FEBRUARY 2004 VOLUME III - ISSUE 2 FEBRUARY 2004 VOLUME III - ISSUE 2 www.phparch.com The Magazine For PHP Professionals Plus: Tips & Tricks, Security Corner, Product Reviews and much more php| Cruise March 1 st - March 5 th 2004 See inside for details Get Ready For Caching Techniques for the PHP Developer Offline News Management with PHP-GTK EXtending PHPEXtending PHP Handling PHP Arrays from CHandling PHP Arrays from C The Need for Speed Writing More efficient PHP scripts PROFILING PHPPROFILING PHP Understand and optimize your code Writing an riting an SMSSMS Gateway ateway with ith PHPPHP and and Gnokiinokii ] ] Visit us at www .php arch.com/cruise for more details. php| Cruise March 1 st - March 5 th 2004 Andrei Zmievski - Andrei's Regex Clinic, James Cox - XML for the Masses, Wez Furlong - Extending PHP, Stuart Herbert - Safe and Advanced Error Handling in PHP5, Peter James - mod_rewrite: From Zero to Hero, George Schlossnagle - Profiling PHP, Ilia Alshanetsky - Programming Web Services, John Coggeshall - Mastering PDFLib, Jason Sweat - Data Caching Techniques <? ?> We’ve got you covered, from port to sockets. Port Canaveral • Coco Cay • Nassau Plus: Stream socket programming, debugging techniques, writing high-performance code, data mining, PHP 101, safe and advanced error handling in PHP5, programming smarty, and much, much more! In partnership with Zend Technologies Zend Studio 3.0 is the official PHP IDE of php|cruise Features php| Crui se Traditional PHP Conference* Conference Pass $ 899.99 ** $ 1,150.00 Hotel Included ($ 400.00) Meals Included*** ($ 200.00) Totals: $ 899.99 $1,750.00 You Save $ 850 * Based on average of two major PHP conferences ** Based on interior stateroom, double occupancy *** Alcohol and carbonated beverages not included ENJOY LEARNING PHP IN A FUN AND EXCITING ENVIRONMENT—AND SAVE A BUNDLE! Signup deadline: Feb 15, 2004 5 Editorial 6 What’s New! 37 Product Review SQLyog 58 Product Review 2003 Quebec PHP Conference DVD by Marco Tabini 61 Security Corner by Chris Shiflett 65 Tips & Tricks By John W. Holmes 68 e x i t ( 0 ) ; Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? By Marco Tabini 9 Write SMS Applications With PHP and Gnokii by Eric Persson 16 Offline Content Management with PHP-GTK by Morgan Tocker 23 Writing PHP Extensions: Managing Arrays by Wez Furlong 28 The Need For Speed Optimizing your PHP Applications by Ilia Alshanetsky 41 Profiling PHP Applications by George Schlossnagle 51 Caching Techniques for the PHP Developer by Bruno Pedro 3 February 2004 ● PHP Architect ● www.phparch.com TABLE OF CONTENTS II NN DD EE XX II NN DD EE XX php|architect Features Departments Existing subscribers can upgrade to the Print edition and save! Login to your account for more details. NEW! NEW! *By signing this order form, you agree that we will charge your account in Canadian dollars for the “CAD” amounts indicated above. Because of fluctuations in the exchange rates, the actual amount charged in your currency on your credit card statement may vary slightly. **Offer available only in conjunction with the purchase of a print subscription. 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Signature: Date: To subscribe via snail mail - please detach/copy this form, fill it out and mail to the address above or fax to +1-416-630-5057 php|architect The Magazine For PHP Professionals YYoouu’’llll nneevveerr kknnooww wwhhaatt wwee’’llll ccoommee uupp wwiitthh nneexxtt February 2004 ● PHP Architect ● www.phparch.com EE DD II TT OO RR II AA LL RR AA NN TT SS php|architect Volume III - Issue 2 February, 2004 Publisher Marco Tabini Editorial Team Arbi Arzoumani Peter MacIntyre Eddie Peloke Graphics & Layout Arbi Arzoumani Managing Editor Emanuela Corso Director of Marketing J. Scott Johnson scott@phparch.com Account Executive Shelley Johnston shelley@phparch.com Authors Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, John Holmes, Bruno Pedro, Eric Persson, George Schlossnagle, Chris Shiflett, Morgan Tocker php|architect (ISSN 1709-7169) is published twelve times a year by Marco Tabini & Associates, Inc., P.O. Box 54526, 1771 Avenue Road, Toronto, ON M5M 4N5, Canada. Although all possible care has been placed in assuring the accuracy of the contents of this magazine, including all associated source code, listings and figures, the publisher assumes no responsibilities with regards of use of the information contained herein or in all asso- ciated material. Contact Information: General mailbox: info@phparch.com Editorial: editors@phparch.com Subscriptions: subs@phparch.com Sales & advertising: sales@phparch.com Technical support: support@phparch.com Copyright © 2003-2004 Marco Tabini & Associates, Inc. — All Rights Reserved W elcome to the February 2004 issue of php|architect. As I write this, I'm sitting in my office—about forty degrees Celsius warmer than outside and, therefore, a much better place to work in that that the local park—suffering from an awful cold and sitting by a collection of (clean) tissues discreetly stashed on my desk, ready for use. As you can expect, I'm not particularly happy about either fact (make that three facts—the cold outside, the cold in my body, and the fact that I'm sitting in an office when I could really be somewhere else far away from any- thing that even remotely resembles a computer). Incidentally, with php|cruise coming at the beginning of March, I should hopefully be able to get rid of at least two problems—and I'm still working on finding a way to avoid computers during that trip. But I ramble—a clear sign that the cold medicine is wearing off. Let me instead tell you something about this month's issue. With the popularity that PHP enjoys nowadays comes the fact that it is used as the back- bone of more and more high-traffic sites. A simple con- sequence of this is that an increasing number of devel- opers are "hitting the wall" and finally feeling the limits of what the "let's just do it in PHP" approach can do. Building a website is always a high-wire balance of budgeting, respecting deadlines and writing the best code possible, but there's nothing quite as bad as find- ing out that the way you've done things is incapable of meeting the demands of your website—and, by the time you realize that you have a problem, it's usually too late to think about a solution short of calling your travel agent and inquiring about that non-extradition country you heard of. Therefore, this month we dedicate a fair amount of room to the performance management of PHP applica- tions. George Schlossnagle's article—based on an excerpt from his latest book, published by SAMS—talks about profiling, a concept that I have very rarely seen associated with PHP applications. Profiling takes the guesswork out of understanding where the bottlenecks in your application are, allowing you to focus on find- ing the best possible resolution. The problem with profiling is that it only allows you to identify the problems and not solve them. Luckily, Ilia Alshanetsky and Bruno Pedro offer two other excel- lent articles on improving the performance of PHP without affecting the code itself (if you can, why not avoid the risk of introducing even more bugs?). While Ilia focuses on ways to make the PHP interpreter itself run faster, Bruno examines the topic of caching—both at the network and script level. This month we also start a new column—Security Corner—written by Chris Shiflett. The daily number of security advisories, patches, break-ins and source-code thefts that we see reported in the media every day has EDITORIAL Continued on page 8 February 2004 ● PHP Architect ● www.phparch.com 6 NNEEWW SSTTUUFFFF PHP 4.3.5 RC1 PHP.net has announced the release of PHP 4.3.5 RC1 PHP 4.3.5RC1 has been released for testing. This is the first release candidate and should have a very low number of prob- lems and/or bugs. Nevertheless, please download and test it as much as possible on real-life applications to uncover any remaining issues. List of changes can be found in the NEWS file. For more information visit: http://qa.php.net/ PHP Community Logo Contest Following Chris Shiflett’s recent announcement of the PHP Community Site, he is holding a contest to find a logo that embodies the spirit of the PHP community. Everyone is welcome to participate, and you can submit as Many entries as you like. Please send all entries to logos@phpcommuni- ty.org And include the name with which you want to be credited. The contest ends 29 Feb 2004, and php|architect is offering a free PDF subscription to the winner. For updated news about the contest, as well as a chance to view the current entries, visit: http://www.phpcommunity.org/logos/ Good luck to all who enter! ZEND Studio 3.0.2 Zend has announced the release of Zend Studio 3.0.2 client. What’s new? Zend.com lists some of the bug fixes as: • ZDE didn’t load when using a new keymap config from an older version. • Save As Project didn’t always work. • Server Center activator tried to open the wrong URL. • .js files were not opened with JavaScript highlighting. • Shift-Delete and Shift-Backspace didn’t work properly. • Find&Replace was very slow under Linux. • Add Comment sometimes erroneously com- mented out a line that wasn’t selected. • Added configurable limit for the number of displayed syntax errors There have also been improvements to the debugger, code completion, code analyzer, IE toolbar, and some Mac OSX changes. Get more information from Zend.com. What’s New! NN EE WW SS TT UU FF FF February 2004 ● PHP Architect ● www.phparch.com 7 MySQL Administrator MySQL.org announces: MySQL Administrator is a pow- erful new visual administration console that makes it significantly easier to administer your MySQL servers and gives you better visibility into how your databases are operating. MySQL Administrator integrates data- base management and maintenance into a single, seamless environment, with a clear and intuitive graph- ical user interface. Now you can easily perform all the command line operations visually, including configur- ing servers, administering users, dynamically monitor- ing database health, and more Get more information from: http://www.mysql.com/products/administrator/index.html NNEEWW SSTTUUFFFF Check out some of the hottest new releases from PEAR. DB 1.6.0 RC4 DB is a database abstraction layer providing: • an OO-style query API • a DSN (data source name) format for specifying database servers • prepare/execute (bind) emulation for databases that don’t support it natively • a result object for each query response • Compatible with PHP4 and PHP 5 • much more…. DB layers itself on top of PHP’s existing database extensions. The currently supported extensions are: dbase, fbsql, interbase, informix, msql, mssql, mysql, mysqli, oci8, odbc, pgsql, sqlite and sybase (DB style interfaces to LDAP servers and MS ADO (using COM) are also avaible from a separate pack- age). System_ProcWatch 0.4 With this package, you can monitor running processes based upon an XML configuration file, XML string, INI file or an array where you define patterns, conditions and actions. Net_IMAP 0.7 Provides an implementation of the IMAP4Rev1 protocol using PEAR’s Net_Socket and the option- al Auth_SASL class. XML_Beautifier 1.1 XML_Beautifier will add indentation and line breaks to you XML files, replace all entities, format your comments and makes your document easier to read. You can influence the way your document is beautified with several options. Looking for a new PHP Extension? Check out some of the latest offerings from PECL. opendirectory 0.2.2 Open Directory is a directory service architecture whose programming interface provides a central- ized way for applications and services to retrieve information stored in directories. The Open Directory architecture consists of the DirectoryServices daemon, which receives Open Directory client API calls and sends them to the appropriate Open Directory plug-in. statgrab 0.1 libstatgrab is a library that provides a common interface for retrieving a variety of system statistics on a number of *NIX like systems. This extension allows you to call the functions made available by libstatgrab library. Sasl 0.1.0 SASL is the Simple Authentication and Security Layer (as defined by RFC 2222). It provides a sys- tem for adding plugable authenticating support to connection-based protocols. The SASL Extension for PHP makes the Cyrus SASL library functions available to PHP. It aims to provide a 1-to-1 wrap- per around the SASL library to provide the greatest amount of implementation flexibility. To that end, it is possible to build both a client-side and server- side SASL implementation entirely in PHP. SQLLite 1.0.2 SQLite is a C library that implements an embedda- ble SQL database engine. Programs that link with the SQLite library can have SQL database access without running a separate RDBMS process. This extension allows you to access SQLite databases from within PHP. Windows binary available from: http://snaps.php.net/win32/PECL_STABLE/p hp_sqlite.dll PHPWeather 2.2.1 PHP Weather announces the release of version 2.2.1. PHP Weather makes it easy to show the current weath- er on your webpage. All you need is a local airport, that makes some special weather reports called METARs. The reports are updated once or twice an hour. Get more information from : http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpweather/ PHPEclipse Debugger PHP Eclipse adds PHP support to the Eclipse IDE Framework. This snapshot introduces the first version of the PHPEclipse debugger plugin. For more information visit: http://www.phpeclipse.de MySQL and Zend Working Together From Zend and MySQL – These two have Joined Forces to Strengthen Open Source Web Development MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, and Zend Technologies, designers of the PHP Web scripting engine, today announced a partnership to simplify and improve productivity in developing and deploying Web applications with open source technolo- gies. Through the alliance, the companies are improving compatibility and integration between the MySQL data- base and Zend’s PHP products to make it easier for busi- nesses to use complete open source solutions, such as the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) software stack. As part of the partnership, MySQL AB and Zend are offering partner products to their respective customers, enabling easier product procurement and deployment for Web application infrastructures. The companies will also commit development resources to design product integration and compatibility modules for both ven- dors’ platforms. For more information visit: www.zend.com SAXY 0.3 SAXY is a Simple API for XML (SAX) XML parser for PHP 4. It is lightweight, fast, and modeled on the methods of the Expat parser for compatibility. The primary goal of SAXY is to provide PHP developers with an alterna- tive to Expat that is written purely in PHP. Since SAXY is not an extension, it should run on any Web hosting platform with PHP 4 and above installed. This release allows CDATASection tags to be pre- served, rather than converted to Text Nodes. For more information visit: http://www.engageinteractive.com/saxy/ February 2004 ● PHP Architect ● www.phparch.com 8 NNEEWW SSTTUUFFFF php|a convinced us that, at the very least, one should be able to protect his sites from malicious usage, in the hope that all the other companies we rely on to maintain their software will do so in a serious way. Finally, we bring you three more articles that, we hope, will tickle your fancy. The first one, written by Eric Persson, shows you how you can build an SMS gateway using PHP and a few other inexpensive components. SMS is not yet very popular here in North America, but, judging from the amount of people I see glued to their cell phones whenever I visit my native Italy, it is very widely used in Europe. In his article on offline news management, Morgan Tocker writes about how PHP-GTK, that most hidden of PHP gems, can be used to improve content management by providing a proper GUI application that doesn't require you to completely rewrite all your code. Finally—last but not least-Wez Furlong picks up where his article from last month left off and delves into the deep bowels of the Zend Engine to show you how a PHP extension written in C can manipulate PHP arrays— it's not quite as easy as from a script but close enough once you know what you're doing. Well, that's it for this month. By the time I will be writing my next editorial, I plan to be either boasting about my suntan or complaining about sunburn. Either way, you can expect me to report on our adventure on the high seas—until then, happy reading! Editorial: Contiuned from page 5 D espite the fact that it sounds like some mysteri- ous Italian pasta, Gnokii is really just a project aimed to develop tools and drivers for Nokia mobile phones-that is, software that makes it possible to control a Nokia phone physically connected to your server via a serial port. Gnokii works like the Nokia Data Suite, which is shipped with more advanced models from Nokia: you can use it to send SMS messages, edit contacts and so on—pretty much everything you nor- mally do with your thumb on the phone's keypad. Gnokii itself is composed of many tools, including a set of GUI applications that facilitate the remote opera- tion of the telephone; we are really only interested in a small subset of these tools called ssmmssdd , or SMS daemon, which provides an interface for rapid access to the phone's SMS capabilities. With the SMS daemon up and running, we can use PHP to interact with the phone, send and receive SMS messages and, of course, build whatever logic we need based on the content of the messages that we receive and send. In short, my goal with this article is to show you how to configure software and hardware so that you can get the same kind of service as you would normally obtain from a big company selling mobile services like SMS gateways— but at a fraction of the price. Major Components of the Final Application The final application that we will create throughout this article is a simple SMS server that awaits a message from a user and acts on its contents. It is made up of three major components: • A Nokia cell phone, which must be connected properly to the server. • The ssmmssdd application from the Gnokii package, which must, of course, be compiled and configured correctly. • The PHP scripts that provide the actual server functionality. The flow of the application will be as follows: • The user send an SMS message to the server. • The ssmmssdd daemon picks it up and auto- matically puts it into its database. • Our server scans ssmmssdd 's database peri- odically for new messages. • When a new message arrives, its con- tents are examined and the server acts on them, for example by replying to the user with another message. February 2004 ● PHP Architect ● www.phparch.com 9 FF EE AA TT UU RR EE Write SMS Applications With PHP and Gnokii by Eric Persson PHP: 4.1 or higher OS: Unix/Linux Applications: Gnokii (http://www.Gnokii.org) Code: http://code.phparch.com/20/3 Code Directory: sms-gnokii REQUIREMENTS SMS-shorthand for Short Message Service-is the standard used by cellular phone networks worldwide to allow their customers to exchange small text messages using their handsets. Despite its limitations, SMS is very popular with cell phone users-and it has rapidly become a wide- ly-used bridge between the Internet and mobile users. [...]... web-based and a GTK version of the same application if they both use OOP techniques Finally, try to separate your code from your desired output, so that you can create a file like data .php and share it between the two without the need to branch your code February 2004 ● PHP Architect ● www.phparch.com 21 Can’t stop thinking about PHP? Write for us! Visit us at http://www.phparch.com/writeforus .php Writing PHP. .. counter For REQUIREMENTS PHP: 4.3+ OS: N/A Other Software: Working PHP source and compiler environment Code: http:/ /code. phparch.com/20/2 Code Directory: extensions 23 FEATURE Writing PHP Extensions: Managing Arrays each person, we allocate a PHP variable using the MAKE_STD_ZVAL() macro, we set it up as an array (lines 17 and 18), and then we step through each of their names and add them as string elements... breaking working code Whenever possible, it is always better to optimize things outside of your code that will have a positive impact on the performance of your applications As you can probably guess, the focus of this article will be optimizations that do not actually require code modification and still make your PHP applications run much faster February 2004 ● PHP Architect ● www.phparch.com Getting... array/object/integer (or whatever it was supposed to be) and that it is not empty/null Personally, I look forward to the release of PHP 5 and exception handling, when GTK & PHP can be taken to the next level and it will become easier to tackle these issues Portability, Recycling, and Reusing Another good idea is to try and store the important parts of your code nested in function calls, as opposed to using... \_supervise smsparse 0:00 \_/usr/local/bin /php -q /smsparse/smsparse .php php: /usr/local/bin /php /usr/local/lib /php /usr/local/lib /php. ini This means that I have the PHP interpreter's binary installed in /usr/local/bin /php It's now time to create a service directory for our service We'll start by creating a "service" directory for February 2004 ● PHP Architect ● www.phparch.com Keeping Tabs on the Situation... S S S S S ● PHP Architect 0:00 /bin/sh /command/svscanboot 0:01 \_ svscan /service 0:00 \_ supervise smsd 0:00 | \_ /usr/local/gnokii/bin/smsd -u xxx -p xxx -d xxx -m mysql 6:26 \_ supervise smsparse 0:00 | \_ /usr/local/bin /php -q /opt/www/smsparse/smsparse .php 0:00 \_ supervise log 0:01 \_ multilog t /main ● www.phparch.com 13 FEATURE Write SMS Applications With PHP and Gnokii Your Own PHP Daemon:... applications and systems Wez is a Core Developer of PHP, having contributed SQLite, COM/.Net, ActivePHP, mailparse and the Streams API (and more) and is the "King" of PECL -PHP' s Extension Community Library His consulting firm can be reached at http://www.thebrainroom.net To Discuss this article: http://forums.phparch.com/124 27 The Need For Speed Optimizing your PHP Applications F E A T U R E by Ilia Alshanetsky... http://forums.phparch.com/127 Tips for Writing Applications with PHP- GTK Error Checking The lifespan of your typical PHP- GTK application is usually longer than that of its web-based counterparts It will have to keep running for several hours, with functions being called over and over again For a GTK application, you may find that you will want to manage your error handling, and check the integrity of your variables... improving performance Most opcode cache implementations and there are several of them on the market nowadays-go even further and actually optimize the opcodes before storing them During the traditional compilation process, the PHP parser tries to speed up the opcode generation process and does not always generate the most optimal instructions for the Zend Engine to execute With an opcode cache, since the... compiler to optimize the generated code to the fullest The end result is that the compiled PHP executable is anywhere between 10% and 25% slower than it would be had it been compiled statically into Apache # PHP configure line /configure with-apache=/path/to/apache_source # Apache configure line /configure activatemodule=src/modules /php4 /libphp4.a The configuration procedure above will compile PHP directly . efficient PHP scripts PROFILING PHPPROFILING PHP Understand and optimize your code Writing an riting an SMSSMS Gateway ateway with ith PHPPHP and and Gnokiinokii ] ] Visit. Techniques for the PHP Developer Offline News Management with PHP- GTK EXtending PHPEXtending PHP Handling PHP Arrays from CHandling PHP Arrays from C The