DevShed: Performing Full-text and Boolean Searches with MySQL
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DevShed has started a new MySQL-centric series today with this new tutorial, an initial look at working with MySQL and PHP to perform full-text and boolean searches on your data.   In this series of articles I'm going to show you how to work with full-text and Boolean searches using MySQL and PHP 5, but the entirety of the code samples that will be developed here can be easily modified to work with a different database server.   They start with the creation of a "common approach" for making the requests and fetching the results (in classes so that any other database could be substituted). With the class structure in place, they move on to the full-text searches, showing how to format database tables by creating them with a fulltext index on which ever fields you want.
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Those in the New York area might want to check out a new post Daniel Krook has concerning his talk he'll be giving on native XML databases at next week's New York PHP User Group meeting.   The presentation follows a mailing list thread and resulting blog post that generated a lot of interest and discussion on the topic. It should be a great talk for database administrators, application developers and content producers alike.   According to the summary of the talk, he'll be discussing what XML databases are good for and why you might choose them over a normal database. For more information on attending, check out the NYPHP User Group website.
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DevShed finishes up their series looking at making a search engine with the Yahoo! web services in PHP5 in this last look at using the functionality they've created so far to make a more improved search.   This last installment of the series will be entirely focused on demonstrating how Inheritance can be used in a helpful way to build a set of child classes that will come in handy for consuming a specific Yahoo! Search Service.   They show how to use their current image search functionality and, with a few modifications, make a base class that can be used to support ech of the other search types (web, image, video) with common functionality and settings.
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An Eclipse IDE plug-in that would provide search capabilities specifically for developers is being readied by a University of California, Berkeley computer science professor.ADVERTISEMENTSBC Case Study: Crate & BarrelWhat sold them on improving their network? A system that could cut management costs from the get-go. Find out more.
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In a new post on his blog, Kore Nordmann takes a look at a feature that's been around a long time (first introduced in a message board application) - BBCodes.   The discussion on my blog post "Do not use regular expressions for parsing" ended in a discussion about BBcodes in general. I just used them as an example to demonstrate why it it is impossible to parse such a language with regular expressions - and mentioned in a subclause, that I don't see any sense in using them at all.   He looks at some of the myths surrounding them and their use (more secure, easier to use, safer than HTML) and gives some reasons for making teh choice of HTML over them.
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On his blog today, Mike Lively has posted about the work h's done to create a database extension for the popular unit testing software for PHP, PHPUnit.   For those that may not have read any of my previous postings on the subject the goal of this software is to extend the functionality of PHPUnit to allow using seed data to put a given database into a known state prior to executing each test. It also provides an easy mechanism to compare database contents with an expected dataset.   Mike has just completed the initial feature set for his project - more or less a port of DBUnit over to PHP. The post includes not only details about this initial release but also code that demonstrates its use. In his example, it's used to validate that a bank account has been created properly by comparng database information before and after the insert.
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Tips for improving the efficiency of job searches on the Web.
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Masala, an add-on to IBM's DB2 database, queries far-flung info sources on company networks.
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This  is very interesting:  "As large MediaWiki deployments may gain performance using Memcached, at some level cost of RAM to store all objects becomes too high. In order to balance resource usage and take more use of Apache server disks, Tugela, the distributed cached on-disk hash database, has arrived."  So Tugela  is like memcached but backed by a disk-based btree.  Since most memcached installs are usually backed by MySQL we would just be duplicating some of the work that MySQL already does. Of course this is probably being a bit unfair.  There wouldn't be any locking in this situation.  I'd like to see benchmarks though.  I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be able to beat an InnoDB install.   ...
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Relevancy of results has been the dominant theme in my semantic search posts so far. And in this piece I will be discussing about SenseBot, a search tool that has the added feature of summarizing results. Very often, the intent of a user is to obtain brief information on a concept or a keyword. In [...]
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The International PHP Magazine has posted the results from their latest poll where they asked their readers "which is the most common PHP database problem?"   The options were:  Using MySQL directly Not using auto-increment functionality Using multiple databases Not using relations The n+1 pattern  And coming out on top (with 27.5%) was "Not using relations" in the SQL statements made. Following close behind was "Using MySQL directly" and falling in last was "Not using auto-increment functionality".   Be sure to vote in this week's poll that asks "Which is Truest?" - given several popular opinions on PHP, pick the one that you think is the most true.
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Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk
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DevShed continues their series looking at some of the fundamentals of working with PHP in this new tutorial posted today. It looks at one of the flow control statements the language has to offer and a very useful data structure - the switch statement and arrays.   In our last exciting adventure (back in early November), we braved crocodiles, ravenous editors, most of the PHP statements, and beginning loops. In this edition we'll cover the final statement, the Switch, and discuss arrays. So sit back, order your R2D2 robot to bring you a cold, frosty Jolt Cola, and let's get cracking.   They start with a simple example of a switch statement (to echo out strings) and follow it with a detailed description of the different sorts of arrays - numeric indexed, associative and multidimensional versions.
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AgileWiki explores new knowledge representation. The current effort is on implementing a copy-on-write OODBMS with support for fast deep copies, b-trees, large extensible hashes, simple lists, bush structures and calendars.   CowDb is a new kind of Object Store based on Copy-On-Write technology. It supports fast deep copies, b-trees and large extensible hashes.   http://agilewiki.wiki.sourceforge.net/CowDb
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPClasses.org: A PHP killer feature - Streams abstractionRob Thompson's Blog: Switch vs. IfPHPEverywhere: Octopussy numbers in PHPJob Posting: MODE Visual Seeks PHP Developer (Charlotte, NC)ProDevTips.com: Why PHP as a templating language sucksMatthew Turland's Blog: The Yin and Yang of TypingStubbles Blog: Stubbles 0.5.0 releasedChristopher Jones' Blog: Updated connection pooling in PHP's OCI8 extensionBen Ramsey's Blog: Congrats Costa Rica PHP!Carsten Lucke's Blog: Configuration issues with Xdebug on Debian Etch
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DevShed has posted the second and last part of a series of two articles based around the Composite design pattern - using it to work with strings in PHP5.   Are you a PHP developer who wants to improve your skills in pattern-based programming in PHP? If the answer to this question is a emphatic yes, then you should begin reading this article now! Welcome to the final part of the series "Implementing the composite pattern with PHP 5." Comprised of two instructive tutorials, this series walks you through the basic concepts of this important design pattern, and shows you how to apply it with some educational examples.   They start by defining a simple StringProcessor class as an abstract interface to build from. From there, they create two other classes - the SingleStringProcessor and the MultipleStringProcessor. Each of these takes in either a single file or multiple filenames and spits back out the value of the string and the length of the string.
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Harry Fuecks has gotten busy and posted the third part of his "Joy of Regular Expressions" series over on the SitePoint PHP Blog today.   Following on from the last part, this one is more of an intermission-a round up of regex syntax seen so far and a couple of links following feedback.   He looks at two different topics:  A "must reads" section of resources for getting the most out of regular expressions A comprehensive "cheat sheet" with tips on expression delimiters, literals, pattern modifiers, character classes, quantifiers, assertions, sub-patterns, and working with the blackslash.