The Developer Day | Staying Curious

TAG | PHP

May/13

31

Build and publish your own PHP Mongo packages

I had a problem at work where we were using a php mongo driver version 1.3.7 which was crashing for us due to a bug in the driver. Since then they have released a new version of the driver 1.4.0 which solves the previous issue but introduces a new one. Fortunately it was quickly fixed on github but not yet released on pecl. I wanted to try the latest driver to see if it works but did not want to custom compile it and instead wanted to use pecl.

This is when I found a howto create a pear repository on github. Following these instructions I set up my own pear repository. Then I simply checked out the php mongo driver, changed the package.xml to point to my channel and ran pear package which gave me a php mongo driver package which I could now add to my own pear github repo using pirum.

Now I can use this repo to install my own packages for testing, share it with others or even use it in production if I can’t wait for the official release.

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Mar/13

7

Cleaning Invalid UTF-8 characters in PHP

I ran into an ugly issue having to discard invalid UTF-8 characters from a string before I pass it to json_decode() as otherwise it fails decoding it. First I’ve discovered that it’s possible to ignore invalid UTF-8 characters using:

iconv(“UTF-8″, “UTF-8//IGNORE”, $text)

However turns out this has been broken for ages and using //IGNORE produces an E_NOTICE. Luckily I found a comment which suggests a workaround:

ini_set(‘mbstring.substitute_character’, “none”);
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, ‘UTF-8′, ‘UTF-8′);

This however was not enough. Because I was getting some characters that were non printable UTF-8 characters json_decode was failing on them as well. To work around this I’ve used:

$text = preg_replace(‘/[^\pL\pN\pP\pS\pZ\pM]/u’, ”, $text);

This will remove new lines as well which is fine for me. You can also try a removing non-printable byte sequences.

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Sep/11

1

Dumping Memcache Keys

Sometimes it’s useful to be able to quickly peek what keys memcache is storing and how old are they. A good use case for example could be to check whether something is cached or not or that they expire as they should.

At first I found a way to dump memcache keys through telnet. However if a memcache instance is fairly large and has a lot of slabs and thousands of keys it becomes impractical to do it manually.

I wrote a simple utility that helps me find keys across all memcache slabs.

#!/usr/bin/php
< ?php
$host = "127.0.0.1";
$port = 11211;
$lookupKey = "";
$limit = 10000;
$time = time();
foreach ($argv as $key => $arg) {
    switch ($arg) {
        case '-h':
            $host = $argv[$key + 1];
            break;
        case '-p':
            $port = $argv[$key + 1];
            break;
        case '-s':
            $lookupKey = $argv[$key + 1];
            break;
        case '-l':
            $limit = $argv[$key + 1];
    }
}
$memcache = memcache_connect($host, $port);
$list = array();
$allSlabs = $memcache->getExtendedStats('slabs');
$items = $memcache->getExtendedStats('items');
foreach ($allSlabs as $server => $slabs) {
    foreach ($slabs as $slabId => $slabMeta) {
        if (!is_numeric($slabId)) {
            continue;
        }
        $cdump = $memcache->getExtendedStats('cachedump', (int)$slabId, $limit);
        foreach ($cdump as $server => $entries) {
            if (!$entries) {
                continue;
            }
            foreach($entries as $eName => $eData) {
                $list[$eName] = array(
                    'key' => $eName,
                    'slabId' => $slabId,
                    'size' => $eData[0],
                    'age' => $eData[1]
                );
            }
        }
    }
}
ksort($list);
if (!empty($lookupKey)) {
     echo "Searching for keys that contain: '{$lookupKey}'\n";
     foreach ($list as $row) {
        if (strpos($row['key'], $lookupKey) !== FALSE) {
            echo "Key: {$row['key']}, size: {$row['size']}b, age: ", ($time - $row['age']), "s, slab id: {$row['slabId']}\n";
        }
     }
} else {
    echo "Printing out all keys\n";
    foreach ($list as $row) {
        echo "Key: {$row['key']}, size: {$row['size']}b, age: ", ($time - $row['age']), "s, slab id: {$row['slabId']}\n";
    } 
}

This script accepts 4 parameters:

-h host
-p port
-s partial search string
-l a limit of how many keys to dump from a single slab (default 10,000)

The easiest way to use it:

./membrowser.php -s uk
Searching for keys that contain: ‘uk’
Key: 1_uk_xml, size: 3178b, age: 1728s, slab id: 17
Key: 2_uk_xml, size: 3178b, age: 1725s, slab id: 17
Key: 3_uk_xml, size: 3178b, age: 1721s, slab id: 17

Download memcache keys dump script.

P.S some of the code I’ve copied from 100days.de blog post.

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Mar/10

10

Zend Framework Advanced Error Controller

The default Zend Framework Error Controller generated by Zend_Tool is quite simple. It displays a simple error message, sets a response status and if exception display is enabled in the current environment, an exception message, stack trace and request variables are displayed.

While such a standard error controller may work well for many web applications it may not be suitable for everyone. The main disadvantage of the default error controller is that it does not notify developers of the errors that occurred and instead silently logs them. Many enterprise web applications will find this unacceptable and will try to implement their means of solving the issue. In this post I’ll try to show how a more advanced Zend Framework error controller could be implemented to help developers tackle errors quickly.

class ErrorController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    private $_notifier;
    private $_error;
    private $_environment;
    public function init()
    {
        parent::init();
        $bootstrap = $this->getInvokeArg('bootstrap');
        $environment = $bootstrap->getEnvironment();
        $error = $this->_getParam('error_handler');
        $mailer = new Zend_Mail();
        $session = new Zend_Session_Namespace();
        $database = $bootstrap->getResource('Database');
        $profiler = $database->getProfiler();
        $this->_notifier = new Application_Service_Notifier_Error(
            $environment,
            $error,
            $mailer,
            $session,
            $profiler,
            $_SERVER
        );
        $this->_error = $error;
        $this->_environment = $environment;
   }
    public function errorAction()
    {
        switch ($this->_error->type) {
            case Zend_Controller_Plugin_ErrorHandler::EXCEPTION_NO_CONTROLLER:
            case Zend_Controller_Plugin_ErrorHandler::EXCEPTION_NO_ACTION:
                $this->getResponse()->setHttpResponseCode(404);
                $this->view->message = 'Page not found';
                break;
            default:
                $this->getResponse()->setHttpResponseCode(500);
                $this->_applicationError();
                break;
        }
        // Log exception, if logger available
        if ($log = $this->_getLog()) {
            $log->crit($this->view->message, $this->_error->exception);
        }
    }
    private function _applicationError()
    {
        $fullMessage = $this->_notifier->getFullErrorMessage();
        $shortMessage = $this->_notifier->getShortErrorMessage();
        switch ($this->_environment) {
            case 'live':
                $this->view->message = $shortMessage;
                break;
            case 'test':
                $this->_helper->layout->setLayout('blank');
                $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender();
                $this->getResponse()->appendBody($shortMessage);
                break;
            default:
                $this->view->message = nl2br($fullMessage);
        }
        $this->_notifier->notify();
    }
    private function _getLog()
    {
        $bootstrap = $this->getInvokeArg('bootstrap');
        if (!$bootstrap->hasPluginResource('Log')) {
            return false;
        }
        $log = $bootstrap->getResource('Log');
        return $log;
    }
}

The modified error controller is aware of the environment it is running in. It’s likely that depending on the environment you would want to display different layouts with different information. For example while debugging Zend Controller Tests you may want to reduce the amount of HTML appearing in your terminal screen by disabling the layout while running in the test environment. You’ll also notice the Application_Service_Notifier_Error class dependency. This class is responsible for deciding whether to send an email to the developers and gathers potentially helpful information from different sources. You’ll also notice how the dependencies for the notifier are instantiated. It can be done in different ways using dependency injection frameworks, using bootstrap resources and so on. It’s up to you to decide what fits your application better.

class Application_Service_Notifier_Error
{
    protected $_environment;
    protected $_mailer;
    protected $_session;
    protected $_error;
    protected $_profiler;
    public function __construct(
        $environment,
        ArrayObject $error,
        Zend_Mail $mailer,
        Zend_Session_Namespace $session,
        Zend_Db_Profiler $profiler,
        Array $server)
    {
        $this->_environment = $environment;
        $this->_mailer = $mailer;
        $this->_error = $error;
        $this->_session = $session;
        $this->_profiler = $profiler;
        $this->_server = $server;
    }
    public function getFullErrorMessage()
    {
        $message = '';
        if (!empty($this->_server['SERVER_ADDR'])) {
            $message .= "Server IP: " . $this->_server['SERVER_ADDR'] . "\n";
        }
        if (!empty($this->_server['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
            $message .= "User agent: " . $this->_server['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] . "\n";
        }
        if (!empty($this->_server['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'])) {
            $message .= "Request type: " . $this->_server['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] . "\n";
        }
        $message .= "Server time: " . date("Y-m-d H:i:s") . "\n";
        $message .= "RequestURI: " . $this->_error->request->getRequestUri() . "\n";
        if (!empty($this->_server['HTTP_REFERER'])) {
            $message .= "Referer: " . $this->_server['HTTP_REFERER'] . "\n";
        }
        $message .= "Message: " . $this->_error->exception->getMessage() . "\n\n";
        $message .= "Trace:\n" . $this->_error->exception->getTraceAsString() . "\n\n";
        $message .= "Request data: " . var_export($this->_error->request->getParams(), true) . "\n\n";
        $it = $this->_session->getIterator();
        $message .= "Session data:\n\n";
        foreach ($it as $key => $value) {
            $message .= $key . ": " . var_export($value, true) . "\n";
        }
        $message .= "\n";
        $query = $this->_profiler->getLastQueryProfile()->getQuery();
        $queryParams = $this->_profiler->getLastQueryProfile()->getQueryParams();
        $message .= "Last database query: " . $query . "\n\n";
        $message .= "Last database query params: " . var_export($queryParams, true) . "\n\n";
        return $message;
    }
    public function getShortErrorMessage()
    {
        $message = '';
        switch ($this->_environment) {
            case 'live':
                $message .= "It seems you have just encountered an unknown issue.";
                $message .= "Our team has been notified and will deal with the problem as soon as possible.";
                break;
            default:
                $message .= "Message: " . $this->_error->exception->getMessage() . "\n\n";
                $message .= "Trace:\n" . $this->_error->exception->getTraceAsString() . "\n\n";
        }
        return $message;
    }
    public function notify()
    {
        if (!in_array($this->_environment, array('live', 'stage'))) {
            return false;
        }
        $this->_mailer->setFrom('[email protected]');
        $this->_mailer->setSubject("Exception on Application");
        $this->_mailer->setBodyText($this->getFullErrorMessage());
        $this->_mailer->addTo('[email protected]');
        return $this->_mailer->send();
    }
}

This class provides an extensive report providing helpful details in what state the application was when an exception occurred. What’s the IP address of the server (maybe the application is distributed on many servers), what was the time, was it an AJAX request, what was user’s session data, request data.

One of the nice things to have is to be able to tell what was the last database query executed. This is especially useful if some dynamic database query fails or someone is trying to make an SQL injection. The easiest way to achieve this is to use a Zend_Db_Profiler. But the default profiler consumes a lot of server resources and should not be enabled on production environments. To work around this we use a custom dummy profiler that does no profiling at all and just stores the last query information in memory.

class Application_Db_Profiler extends Zend_Db_Profiler
{
    protected $_lastQueryText;
    protected $_lastQueryType;
    public function queryStart($queryText, $queryType = null)
    {
        $this->_lastQueryText = $queryText;
        $this->_lastQueryType = $queryType;
        return null;
    }
    public function queryEnd($queryId)
    {
        return;
    }
    public function getQueryProfile($queryId)
    {
        return null;
    }
    public function getLastQueryProfile()
    {
        $queryId = parent::queryStart($this->_lastQueryText, $this->_lastQueryType);
        return parent::getLastQueryProfile();
    }
}

The custom error controller will only notify developers of errors that occur on production and stage environments to avoid spamming people with exceptions from the unstable development environment. The Application_Service_Notify_Error class is also highly testable. All the dependencies can be mocked, no global variables or constants are used. The class itself could be more refined by employing polymorphism instead of if statements but I believe it’s better to keep the example simple to make it easily understandable.

Depending on which version of the Zend Framework is being used the implementation for the custom error controller may be a little different, but the general idea is the same. In short the advanced error controller provides additional information such as session data, database queries, server variables and also is capable of notifying developers when errors occur on production or stage environments. Please let me know if this is helpful by providing feedback in the comments.

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Mar/10

9

Avoiding Brittle Tests / Testing Output

While unit tests have benefits they can also cause trouble. Having tests to catch software bugs is great but having tests that break whenever the application is at least slightly changed might not be very pleasant. The latter effect is called brittle tests. It may work well for applications which change rarely but may be counterproductive for applications that change rapidly. Test brittleness can be caused by a variety of implementation details. This post aims to describe few of these details and explain ways how brittle tests can be avoided.

Deciding how detailed the tests should be

It’s important to have an at least general idea what tests should test and what should be left untested. Imagine having to functional test a web application UI displaying a form made of various input fields populated with values coming from the database. Quite a few things could be tested. Are all the values displayed? Are all radios, check boxes, drop-downs properly selected? Are validation messages displayed and are they correct? Are all labels displayed and correct? Are attached javascript events working? Can the form be submitted and is the data passed to the underlying layer? Is the confirmation message displayed?

The more things there are to test more likely that the tests will break not because of a bug but of a minor change. It’s important to pick only the important battles to fight. Even though it’s possible to test a lot of things it may not be practical to do so. It would certainly be possible to run a spelling checker on every displayed word but if it’s not critical to the application it may not be worthwhile to do so. For example testing javascript integration requires use of Selenium. To work with continuous building it would require a Selenium RC server to run all the browsers. Tests recorded by a selenium recorder may be brittle to a slightest HTML structure change unless designed very carefully. While selenium would provide the ultimate functional testing power it might be overkill for a simple web application. Decide what is critical to your application, which things are more likely to break than others and test those things only. Adapt to reoccurring software problems by adding additional tests.

Testing output not implementation

When developing unit tests the most effective way to test is by testing the output of method calls instead of testing the internal implementation. For example testing a simple multiplication function which multiplies a and b is straightforward. More sophisticated units which rely on other units require use of mocks. If possible it’s best to avoid testing that a mock was used or how many times a mock was called and what kind of data it was passed. Otherwise the test is tightly hooked to the internal implementation and is more likely to break when it changes. It comes to the first principle deciding how detailed a test should be. If you are fairly comfortable that the code is less likely to change or break or it’s less critical, hooking deep into the mocks might be avoided. Imagine having to test the following piece of code:

class Notifier
{
    public function __construct(Zend_Mail $mailer)
    {
        $this->_mailer = $mailer;
    }
    public function notify()
    {  
        $this->_mailer->setBodyText('This is the text of the mail.');
        $this->_mailer->setFrom('[email protected]', 'Some Sender');
        $this->_mailer->addTo('[email protected]', 'Some Recipient');
        $this->_mailer->setSubject('TestSubject');
        return $this->_mailer->send();
    }
}

In this case the mock is the _mailer. All it’s method calls could be mocked and tested against that they are called only once and are passed the correct data. In turn that would make the test more likely to break whenever this function is changed. Instead it may be enough to test that function notify() returns true whenever send() returns true. On other hand such a test might seem not sufficient enough and more hooks may be required. For example adding a test for addTo() function call. Or if the functionality is extremely critical an integration test could be created to test that an actual message was sent to the mail server with the correct header and body.

Final Words

In the end it’s a challenge of trying to find the the acceptable balance between testing application functionality and avoiding having too many brittle tests. Try to identify what’s important to your application, and test those things only, prefer testing output of method calls over hooking deeply into implementation. Let your tests work for you and not against you.

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Mar/10

6

PHP Anti Patterns

Another talk I’ve atended at PHPUK 2010 was AntiPHPatterns by Stefan Priebsch. While design patterns are core implementation independent solutions to problems that occur over and over again which also serve as a great vocabulary, anti patterns are software patterns that are ineffective or counterproductive. In his presentation Stefan describes some of these anti patterns:

1. Constantitis. Excessive use of global constants is considered to be a code smell. Global constants can be defined anywhere in the code base, there is a risk of name clashes if a constant is already defined, global constants make the code more coupled, testing gets more complicated since constants have to be known beforehand and defined explicitly which might be even more troubling if a constant has to change it’s value for another test. Since class constants are not global it’s OK to use them. Cure for constantitis is not to use global constants and instead use dependency injection.

2. Globalomania. Global variables share the same problems as global constants. Because global variables can be changed it makes them more dangerous than global constants since a change in one part of the codebase can affect the other without anyone noticing. Global variables can be cured by using dependency injection.

3. Singletonitis. Singleton is one of the most popular design patterns. It’s wide success is due to the fact that singletons by implementation are available globally in the entire application. The problem that singleton design pattern tries to solve is to prevent having multiple instances of the same class. This is rarely the problem in most applications and most singletons are being used as global variables instead. Singletons share the same problems as global constants and global variables and therefore should be avoided. Singletonitis has the same cure as constantitis and globalomania.

4. God classes. According to object oriented best practices classes should do one thing only and do it well. Classes should be refined and granular. One of the ways to think about this is to ask yourself what are the responsibilities of this class. In an ideal case you will be able to describe it in one sentence without any “and’s”. When classes start having too many  responsibilities they become god classes. Usually the whole application relies on one of the god classes which makes the application tight coupled and therefore more difficult to maintain. To cure god classes minimize class responsibilities so that objects know everything about themselves and little about others.

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Feb/10

26

Zend Framework Escaping Entities

Zend Framework has a powerful input filtering component Zend_Filter_Input. It provides an interface to define multiple filters and validators and apply them to a collection of data. By default values returned from Zend_Filter_Input are escaped for safe HTML output. An example of such functionality:

$validators = array(
    'id' => array(
        'digits',
        'allowEmpty' => true,
    ),
    'name' => array(
        'presence' => 'required',
        new Zend_Validate_StringLength(5, 255),
    ),
    'date' => array(
        'presence' => 'required',
        new Zend_Validate_Date('d/m/Y'),
    ),
);
$filters = array(
    '*'  => 'StringTrim',
);
$input = new Zend_Filter_Input($filters, $validators, $data);
if ($input->isValid()) {
    print_r($input->getEscaped());
} else {
    print_r($input->getMessages());
}

The code above validates the $data array by checking that the id key consists only of digits or is empty, that name is present and it’s min length is 5 and max length is 255 and that date is present and it’s format is d/m/Y. The StringTrim validator removes any spaces in front and at the end of all the $data values. If the $data array is valid all escaped values are outputted and if not a generated list of error messages is presented.

Recently I’ve ran into a small problem while using Zend_Input_Filter. According to the best security practices all data coming from the user should be escaped before being outputted to the screen. This also means data coming from a database. This requires to escape every single output statement in every view. In my opinion this adds unwanted verbosity, performance overhead and a possibility to easily miss that something was not escaped in one of the views. That is why if there is a possibility I would prefer to trust the database and not worry about the data incoming from it. It may not be a very good option if data in the database is most often presented in other documents than HTML. Since all values would need to be decoded which defeats the whole purpose. Though this is rarely the case.

By default Zend_Filter_Input escapes values by using the htmlentities function. Which converts all applicable characters to HTML entities. This means that for example Danish language characters Æ Ø Å would be stored as Æ Ø Å Which means that it would take 7 bytes on average to store a single letter that otherwise could be stored using 1 - 3 bytes using UTF-8 encoding support in MySQL. This could also potentially ruin collation sorting.

To overcome this issue a very similar function htmlspecialchars could be used. It escapes only a few certain characters such as > < ” without escaping all international characters. The actual problem with Zend_Filter_Input is that it does not have an escape filter that uses htmlspecialchars. To solve the issue I’ve created a copy of HtmlEntities filter which uses htmlspecialchars function instead.

The filter can then be used like this:

$input = new Zend_Filter_Input($filters, $validators, $data);
$input->setDefaultEscapeFilter(new Company_Product_Filter_HtmlSpecialChars());

Zend_Filter_Input is a great tool to ease form validation and filtering. I would be very interested to hear from you how this problem could be solved.

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Feb/10

23

PHP London Conference 2010

I’m pleased to say that I will be attending the PHP UK conference 2010 in London. Last year I attended PHPNW 2009 which was great and I hope PHP London to be even better. It will be certainly interesting to listen to famous PHP speakers such as Stefan Priebsch, Fabien Potencier author of Symfony. The conference schedule has been announced and these are the talks that I’m going to attend:

  • The lost art of simplicity
  • AntiPHPatterns
  • PHP 5.3 in practice
  • PHPillow & CouchDB & PHP
  • ‘In search of…’ - integrating site search systems
  • PHP on the D-BUS

The keynote talk about lost art of simplicity sounds very promising. Also very eager to see Fabien’s presentation on how PHP 5.3 can be used in practice.

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Feb/10

20

Zend Framework Database Profiler Reporting

Zend Framework has a powerful Database Profiler component. It is remarkably simple to integrate the database profiler with the Zend Framework front controller with the use of Firefox addons FireBug and FirePHP:

// In your bootstrap file
$profiler = new Zend_Db_Profiler_Firebug('All DB Queries');
$profiler->setEnabled(true);
// Attach the profiler to your db adapter
$db->setProfiler($profiler);

Or just by enabling it in the database configuration:

$db = array(
    'type' => 'pdo_mysql',
    'host' => 'localhost',
    'dbname' => 'dbname',
    'username' => 'username',
    'password' => 'password',
    'profiler' => array(
        'enabled' => true,
        'class' => 'Zend_Db_Profiler_Firebug',
    )
);

Producing nicely formatted results:

Firebug profiler is great tool. But it requires to use Firefox and have FireBug and FirePHP addons installed. Not everyone in your organization may be Firefox users or have these addons installed. Another drawback is that sometimes queries may be quite big and complex. It’s not easy to analyse them in a Firebug window or to copy them to an editor that supports SQL highlighting.

To solve that it is possible to create a custom database profiler reporting mechanism. To output the profiler queries I’ll create a custom Zend Framework action helper:

class Company_Product_Helper_Profiler extends Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_Abstract
{
    protected $_profiler;
    protected $_view;
    protected $_config;
    protected $_db;
    public function __construct(Zend_Config $config, $db)
    {
        $this->_config = $config;
        $this->_db = $db;
    }
    public function init()
    {
        $this->_view = new Zend_View();
        parent::init();
    }
    public function postDispatch()
    {
        $this->_profiler = new Company_Product_Db_Profiler_Report($this->_db1);
        if (!$this->_isProfilerEnabled()) {
            return false;
        }
        $this->outputToScreen();
    }
    protected function _isProfilerEnabled()
    {
        if ($this->_config->environment == 'live') {
            return false;
        }
        if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'])) {
            return false;
        }
        $profiler = $this->getRequest()->getParam('profiler');
        if (!empty($profiler)) {
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
    protected function outputToScreen()
    {
        $this->_view->headLink()->appendStylesheet('/css/highlight/default.css', 'screen');
        $this->_view->headScript()->appendFile('/js/highlight.pack.js');
        $this->_view->headScript()->appendScript('
            hljs.tabReplace = \'    \';
            hljs.initHighlightingOnLoad();
        ');
        $this->getResponse()->appendBody($this->_profiler);
    }
}

The action helper uses a post dispatch hook. The post dispatch hook is called after the Zend Framework dispatcher dispatches a request. A post dispatch hook is used to ensure that all queries have been run and to integrate the profiler with the Front Controller without changing any of the controller classes.

Action helper profiler checks to see if any profiling information should be outputted. It checks if the current configuration environment is not production to not allow unauthorized people to use the profiler. It also checks if a request is not an AJAX request, since AJAX requests may be returning JSON data structures and any additional output can break the client which sent the request. Profiler can be enabled by adding a URL query parameter ?profiler=1.

To highlight the SQL queries profiler uses a third party JavaScript highlighting library Highlight.js. On page load highlight.js finds all <code> nodes in the DOM structure, detects the programming or markup language type of the content inside them and highlights it.

The profiler action helper also uses another class to format the profiler report. The profiler report class implements an iterator interface and the __toString method allowing to use it in different ways. It could also be used to format profiler output for environments such as terminals which can’t interpret HTML.

class Company_Product_Db_Profiler_Report implements Iterator
{
    protected $_profiler;
    protected $_html = false;
    protected $_position ;
    public function __construct($db, $html = true)
    {
        $this->_profiler = $db->getProfiler();
        $this->_html = $html;
        $this->_position = 0;
        $this->_profiles = $this->_profiler->getQueryProfiles();
    }
    public function setOutputFormatToHtml($value)
    {
        $this->_html = !empty($value);
    }
    public function __toString()
    {
        $out = "";
        if ($this->_html) {
            foreach ($this->_profiles as $key => $query) {
                $out .= $this->_formatProfileAsHtml($key, $query);
            }
        } else {
            foreach ($this->_profiles as $key => $query) {
                $out .= $this->_formatProfileAsText($key, $query);
            }
        }
        return $out;
    }
    protected function _formatProfileAsHtml($key, $query)
    {
        $out = "<pre><code>{$key}. " . wordwrap($query->getQuery(), 150) . "\n\n ({$query->getElapsedSecs()} s.) </code> </pre>";
        return $out;
    }
    protected function _formatProfileAsText($key, $query)
    {
        $out = "$key. {$query->getQuery()} ({$query->getElapsedSecs()} s.)\n\n";
        return $out;
    }
    public function rewind()
    {
        $this->_position = 0;
    }
    public function current()
    {
        if ($this->_html) {
            return $this->_formatProfileAsHtml($this->_position, $this->_profiles[$this->_position]);
        } else {
            return $this->_formatProfileAsText($this->_position, $this->_profiles[$this->_position]);
        }
    }
    public function key()
    {
        return $this->_position;
    }
    public function next()
    {
        ++$this->_position;
    }
    public function valid()
    {
        return isset($this->_profiles[$this->_position]);
    }
}

To make Zend Framework aware of the profiler action helper add the following lines of code to the bootstrap file:

Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::addHelper(
    new Company_Product_Helper_Profiler($config, $databaseConnection)
);

When done the output of the profiler should look something like this:

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Jan/10

17

Creating websites with Drupal cons and pros

Recently I’ve set myself of a new journey since I’ve decided to help my friend’s business to  battle the crisis back home by creating them a new website. It’s a bit ironic but I didn’t know where to start, because at work I usually work with custom made websites which very rarely use a content management system.

The content management system I’ve chosen to use is Drupal - a widely adopted opensource content management system written in PHP. It has a vast community and enormous amounts of modules developed by other people. It took me about a week’s worth of evenings to get to know the system and launch the website. Here are the steps involved to create a Drupal website:

  • Install Drupal. The installation was really easy and simple. Put it on your webserver, access the website, follow an easy guide and you’re done.
  • Configure Drupal. To a new user Drupal configuration may seem hectic or chaotic at first. It may take a while to get the hang of things. Figuring out how to change website information, setting up menus, changing themes, hiding things that you don’t want to display.
  • Pick a theme. It’s generally better to pick an already made theme and modify it to fit your needs. Themes are designed to integrate with Drupal nicely. They will likely look the same on all popular browsers, will be HTML standard compliant, optimized for SEO and may even be optimized usability wise. I found it very easy to pick a theme using theme garden.
  • Install modules. Drupal is a modular content management system and comes with a few useful bundled modules it self. One of the strongest Drupal’s key points is that it has a vast community actively developing modules for it. If you ever need to do something on your website most likely there is a module to do it.

More about modules

Drupal has many useful modules such as Blog, Comments, RSS, Forum, Search, Localization, Content categorization. But the true power lies in modules developed by the Drupal community. A few examples:

  • CCK. Content construction kit allows you to add custom fields to content nodes.
  • Views. One of the most essential modules for Drupal. Alows to change website’s representation in many ways.
  • Pathauto. Allows to configure how website’s URL’s are constructed. A very powerful module for anyone interested in SEO.
  • Nodewords. Allows to change meta tags. Very useful to provide custom meta descriptions for content pages. Descriptions are important for SEO.
  • Page Title. Another useful Drupal SEO module that allows to provide custom page titles.
  • Lightbox2. Very nice plugin to display images on the website. Also supports slideshow.
  • Wysiwyg. Allows to replace a simple content text editor with a rich text editor of your choice.
  • Node Gallery. A nice lightweight image gallery for Drupal. Still in alpha stages but very easy to use and provides lot’s of configuration. Integrates with Lightbox2.
  • Backup and Migrate. Creates scheduled website backups in case there’s an emergency.
  • And many other modules

Pros and Cons of Drupal

Drupal has many pros:

  • Extremely easy to install on any webserver.
  • Has a vast community developing modules and providing technical help.
  • Has a huge amount of freely available themes to pick from.
  • Is very well adopted and maintained which means that bugs are fixed, security patches are released and new cutting edge features are always on the horizon.
  • Drupal is fast. Maybe it’s not the fastest content management system in the world but it certainly is fast. It’s very easy to set Drupal cache settings which give an immediate boost to the website.
  • It’s relatively easy to set up a website that is Search Engine Optimized aka SEO.

Like everything in life Drupal has a few cons:

  • For new users Drupal may be overwhelming somewhat chaotic and hectic. It’s still very easy to set up a theme and enter content. But you may have to scratch your head for a while how to add localization support to Drupal.
  • Drupal is quite old and even it’s actively developed lot’s of it is written in procedural PHP. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in some way means that it’s not a top cutting edge software modelling masterpiece.
  • Even though Drupal has a huge community which develops modules for it some of the modules don’t have very good documentation. More often than not these are the less used ones. It’s not Drupal’s fault but it’s still confusing and somewhat frustrating to try and figure out where and how you can configure some module you’ve just installed.

All in all I’m happy with Drupal and I think it’s an amazing project and I’m giving my thanks to the Drupal community for all the greats things they are doing.

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