Meet Nu Engine

nuengine:

We don’t want all that bloat from frameworks like CakePHP and CodeIgniter, what we want is a plain and simple framework that helps you organize your code into a wonderful and glorious Three-Tier or MVC architectural pattern. Simple as that.

If you share the same sentiments, meet Nu Engine, a simple and straightforward PHP framework that will help you write MVC applications without all those bloat and unused Classes and files.

PHP Frameworks

Everywhere you ask, people will tell you “don’t use them, they’re bloated, write your own”, or even harshly “grow a spine, write your own”. Well, it’s actually true, but most of the time, we have deadlines and we needed that website done yesterday.

This is where frameworks come in, helping you in shrinking the time span for development, and also help you write cleaner and modular code. Just make sure you choose the right one for you.

This benchmark might help you decide which framework you’d want to use, but don’t let execution speed be the only factor for your decision, make sure it does help you develop fast.

Making a proper Logout Page in PHP

A good logout page makes sure that the user is properly logged out, and that he leaves no sensitive information in the browser. To do this, you should empty out the $_SESSION variable, destroy the cookie, and finally destroy the session.

Assuming you have already called in session_start(), use this function to properly end a session and log out a user:

function logout()
{
    $_SESSION['authenticated'] = array();
    if (isset($_COOKIE[session_name()]))
        setcookie(session_name(), '', time()-42000, '/');
    session_destroy();
}

Getting your Local Time in PHP

Chances are, that when you’re on a shared hosting server, the date() function in PHP doesn’t return the time at your locality. To get your local time, you can offset the epoch time parameter in the date() function.

echo date('g:i A', time()+(60*60*8));

To offset the epoch time, use the time() function plus your offset as your epoch time parameter, like the example above.

Here in the Philippines, our time is +8, so we add 60*60*8 (=28800) to the time() function.

Fine Tuna →

This is the best way to get detailed notes and comments on your design/image, online. Simply upload image or website’s url and then send an email of the link of your image to your friends or clients.

PHP’s json_encode

The function json_encode can serialize any PHP variable into JSON format.

$arr = array('a'=>1,'b'=>2,'c'=>3);
echo json_encode($arr);

This PHP code will output:

{"a":1,"b":2,"c":3}

The thing is, json_encode is only defaultly compiled with PHP 5 and above, and if you can’t install new modules into your server, you can’t have the new native function. Luckily somebody has a clean PHP script version of it so you can define the function yourself, save this to a file and include it everytime you’ll need it.

if (!function_exists('json_encode'))
{
  function json_encode($a=false)
  {
    if (is_null($a)) return 'null';
    if ($a === false) return 'false';
    if ($a === true) return 'true';
    if (is_scalar($a))
    {
      if (is_float($a))
      {
        // Always use "." for floats.
        return floatval(str_replace(",", ".", strval($a)));
      }

      if (is_string($a))
      {
        static $jsonReplaces = array(array("\\", "/", "\n", "\t", "\r", "\b", "\f", '"'), array('\\\\', '\\/', '\\n', '\\t', '\\r', '\\b', '\\f', '\"'));
        return '"' . str_replace($jsonReplaces[0], $jsonReplaces[1], $a) . '"';
      }
      else
        return $a;
    }
    $isList = true;
    for ($i = 0, reset($a); $i < count($a); $i++, next($a))
    {
      if (key($a) !== $i)
      {
        $isList = false;
        break;
      }
    }
    $result = array();
    if ($isList)
    {
      foreach ($a as $v) $result[] = json_encode($v);
      return '[' . join(',', $result) . ']';
    }
    else
    {
      foreach ($a as $k => $v) $result[] = json_encode($k).':'.json_encode($v);
      return '{' . join(',', $result) . '}';
    }
  }
}

PHP optimization tricks you can do right now

These are just some small tweaks that you can do to your existing code to improve parse time, and also you should eventually get used to writing PHP code this way.

Although some doubt and say that these techniques are not true and does not reduce parse time in any way, it surely will help you in writing more readable and cleaner code.

Lower case true

// instead of writing
$bool = TRUE;

// write true in lower case like this
$bool = true;

PHP takes in one extra effort to convert your upper case booleans into lower case. Also, lower case is much more readable than upper case, as it defines the word’s shape more, fyi: humans read through recognizing the words’ shapes.

Single quotes

// avoid using too much double quotes
echo "hello world!";

// use single quotes whenever possible
echo 'hello world!';

// well everytime it is actually possible
$noun = 'world';
echo 'hello '.$noun.'!';

// rather than
echo "hello $noun!";

// yes it does look like more work
// but eventually your code will look more uniform,
// separating static strings with variables,
// and not mixing them up

During parsing, whenever PHP encounters a double quoted string, it looks for parsable variables within, but when it encounters a single quoted string it skips this step. Clearly it is more straightforward for PHP to concatenate strings and variables, rather than parse each and every double quoted string and concatenate found variables.

One Pixel Clipped Corners

GMail recently rolled out more features regarding labeling your email, and with that comes new buttons! I like these new navigational candy.

These new buttons aren’t really rounded, not rounded but clipped, and they’re definitely soft on the eyes, they’ve used this technique before in Google Analytics and now they have implemented it in Google Mail.

You can easily do this by using CSS3 rounded corners, add these to any of your block elements:

-moz-border-radius: 2px;
-webkit-border-radius: 2px;
background:#333;
/*of course you can change this color.*/

Another solution uses nested bold tags to create the effect, although this is much more difficult, this resolves browser incompatibility with CSS3 styles, this guy has beat me to it long ago.

Hello Wurld!

We just launched, so far it’s been awesome setting up Websites and stuff. We hope to get some good followers and readers, and also some good clients too. =]

Hire us! Feel free to email us at hello@vanillazoo.com.

Oh BTW, I’m Pat the web developer, and he is Migs the designer.