Petition to release Zend Studio 5.5.1 source code.

Zend Studio 5.5.1 is the latest version of the famous PHP IDE which is not based on Eclipse. The next Zend Studio for Eclipse 6 has used the same name, but is a completely different software. Zend Technologies Ltd. has taken the open-source general purpose IDE and extended it to be suitable for PHP development. The main reason for the switch IMHO was that Eclipse is a well know, well supported IDE and Zend Technologies Ltd. can profit from many public extensions and improvements to Eclipse and can concentrate on the PHP support.

Zend Studio 5 has been almost the perfect IDE. Extremely fast (especially compared to Eclipse), relatively robust (crashes from time to time), but very well sewed. It had native (S)FTP support, more native then ZS4E. It had the debugger, profiler, code analyzer, CSV/SVN support - everything that PHP programmer ever needed.

ZS 5 is in many aspects superior to ZS4E and currently lacks some new features (PHP 5.3, Mercurial). Therefore we're kindly asking Zend Technologies Ltd. to release Zend Studio 5 source code to public. We are sure there are Java enthusiasts who will fix the stability issues and implement new features. The only reason Zend Technologies Ltd. has not done so already is because open-source ZS5+ may be a threat to their profits. Still we are sure that open-source product will only increase the popularity of the Zend Technologies Ltd. as a leading PHP company which will trigger increased profits in the long term.

Please comment to support this petition and share this page with everybody who might be interested.

DebugPanel - Web 2.0 way of print_r()

Target Audience

Novice and intermediate PHP developers who are debugging the code by inserting

print_r($var); // or
var_dump($var); // or
var_export($var);

Note: those who are using DBG, Xdebug, Zend Debugger or others, please ignore this "lame" script - it will only make you laugh.

Purpose

Most of PHP developers start debugging by inserting something like this in their code and seeing results on the screen.

$var = call_some_obscure_function();
print '<pre>'.print_r($var, true).'</pre>';

DebugPanel also outputs the variable contents on the screen, but not directly at the place where it's called, but in a window floating over your script output with many convenience features.

Feature list

• Collect all variable dumps in one place.
• Highlight the syntax a little (different variable types get different background).
• Save screen space by toggling visibility of different variables.
• Handle multidimentional arrays with ease.
• DebugPanel is displayed with position: absolute which is not interfering with the output of your script.
• Drag and drop DebugPanel so it will not cover important information on your screen.
• Never get warnings that you are trying to send HTTP headers or set cookies AFTER outputting debug information.
• Handle objects as easy as multidimentional arrays.
• Use the included PHP profiler to find the slowest code block in your script.
• Use the included server statistics module to know what's going on with your server.
• Remembers it's position after dragging, giving you pleasant debugging time!

What requests do browsers' “F5” and “Ctrl + F5” refreshes generate?

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/385367/what-requests-do-browsers-f5-and-ctrl-f5-refreshes-generate/385491#385491

Elastic Feedback

I wanted to learn the animation features of jQuery and made the elastic feedback effect.
There's just a container DIV with a ball inside. The ball is made draggable, and once released it will elastically return to it's original position. The actual JavaScript code is amazingly short (thanks to the plugins).

FloatBox (floating effect for <div> using CSS3 box-shadow)

I've been bored at the IPC10 so I've been playing around a bit and made a hovering floating box effect in JavaScript. This thing is dynamic so the screenshot is not so useful.

The script is using jQuery and Shadow animation jQuery-plugin. I had to fix the RegExp of the plugin to accept negative shadow offsets like this:

(-?\+?[0-9]+)

 Download: http://jump.fm/CUKDM

International PHP Conference from the inside

This is how IPC looks like from inside:

Displaying data from myTinyTodo somewhere else

For my project bug tracking I use myTinyTodo. One day I decided that it would be nice to show my todo list to the beta users of my project. So here's a simple class which is doing the job.

array_merge() vs array concatenation and array_merge_recursive_overwrite()

I never seem to remember all the differences and aspects of the array_merge() function and array concatenation (not even documented thoroughly). On top there is this array_merge_recursive() which behaves like array_merge() though.

To start with I’ll say that array() + array() (called array concatenation) is in general NOT the same as array_merge(). It may behave in the same way if your arrays have all keys different. In this case you get both function and operator return the same result:

CSS3 Full-Screen Gradient Flashlight (jQuery)

Want to share a small tech-demo which simulates a moving flashlight (spotlight) over your web-site (without using Adobe Flash). The light is following mouse cursor. Uses jQuery. See the screenshot and the corresponding code:

Extension to the bookmark JSON viewer to have collapsable folders

This is a follow-up of my previous post on "Parse and display Firefox bookmarks.json on the fly as HTML with jQuery". The modification allows to collapse/expand (open/close) the bookmark folders. The collapsed folders are stored in cookies, this way they persist between page views. Download the new code and put it into your Firefox profile folder.

I want to stress one aspect of this small "application". The whole application is done in Javascript, it requires no PHP or even the web-server at all and even the body part of the HTML is empty. The whole thing that you see is dynamically generated with Javascript. Quite a different approach to the usual web-programming.

Parse and display Firefox bookmarks.json on the fly as HTML with jQuery

Abstract: this small HTML/JS/CSS file is parsing the bookmarks.json file located in the Firefox profile directory and displays all of your bookmarks as HTML. This file can be set at a default home page and so you can choose any of your bookmarks with less clicks.

Screenshot:

Note: This code has been programmed as an exercise to learn jQuery, but serves my own practical needs as well. The same effect (displaying bookmarks) can probably be archived by using a Firefox plugin, but I like it this way.

RIP Zend Studio 5.5.1

Although it's been several years since Zend Studio development has been ceased (the new product Zend Studio 6+ is a completely different application with just the same name), I'm still using it. And I know there are others who just can't get used to the new Exclipse IDE (Can't believe zend made this). Here I'll describe some of the bad things in Zend Studio (not necessary bugs) and propose a list of new features (this makes no sense, I know).

Problems:

• Hangs a lot. Especially when switching projects or using SVN, CPU usage goes to 100% (or 50% on dual-core) and you can't close it, except for killing javaw.exe.
• No code completion for arrays:

Impossible features:

• Some nice refactoring like clicking on variable and making it a class member (with replacement suggestions from other places in the code):

• to be continued...

Seeing all Google Analytics profiles at once

As I have several different sites to manage in Google Analytics (and more come from time to time) I wished I could have a quick overview of all the profiles under my control. I found no ready software for this hence I wrote it myself. Here you can see the first initial version. If anybody extends it, please let me know so others can download it too.
Screenshot:

 

Download PHP source: gaChart.rar 

Installation instructions: copy the files (there's just two) to your web-server, change index.php to contain your own Google Analytics login and password (line 15) and run index.php with web-browser.

Should you like to use this, but don't have a web-server, please let me know and I will install it on my server for everybody to test.

Disclaimer: I've used the Google Analytics PHP library from http://www.askaboutphp.com/tutorials/63/google-analytics-api-class-for-php.html