You have to learn yourself. Company may not give the opportunity!

This is one of the most common pitfalls i found in this recruitment drive. Most people complain that they don’t get enough time to learn about the latest tools and technologies. But the thing is, It’s your career! the companies will always try to get the best out of you within shortest possible budget and time. And at the same time you have to enrich yourself not only through the projects you get but also with some voluntary open source projects. What most companies don’t realize that, if the programmers are not given some room to do R&D, it’s eventually the organization who will lose by compromising with the standards of the programmer against budget. And the programmers are not updates with the latest tools technologies. So, guys! you have to take some personal effort to play with the newer things. Even if you don’t get a minute in the workplace, find some time at home to do some R&D. It will pay off inshAllah.

Ability to do things VS Ability to do things with Art.

There are hell lot of renowned Javascript programmers but how many do we know? John Resig, Jack Slocum, Remy Sharp and so on. Why do we know them ? Because they did something which others didn’t. They did things with Art for which we know them. So all the promising programmers, please concentrate on doing thing with Art. If you know jQuery, learn how it works, who’re the people behind it, follow them on twitter, read their blogs. Let alone John Resig’s Blog can give you a very good insight what’s being cooked for the next generation javascripts. BE detail oriented about things you play everyday with. You’ll always be appreciated for things you want to do not “things you had to do”.

Object Oriented Programming

PHP had been very lose in standards and conventions when it comes to Object Oriented Programming. The recent releases of PHP are much more matured that it used to be in the past. I started in 2000. We can do lot of things without even following the standard way. But dear PHP programmers, better companies or promising companies will take you because you’ll make some magical changes, add some new dimensions in the organization. So please be very clear and efficient about Object Oriented Concepts and way of doing those things in PHP. There’s a difference between a programmer who declares a class “abstract” knowing when it’s needed and a programmer who knows OOP but doesn’t want to declare the class abstract. PHP is not at the pick of it’s maturity. So try to discover which things are absent in OO PHP which are there in other languages (C++,Java, Ruby).

Have some publishing activities

To present yourself as a passionate programmer, you gotta have a blog or some sort of publishing which is visible on the WWW. If you have a blog and you write about things you play with, problems, time saving solutions, it will help you a lot getting the attention as a good, focused and passionate programmers. So start your blog now if you don’t have one. It takes a little time to get used to with some writing habit.

Care more on the CV

May people simply flooded of with bunch of tools and technologies. Many of cv looked like they are Jack of All trades. But hardly anyone was proficient in all they mentioned. So please, do not put items on which you don’t have substantial hold of and just for the sake of filling up CV. If you write you are good at Javascript, expect advanced level questions from JS. If you write “Good in OOP” , expect higher level questions from OOP.  Make the CV withing 3 pages maximum. It irritates the interviewer when people have long descriptions about each project you have worked on.

There are other points i wanted to write but the post will become longer than the comfortable or acceptable length. So i’ll share some more next hopefully.

So ADMINER (formerly phpminadmin) comes up with a nifty utility in their one file standalone package.

If you haven’t heard of Adminer yet (you must have missed a great tool), download from http://www.adminer.org/en/

And run it from your web server from any location. After entering credentials and selecting database, just select a table from the left which appears like this.

Now you get some options like – Alter table   |   Default values  |   Select table  |  New item

Select Alter Table and you get a screen like this

Alright, you pretty know what to do with those up and down arrows now. Don’t forget to save the changes

So how do we do that in Codeigniter ? It’s simple, although this feature is not well commented or documented. Ok, now open system/application/config/config.php file

And find the settings called $config['sess_expiration'] under the section Session Variables and put the value like this

$config['sess_expiration']        = -1;

That’s it. Now your session will be killed in the event of browser closing.

HMVC helps developing modular apps in a very convenient way. All the things work simply fine just like a clean CI installation. There’re 1 or two exceptions which i have found. One is the callback of Form_validation class. If we are making some forms like registration we check emails and usernames and we do it in the form validation class using callbacks. If we look at the basic callback structure when validating forms from CI documentation, it appears like.

< ?php

class Form extends Controller
{

 function index()
 {
 $this->load->helper( array (

 'form',
 'url'
 ) );

 $this->load->library( 'form_validation' );

 $this->form_validation->set_rules( 'username', 'Username', 'callback_username_check' );
 $this->form_validation->set_rules( 'password', 'Password', 'required' );
 $this->form_validation->set_rules( 'passconf', 'Password Confirmation', 'required' );
 $this->form_validation->set_rules( 'email', 'Email', 'required' );

 if ($this->form_validation->run() == FALSE)
 {
 $this->load->view( 'myform' );
 }
 else
 {
 $this->load->view( 'formsuccess' );
 }
 }

 function username_check($str)
 {
 if ($str == 'test')
 {
 $this->form_validation->set_message( 'username_check', 'The %s field can not be the word "test"' );
 return FALSE;
 }
 else
 {
 return TRUE;
 }
 }

}
?>

But this callback will not simply work. Some of my precious hours went why it was not working. Then i navigated the Form_validation.php in /system/libraries folder around line 580 which looks like

if ($callback === TRUE)
 {
 if ( ! method_exists($this->CI, $rule))
 {
 continue;
 }

The function – method_exists returns false even if the callback function is there in the Controller and after all in the CI loader object. So it came out from the forum that you have to do a little extension to Form Validation class which is

< ?php if (!defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

class MY_Form_validation extends CI_Form_validation
{
 function run($module = '', $group = '') {
 (is_object($module)) AND $this->CI =& $module;
 return parent::run($group);
 }
}
/* End of file MY_Form_validation.php */
/* Location: ./application/libraries/MY_Form_validation.php */

And when running the validation like in earlier code

 if ($this->form_validation->run() == FALSE)

you have to provide an addition $this as a parameter to run method. which will look like

 if ($this->form_validation->run($this) == FALSE)

Now, you validation callbacks will work perfectly.

Another note, if you’re trying to access a public variable of a controller via the get_instance() in hooks , you’ll have to write in your controller like this.

CI::instance()->var_name = “Some Value”;

May be there are some other required adjustments when using HMVC, but i came across this two time killing adjustments.

< ?php
// For overriding Native class to  convert filenames to lowercase.
class MY_Upload extends CI_Upload
{
function _prep_filename($filename)
{
if (strpos($filename, '.') === false)
{
return $filename;
}

$parts = explode('.', $filename);
$ext = array_pop($parts);
$filename = array_shift($parts);

foreach ($parts as $part)
{
if ($this->mimes_types(strtolower($part)) === false)
{
$filename .= '.' . $part . '_';
}
else
{
$filename .= '.' . $part;
}
}

$filename .= '.' . $ext;

return strtolower($filename);
}
function get_extension($filename)
{
$x = explode('.', $filename);
return strtolower('.'.end($x));
}
}

The code can be downloaded from here

my_upload

Unzip and put it in your /system/application/libraries directory.

Now for any upload you do using CI’s uploading class, will produce lowercased filenames.

Look at the Alexa graph above. What do u think ?  

I’ve been using Codeigniter in Mid and Fairly Big project for over a year and a half. Kohana was released before i started but the amount of online support and tutorials and an active company development (EllisLab) made me decide using CodeIgniter. But I keep checking updates on Kohana because it has lot of extra features over CI. It’s Strictly PHP5 OOP and has libraries like ORM which doesn’t exist CI’s distribution. Just out of curiosity, i went to Alexa and compared the traffic for CI and KohanaPHP and it really surprised me. Kohana is way ahead in terms of traffic. What does that mean? People are more involved with Kohana than CI ? Well, apparently YES. Kohana is community driven development. In CI, user contributes as addons to the Framework, which is ok. But when there’s an active driving force by the community, it’s better, at least i think. 

Moreover I read some articles how to easily use Zend in Kohana in the beyondcoding.com. So that makes me think of leaning towards Kohana for my next projects. There are of course ways to use CI with Zend though but the integration method of Kohana with Zend looked neat. It won’t get much tough to switch to Kohana because it was originally based on CI. And default design pattern in Kohana is Factory (as it appears) while CI is singleton. Of course I’ll need to analyze some more benchmarks for scalability and other features before shifting focus. 

It has select, search, edit, index , create — almost everything u need. The best part is that it needs no install and it’s a single file weighing about 167KB.

But of course, i’m not saying it’s a fully alternative to phpmyadmin. No way. They have been developing this mighty tool for over nine years.  But phpminadmin surely is a very very good altenative of that for quick solutions. Check it out here.

http://phpminadmin.sourceforge.net/

Why didn’t I find it earlier ?  :-(

UPDATE : THE PROJECT HAS BEEN RENAMED TO “adminer” AND IS AVAILABLE at http://www.adminer.org/en/

And the end result is inefficiency and waste of valuable time. There are various naming conventions practiced for coding. PHP has it’s own style where underscore is massively used. And it’s quite comfortable to use. $last_name is more readable than $lastname. So variables/functions can be made quite meaningful when they are written. To cut the story short, here’s some suggestions from me: 

• Always use lower case in functions and variables unless specifically asked by Frameworks. Like function Login()
  
  function login()

• Functions/Variable separators should be with underscores. e.g function get_users()..
  
  function getUsers() // It’s better to avoid Camelize

• Function names should be grammatically sensible. For example if we want a function that returns all the countries of the world, we should name it like function get_all_countries().
  
  function get_all_country().. // wrong plural
  
  function get_country_all().. // Hard to make sense what this means
• Be consistent with one practice throughout the whole project so that other people can confortably assume the convention.
• If possible keep signature of datatypes or return types in variable function name. Like if we want to store users as an array in a variable it should be $user_array instead of $users
• Using imperatives. Meaning put some verbs in functions to know what the function is doing. Instead of function notes(), try to write function get_notes(); which is kind of self explaining.
• Avoid homophones: e.g., foo, fu, phoo, etc.
• Avoid generic names such as tmp, buf, reg.
• Avoid intentionally misspelled words such as lo or lite.

Well, there can be many more suggestions for better coding, because "coding is poetry" for programmers.