what to do with the BLOB content. It takes several parameters like size, type etc. “Content-length” sets the size of the file, and “Content-type” sets the type of the file (JPG or GIF or PNG etc.). After setting the header, the actual BLOB content is written using print $content. The <img src=”” /> tag then is able to display the images.