Here's a simple question to get you started. There are three monkeys sitting on a tree, above a pond. One of the monkeys decides to jump into the pond. How many monkeys are left on the tree? Two? Wrong.
The right answer is three. You see, the monkey only made the decision to jump into the pond. He didn't actually jump! If you think about it, we are all like that. We take decisions. We make resolutions. But somehow, we don't follow through with action. And intent without action is quite useless, really. Getting started - taking that first step - is often the master key to success. As someone once said, you don't have to be great to get started. But you sure have to get started to become great!
Do you find yourself struggling to take action on your plans and intentions? Well, here's a five-point programme to help you move from intent to action.
Make a beginning ? right away. Whatever be your goal, take the first step - however small - right away. Until you take that first step, your mind does not believe you. You need to signal to yourself that you are serious, that you mean business. Commit to taking action, immediately. Today. Now.
Break up the grand plan into smaller tasks. Remember, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Sometimes the task ahead looks so enormous that we feel overwhelmed - and we don't do anything about it. Break that up into smaller sub-tasks, and suddenly you'll find something that's doable. Remember that old adage &lsquosomething is better than nothing'? It's still true.
Think of the pleasure, not the pain. Visualise success. If you want to do an MBA at a premier school and plan to devote three hours a day to studying, don't think about missing the football game on television, or about not being able to go out for that Saturday night bash. Think instead of the job that you could get post your MBA, the rewards that it would bring, the dreams that would get realised.
Create a support group. Surround yourself with people who share your objective, who are co-passengers on your journey to success. The excitement of being in it together will help you fight the inertia, and get you going with the rest of the gang.
Pay up ? in advance. For most of us, monetary commitments are a strong impetus for action. The fear of losing money or wasting it, can spur you into action. We follow up on our commitments, if only to ensure our money is well-spent. Plan to lose weight? Pay up for that three-month weight loss programme! Don't wait.
Surround yourself with people who share your objective, who are co-passengers on your journey to success.
Bestselling management author Tom Peters tells the story of a man who approached American financer and banker JP Morgan with an envelope, and said, "Sir, in my hand I hold a guaranteed formula for success, which I will gladly sell you for $25,000."
"Sir," JP Morgan replied, "I do not know what is in the envelope. However, if you show me, and I like it, I give you my word as a gentleman that I will pay you what you ask." The man agreed to the terms, and handed over the envelope. JP Morgan opened it, and pulled out a single sheet of paper. He gave it one look - a mere glance - then handed it back to the gentleman. And paid him the agreed-upon sum of $25,000! On that sheet of paper, were two things:
JP Morgan benefited from this advice, and you can too. Knowing what to do is often easy. We all have our list of things to do. Our plans and our resolutions. Doing it - that's the tough bit. But that's the hallmark of successful people. The Nike guys are right. Want to be a winner? Just do it!
Thursday, 21 April 2011
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
PHP – Take advantage of language constructs
Fastest things in PHP are the language constructs.
They are highly optimized in the interpreter
Don’t require calling external libraries
Don’t call a function if there is a language construct. As an example, using a casting operator like (int) $total is much more efficient than using the function intval($foo)
Function calling generate considerably amount of overhead. Using a language construct avoid
isset() and unset() are both language constructs, even though they mostly act like functions. However calling them does not generate the function overhead.
Some common language constructs are:
echo()
empty()
isset()
unset()
eval()
exit()
die()
include()
include_once()
require()
require_once()
return
What is Web Service?
Web Services is a generic umbrella that describes how disparate systems can integrate with each other over the web.
Most major sites offer some form of web services:
– Amazon
– FedEx
– eBay
– PayPl
– del.icio.us
Why use Web Services?
REST
REST Request
http://library.example.com/api.php?devkey=123&action=search&type=book&keyword=style
After the request, we will get the answer or response as an XML file. we can simple parse them using PHP’s SimpleXMLElement (SAX API) or DOM API to retrieve data
Most major sites offer some form of web services:
– Amazon
– FedEx
– eBay
– PayPl
– del.icio.us
Why use Web Services?
- Someone else has data you need
- Easier than scraping pages also more reliable
- Automate processes
- Provide additional information to your clients
REST
- Representational State Transfer
- Requests look like filled out forms, can use either GET or POST
- Response is an XML document
- Request and Response is defined by the service provider
- Very simple and popular
REST Request
http://library.example.com/api.php?devkey=123&action=search&type=book&keyword=style
After the request, we will get the answer or response as an XML file. we can simple parse them using PHP’s SimpleXMLElement (SAX API) or DOM API to retrieve data
Zend Framework for developing Web Application using PHP
There are many frameworks for developing web applications using PHP. CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Symphony and more.. I’ve not much experience in all the frameworks. I’ve a good experience in using CodeIgniter and some small MVC frameworks.
Recently I am Working on Zend Framework . I noticed Zend Framework is a nice framework to develop web application. Zend finally give special notice to develop a very good framework. And I hope very soon, Zend Framework will lead among all. I found this framework is very essential and powerful.
Recently,
What is Zend Framework?
Documentation:
Documentation is really rich. Its not take much time to grasp a basic concept of this framework to develop application. Because there is quick start, api documentation, component based documentation. Overall I rate 10 out of 10 grade in documentation.
Goals of Zend Framework Components:
Recently I am Working on Zend Framework . I noticed Zend Framework is a nice framework to develop web application. Zend finally give special notice to develop a very good framework. And I hope very soon, Zend Framework will lead among all. I found this framework is very essential and powerful.
Recently,
What is Zend Framework?
- Zend Framework is a simple, straightforward, open-source software framework for PHP 5 designed to eliminate the tedious details of coding and let you focus on the big picture.
- It follows Model-View-Controller (MVC)
- ZF follows good coding-convention.
Documentation:
Documentation is really rich. Its not take much time to grasp a basic concept of this framework to develop application. Because there is quick start, api documentation, component based documentation. Overall I rate 10 out of 10 grade in documentation.
Goals of Zend Framework Components:
Zend_Acl
Zend_Acl provides lightweight and flexible access control list (ACL) functionality and privileges management.Zend_Auth
Zend_Auth provides an API for authentication and includes concrete authentication adapters for common use case scenarios, as well as “Identity 2.0″ adapters such as OpenID and Microsoft InfoCard.Zend_Cache
Zend_Cache provides a flexible approach toward caching data, including support for tagging, manipulating, iterating, and removing subsets.Zend_Config
Zend_Config simplifies the use of configuration data for web applications.Zend_Controller and Zend_View
These components provide the infrastructure for a Model-View-Controller (MVC) website.Zend_Date
Zend_Date offers a detailed but simple API for manipulating dates and times.Zend_Db
This is a lightweight database access layer, providing an interface to PDO and other database extensions in PHP. It includes adapters for each database driver, a query profiler, and an API to construct most SELECT statements.Zend_Db_Table
The Zend_Db_Table component is a lightweight solution for object-oriented programming with databases.Zend_Feed
This component provides a very simple way to work with live syndicated feeds.Zend_Filter and Zend_Validate
These components encourage the development of secure websites by providing the basic tools necessary for input filtering and validation.Zend_Filter_Input
This is a configurable solution for declaring and enforcing filtering and validation rules. This component serves as a “cage” for input data, so they are available to your application only after being validated.Zend_Form
This component provides an object-oriented interface for building forms, complete with input filtering and rendering capabilities.Zend_Gdata (Zend Google Data Client)
The Google Data APIs provide read/write access to such services hosted at google.com as Spreadsheets, Calendar, Blogger, and CodeSearch.Zend_Http_Client
This component provides a client for the HTTP protocol, without requiring any PHP extensions. It drives our web services components.Zend_Json
Easily convert PHP structures into JSON and vice-versa for use in AJAX-enabled applications.Zend_Layout
Easily provide sitewide layouts for your MVC applications.Zend_Loader
Load files, classes, and resources dynamically in your PHP application.Zend_Locale
Zend_Locale is the Framework’s answer to the question, “How can the same application be used around the whole world?” This component is the foundation of Zend_Date, Zend_Translate, and others.Zend_Log
Log data to the console, flat files, or a database. Its no-frills, simple, procedural API reduces the hassle of logging to one line of code and is perfect for cron jobs and error logs.Zend_Mail and Zend_Mime
Almost every Internet application needs to send email. Zend_Mail, assisted by Zend_Mime, creates email messages and sends them.Zend_Measure
Using Zend_Measure, you can convert measurements into different units of the same type. They can be added, subtracted, and compared against each other.Zend_Memory
Zend_Memory offers an API for managing data in a limited memory mode. A PHP developer can create a Zend_Memory object to store and access large amounts of data, which would exceed the memory usage limits imposed by some PHP environments.Zend_Pdf
Portable Document Format (PDF) from Adobe is the de facto standard for cross-platform rich documents. Now, PHP applications can create or read PDF documents on the fly, without the need to call utilities from the shell, depend on PHP extensions, or pay licensing fees. Zend_Pdf can even modify existing PDF documents.Zend_Registry
The registry is a container for storing objects and values in the application space. By storing an object or value in the registry, the same object or value is always available throughout your application for the lifetime of the request. This mechanism is often an acceptable alternative to using global variables.Zend_Rest_Client and Zend_Rest_Server
REST Web Services use service-specific XML formats. These ad-hoc standards mean that the manner for accessing a REST web service is different for each service. REST web services typically use URL parameters (GET data) or path information for requesting data and POST data for sending data.Zend_Search_Lucene
The Apache Lucene engine is a powerful, feature-rich Java search engine that is flexible about document storage and supports many complex query types. Zend_Search_Lucene is a port of this engine written entirely in PHP 5.Zend_Service: Akismet, Amazon, Audioscrobbler, Delicious, Flickr, Nirvanix, Simpy, StrikeIron and Yahoo!
Web services are important to the PHP developer creating the next generation of mashups and composite applications. The Zend Framework provides wrappers for service APIs from major providers to make it as simple as possible to use those web services from your PHP application.Zend_Session
Zend_Session helps manage and preserve session data across multiple page requests by the same client.Zend_Translate
The Zend_Translate component provides the Zend Framework with message translation functionality.Zend_Uri
Zend_Uri is a component that aids in manipulating and validating Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). Zend_Uri exists primarily to service other components such as Zend_Http_Client but is also useful as a standalone utility.Zend_XmlRpc
Zend_XmlRpc makes it easy to communicate with and create XML-RPC services from PHP.
Easy way to data filter and validate in php
Before php 5.2.0 when we have to validate or filter user data, we normally use regex and some php functions. Some of those regex are difficult to understand. So normally most of the coders search in google to collect the correct regex to validate data and also use some php functions to filter data.
In php 5.2.0 a new extension is provided named filter to make these filter tasks much easy. You can install it in your linux distro by simply typing in shell pecl install filter
Before proceeding next at first check the available filters in your system:
echo'<pre>';
print_r(filter_list());
echo'</pre>';
Output in my system:
Array
(
[0] => int
[1] => boolean
[2] => float
[3] => validate_regexp
[4] => validate_url
[5] => validate_email
[6] => validate_ip
[7] => string
[8] => stripped
[9] => encoded
[10] => special_chars
[11] => unsafe_raw
[12] => email
[13] => url
[14] => number_int
[15] => number_float
[16] => magic_quotes
[17] => callback
)
filter_list() is a method that returns a list of all supported filters.
Validate Email address
Normally we validate email address like this way
$email= "viral.solani@gmail.com";
if(eregi("^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$", $email)) {
echo"Valid email address.";
}
else{
echo"Invalid email address.";
}
But using php’s filter functions you can easily verify that
$email = "viral.solani@gmail.com";
if(filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)){
echo" $email is valid email address <br />";
}
$email= "viral.solani@gmail.com";
if(filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) === FALSE){
echo" $email is not a valid email address <br />";
}
Output
viral.solani@gmail.com is valid email address
viral.solani@gmail,com is not a valid email address
So using filter_var() and its parameters you can easily validate email, url, ip address and more.
Check this link to learn what type of data you can validate via filter functions. Normally FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL, FILTER_VALIDATE_INT,FILTER_VALIDATE_URL, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP are mostly used.
Data Sanitization
Data sensitization is very important. As a coder never trust user’s input. User may push SQL injection code or javascript code. So always validate or sanitize data before use. To sanitize data you can use the same filter functions but you have to only provide sanitize filters as second parameter. Some commonly used sanitize filters are:
FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL
FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_FLOAT
FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_INT
FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS
FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING
FILTER_SANITIZE_URL
FILTER_SANITIZE_ENCODED
You’ll see detail list and description from here. For example to get valid string from user input
$userData= array(
'<b>bold</b>',
"<script>javascript alert('hi');</script>",
'P*}i@893746%%%p*.i.*}}|.dw<?php echo "echo works!!";?>'
);
$myinputs= filter_var_array($userData, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
echo'<pre>';
print_r($myinputs);
echo'</pre>';
output
Array
(
[0] => bold
[1] => javascript alert('hi');
[2] => P*}i@893746%%%p*.i.*}}|.dw
)
filter_var_array() is used to get multiple variables and optionally filters them. And this function is very useful for retrieving many values without repetitively callingfilter_var().
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