I was recently working on a project that generated PNGs using Java from a Java2D canvas. Along the way someone wanted to change the graphics to have transparent backgrounds and because they were needed for display on the web I knew this would become an issue because IE doesn't support transparency in PNGs out of the box. And so my journey started.

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I ran into this and found it interesting. Someone has added support for anonymous functions in PHP.

With the patch you can now do stuff like:

Before you had to use a funky function generation call.

Tags: php

After reading a post on hacking Akismet to add graphs I decided I liked the idea but I didn't want to store the data in a database. It seemed like it would be better to store it using a RRD and then use the PHP RRD library. So after a little hacking I've created a version that does basically the same thing except uses a RRD.

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Now that you can create a streaming Flash video player with PHP or Ruby and you know add metadata for cuepoints to Flash videos you are ready for something else. The following code will show you how to create a video player with PHP that will watch for metadata events and display annotations contained inside the metadata either over the video itself or in a div on the same page as the movie.
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I mentioned in creating Flash videos using FFMpeg that you could use Ming to create your own Flash video player. I've added a patch to the ruby -ming extension for video streaming so now it is possible to create a streaming player with both PHP and Ruby using their Ming extensions. The following examples show you how.
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A while back I explained how to compile the ImageMagick extension for PHP and this past week I got around to creating some example code to make some of the command line examples I have in ImageMagick command line examples part 1 and ImageMagick command line examples part 2.
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A few days ago when PHP 5.2 was released one of the things that caught my eye was that it now includes the JSON extension. For anyone doing AJAXy type stuff JSON is an easy way to martial your data between your server side language and javascript.

For the longest time I've been using the older PHP JSON library to do JSON with PHP but now that the extension is included in the core I decided it was time to test it out. I took a couple of minutes and converted my DNSBL checker as a test since it has a fairly large data-set that gets converted and sent back. The json functions provided by the extension are probably easier to use since the JSON library needed you to create an object first but that wasn't a real issue. After making the change I could tell JSON extension was faster than the library. After a little digging I found that someone has done a little extension vs library testing and claims the JSON extension is 153 times as fast as the library.

Tags: php, ajax

Some time ago I was looking at how to re-size uploaded images in a way that looks good using PHP. I was impressed that when I uploaded a 4M picture to flickr it managed to re-size and compress it into a smaller version that looked correct. I knew they weren't just resizing it so I went on a quest to find out what it took to do the same thing with PHP. The following is step one in that process.

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I noticed Lighty XCache when it came out a few months ago. I like EAccelerator myself but now there is an admin console for XCache that looks pretty nice.

On a number of occasions I've wanted to map a section of a site hosted with lighttpd onto a single PHP file that could then be used as a controller. Here is how I go about doing it.

The first part is to re-write the given part of the site to the PHP file you want to be the controller. Add the following to your configuration file:

You can then start with a simple example to see where you will get your URL information from:

The $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] value will be the requested URI. You can now break it up into multiple parts with explode:

At this point you have an array of the URI parts and can map those however you want using PHP.

Tags: PHP, lighttpd