The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a PECL package that provides an opcode cache for PHP. Rasmus Lerdorf is the lead of the project along with a handful of other developers. What is an opcode cache? Before I can answer that, let’s discuss how PHP works. Because it is an
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One of biggest draws to Redis for me is the fact that it has more data structure types than just key / value. These additional data structures allow you to do some amazing things while still benefitting from being in-memory. One of the most notable ways to leverage Redis would
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Getting the IP address of a user seems like a pretty trivial task but you can’t always rely on $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']. The super global value is the most reliable source because it is extracted directly from the TCP stack but if you’re behind a load balancer that address would be that
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In a previous post I’ve talked about installing phpredis a PHP Extension for Redis that has to be compiled from source. But what if you’re hosting scenario doesn’t allow you to compile extensions? Well you’re in luck, in addition to the extension, there are additional client libraries out there for
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SQLite is a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. The SQLite website also boasts that it is the most widely deployed SQL database engine in the world. As I’ve previously discussed, SQLite has the advantage over MySQL as it can be used as an internal session handler with PHP.
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Installing the Memcached module for PHP on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is as simple as can be. First let’s make sure we have Memcached installed: sudo apt-get install memcached On Ubuntu, the process to install the PHP module is similar to how we installed Memcached itself: sudo apt-get install php5-memcache php5-memcached
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Now that I’ve discussed the in-memory data stores (NoSQL if you will) let’s switch gears to a more traditional RDBMS. SQLite by definition is a software library that implement a self-contained server-less, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. It’s more important claim to fame is that it is the most widely
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Redis is one of my favorite key-value stores, the range of data types alone make it a must have in any developer”s tool belt. Another great use for Redis is as your session handler in PHP. The optional persistence that Redis provides makes it a better option than using Memcached
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Memcached makes a semi-perfect solution for storing your PHP sessions. Why only semi-perfect? Well in Memcached’s defense, the fact that it is an in-memory data store makes it a great choice because of the speed. The negative is the lack of persistence, which makes it somewhat less desirable. What this
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Redis is one of my favorite new data stores of the NoSQL movement. It has the power and speed to act as a caching server like Memcached and it has more advanced data types to make it more like an RDBMS. Before we can talk about using Redis as a
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Calculating the age based on a date is a pretty simple task that can be accomplished many different ways (Google yield’s quite a few different approaches). The caveat that usually arises is that you need to factor in which side of the birthday you are on based on the day’s
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Now that we know how to use sessions and have built a simple login system, let’s take a look at some options for configuring PHP sessions. Out of the box, PHP is configured to file-based sessions with a max lifetime of 1440 seconds (a mere 24 minutes). Garbage collection probability
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Following up on yesterday’s introduction to PHP Sessions, let’s talk about building a simple login system in PHP. To start, you will need to make sure that pages on your site that are behind the login page will have sessions enabled. This can be done for all of your pages
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Sessions, one of those necessary evils when building websites. They come into play whenever you need to have data available between pages on a site. These scenarios typically arise when you have login restricted areas on a site. Why do I refer to them as evil? Quite a few reasons
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I remember one of my first paid programming gigs, it was to build a contact form for a friend’s website. Not one of those janky mailto: hacks that attempted to open the local email client. I’m talking about a form that would send mail from the server, you know, in
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This post started as part of yesterday’s post on encrypting passwords as a subsection labeled “Salt? Pepper? When did this become a cooking blog?” The fact is, I felt that the section was a bit long-winded and warranted a dedicated post. Without further ado let’s talk about some techniques for
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Not all hashing functions are created equally, some are considered more secure than others and yet all of them are more secure than storing plaintext passwords. In this post I’m going to discuss some of the common PHP hashing functions that can be used as an alternative to storing plaintext
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I recently encountered a scenario where one of my site’s login system stopped working. The piece of code that stopped working was the third-party login that leveraged GitHub for the authentication. It was one of those “it worked yesterday” moments for sure. After some research, I discovered that GitHub had
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Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a good ol’ LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) but in my experience, Apache doesn’t necessarily scale all that well with PHP. It’s really not Apache’s fault, the fact is that most of the time servers are configured to use the
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PHP is a powerful scripting language but did you know it can be used from the command-line as well? Using PHP from the CLI has many applications from checking what version of PHP is installed to being able to execute scripts and even check the syntax of a file. If
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Within nearly every web site or application there is a need to redirect a user to another page. Perhaps you want to route them to a login page when they aren’t authenticated or maybe because a page moved and you want to take them to the new location. To accomplish
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It seemed fitting that the first post on PHP Avenue should be about setting up a new server with PHP. This particular post will focus on a traditional LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I also intend on writing additional posts covering the setup of a
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If you know me you know that I’m a huge proponent of Redis. I started using it in mid-2011 as the storage engine for a chat system I was building for SceneKids. Over the last year and a half or so I’ve utilized Redis more and more for many other
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If you know me, you know I’m a pretty devout PHP coder when it comes to my own adventures in web development. I’ve been using it since version 3 (started with it in Y2K) and in using it that long, I’d be the last person to say that it’s a
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Just cleaning up a repository at work and came across a script I haven’t used in forever, a script to lint all PHP files in a directory, recursively. Expect something more stimulating soon as I found out the hard way that tumblr doesn’t seem to auto-save your posts once you’ve
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