SolutionBot

PHP has typically been partnered along side of MySQL as a DBMS for a long time now. While MySQL is very powerful PHP can utilize many other DBMS’s as well such as PostgresSQL, Oracle, and even Microsoft SQL. The problem is that connecting to and using the different databases means you have to load different drivers with different coding conventions. For a long time you couldn’t use the same code with Microsoft SQL as you did with MySQL. Not until PDO.

To really appreciate JSON its good to understand XML and why an alternative to XML exists. XML is a powerful robust markup language that makes many things that were formerly very difficult much more feesable. One of those things is data interchange between different systems. Data interchange between different systems has always been possible, however up until recent years it has been very difficult because of the lack of a unified protocol. These days most modern languages and DBMSs have XML parsing functions that allow you to grab the data that you need and search and filter your data with Xpath.

The Publish/Subscribe model allows you to build loosely coupled applications in which an event is ‘fired’ and subscribing functions ‘respond’. This can be very powerful, if implemented correctly, and provides your application with more scalability.

Site maps are important tools for webmasters to have some sort of control over how their sites are indexed. This doesn’t give ultimate control by any stretch of the imagination. Google and yahoo will still index websites the way they will, a site map is more like a webmasters ‘tip’ to crawler bots to tell them what pages they should crawl, how often they change and what kind of priority the crawler bots should give to certain pages.

Here’s a handy little function. This comes in handy in many different situations, especially in regards to parsing database results.

The whole point of an IDE is to help you develop faster and with fewer errors. Eclipse PDT has many features that can help accomplish this, but if you don’t know what those features are and don’t use them, then you might as well just use notepad. Here are a few shortcuts that I’ve found very helpful:

“Ok, so I have a great text editor. Why do I need an IDE?” A very common question especially among PHP developers. There are many different text editors that do a really good job when you need a basic text editor and maybe a little syntax highlighting. But what does a full fledged IDE typically offer that a text editor does not?