BLOGS@DiGiTSS

DiGiTSS Team's Programming experience with PHP, MySQL, Ajax, Javascript, jQuery, C# and Microsoft technologies

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Netbeans 7.0 RC1 Released

Apr 4

Posted by Dharmavirsinh Jhala in News | 1 Comment


Netbeans IDE 7

Netbeans IDE 7 RC1 Released

Netbeans has been one of my favorite IDE for PHP, I have been using it in my day to day usage for most of my projects. I have been using Netbeans since 6.x. I know it's Java based IDE which needs powerful machine just like Eclipse. But some of the feature it offers are even not available in commercial competitors. One of the best feature is "Quick Search", the way it provides search through list of file is awesome. Something similar I have seen is in JetBrains PHPStorm but could not find it in Enterprise class Eclipse.

I have been following and using and following progress on Netbeans 7 since it's first beta release and I have noticed that it has improved lot as far as speed of IDE is concerned. Whenever your Netbeans 7 IDE freezes for fraction of second or two it immediately opens up a window to report an issue. With each beta (1, 2) and now RC1 speed improvement and especially intelligent auto-complete speed has improved drastically (compared to 6.x).

Here is the quick view of features supported by Netbeans 7 platform: Read the rest of this entry »

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jQuery 1.5.2 and jQuery mobile alpha 4 released

Apr 3

Posted by Dharmavirsinh Jhala in jQuery | No Comments

jQuery mobile framework

jQuery mobile framework

jQuery 1.5.2 is released (on April 2nd) as a bug-fix release of jQuery version 1.5.x, fixing about 18+ issues/bugs reported. Along with that couple of days back on 31st March 2011 jQuery Mobile's alpha-4 version has been released.

jQuery mobile project is making good and steady progress though from their road-map published earlier I was expecting production ready release of jQuery mobile in Jan 2011. As I have invested into jQuery mobile as a technology and tool for one of my project and it's obvious that I can not release that when framework itself is not mature for production.

I am highly impressed with jQuery mobile framework project and I have chosen jQuery mobile over Sencha Touch after researching over it for sometime. One of the reason behind choosing jQuery mobile was number of devices they support. Look at the device support grid here. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posting or Uploading Files using cURL with PHP

Mar 6

Posted by Dharmavirsinh Jhala in cURL | 7 Comments

cURL - groks those URLs

groks URLs

cURL is very important tool for PHP programmers, we tends to do so many thing with using this tool. Posting data, imitating a form post and lot more, it's usage is countless. Some time back I came across situation where we have to post files to a 3rd party faxing service. I knew there are many possibilities but I didn't wanted to get into sockets and file stream to get this done, just wanted to post FILE in addition to rest of the post data.

// URL on which we have to post data
$url = "http://localhost/tutorials/post_action.php";
// Any other field you might want to catch
$post_data['name'] = "khan";
// File you want to upload/post
$post_data['file'] = "@c:/logs.log";
 
// Initialize cURL
$ch = curl_init();
// Set URL on which you want to post the Form and/or data
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
// Data+Files to be posted
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_data);
// Pass TRUE or 1 if you want to wait for and catch the response against the request made
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// For Debug mode; shows up any error encountered during the operation
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
// Execute the request
$response = curl_exec($ch);
 
// Just for debug: to see response
echo $response;

Above Code is the bare minimum required to post/upload file using CURL. As used in above example, it's not mandatory to use array index as "file". You can use anything required depending upon the requirement.

Posting multiple files is also easy, with the same code you can add multiple file upload using following lines:

$post_data['alian_error_log'] = "@c:/alian_app_error.log";
$post_data['myapp_error_log'] = "@c:/myapp_error.log";

Here @ is the key character, prefixing local file path with @ does all the trick.

 Read the rest of this entry »

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Penango – secure encrypted email w/ attachments for Gmail, Google Apps and Zimbra

Feb 20

Posted by Dharmavirsinh Jhala in Tools / Plugins / Extenstion | No Comments

Penango - secure emails

Penango - secure emails

Penango is a successor to free Firefox extension Gmail S/MIME, which let's you send encrypted emails using Gmail, Google Apps mail and Zimbra. As Google Apps or Gmail is not HIPAA complaint though it is running over Secure HTTP (HTTPS) protocol.

It comes as a Firefox, Maxthon and Internet Explorer extension.

Unlike Gmail S/MIME extension for Firefox, Penango is not going to be free but if you want to send signed emails (using email certificate) which are encrypted then I don't see any other alternates for Gmail or Google apps users.

See Penango's seamless integration with Gmail service, you can easily setup this for your Google apps email account too.

Penango's seamless integration with Gmail

Penango's seamless integration with Gmail

What all you need is download Penango extension for your browser and get free email certificate. That's it you'r ready to go. So far I am not sure about the licensing or pricing policies as Penango has not been publicly available so far.

Here I am providing you download information I have received while signing up for trial, you can either go and sign-up yourself or download Penango extension for your browser.

Download Penango from following location for your browser:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Best Free Website Uptime Monitor

Feb 14

Posted by Dharmavirsinh Jhala in Reviews | 6 Comments

I came across a post on Mashable about an article on 10 Free Website Uptime Monitoring services, out of that I have analyzed and found 2 of them the best free solution out of all. One is UptimeRobot and another one is pingdom. Whether you have single website or multiple, if you want to check and monitor uptime of your website to verify the reliability of your web-server or hosting company then you should deploy up-time-monitoring service for your website/web-application. If you are running critical application than one should consider buying or using one for monitoring them.

Let me give you some idea about both the services:

UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot is completely free service for monitoring websites.

# of websites you can monitor per account: 50
Check Interval: 5 minute
Alert by: email, sms, rss, twitter

UptimeRobot looks at your site header’s status codes every five minutes and if the code comes back with a problem, does further checks. Then, if there are still issues, it lets you know about it pronto. According to about-us, they will try to keep this service free as long as possible.

pingdom

pingdom

pingdom is commercial monitoring service but it has a free sign-up with limited # of monitor. Basic free account let's you monitor 1 website. It comes with free iPhone application and monthly summary report as email.

# of websites you can monitor per account: 1
Check Interval: 1 minute
Alert by: E-mail, SMS (up to 20 per month), push alerts via iPhone app

I like that it allows you to select the time interval between 2 checks and the big deal is that at minimum you can select interval to 1-minute. The configuration is great and you can configure URL by HTTP/S or custom HTTP/S where you can set the PAYLOAD. We can choose between HTTP, TCP Port/Ping/DNS/UDP, SMTP/IMAP/POP3. See URL configuration screen below: Read the rest of this entry »

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Speed up PC startup with Soluto – Anti-Frustration Software

Feb 13

Posted by Dharmavirsinh Jhala in Software | No Comments

Soluto: Anti-Frustration Software

Soluto: Anti-Frustration Software

If you're one of those frustrated with sluggish PC startup then you should consider trying Soluto Beta. Soluto is an Anti-Frustration Software, which will help you easily view and remove unwanted items from the system startup and see what action other users in the community have taken for particular startup item.

With Soluto, we will have choose to Pause or Delay startup items, Pause will remove item from the startup still keeping in the registry, so that in future if you want you can queue them up and Delay will delay the startup item so that those services/processes will be little later after your startup which gives you quick access to the usable desktop/windows machine.

Basically their user interface is great as it shows you items in graphical way with amount of time you're saving by removing the startup items. Read the rest of this entry »

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Setting up PHP, MySQL, Apache with most up-to-date WAMP Package

Jan 17

Posted by Dharmavirsinh Jhala in PHP | 2 Comments

WAMP Packages

WAMP Packages

Availability of WAMP packages is not a new story, they are here since the beginning of last decade now. EasyPHP, Wamp, XAMPP and dozens of them. Find comparison of WAMP packages on Wikipedia here.

We are here not to discuss all of them, just top 3 to 5 which are active and we can use them reliably for development or optionally for production purpose or both.

Having WAMP stake up-to-date on production environment is important as we are using open-source technologies and there are few to hundreds of critical to non-critical bugs are being fixed with every new release of the software, and if it's development environment we would like to test new features when they're hot.!

Zend Server, Zend Server Cluster Manager and Zend Server Community Edition:

Zend Server (CE)

Zend Server (CE)

All 3 editions are highly reliable and ready for production usage. I have tried both Zend Server and ZS-Community Edition, Zend Server - Commercial version is pre-tweaked for performance on production environment and Community Edition do not have some of the goodies. But that does not stop you or me from using Zend Server - CE on production. Zend Server comes with beautiful web-panel to administer, control and configure server from the browser itself. We can change PHP and Apache parameters, check server status and even restart service from within browser itself, this feature makes it good choice for remote server administration.

Zend Server - CE is as good for development as it is for production. It comes as Apache and PHP package where MySQL is an optional download during the installation wizard.

The Uniform Server:

The Uniform Server

The Uniform Server

Uniform Server is comparatively new kid on the floor and highly configurable for both development and production use. It comes with system tray using which we can switch Apache and PHP configuration files from development to production or back and forth.

It comes in both VC6 and VC9 binaries for Windows and I must say it's most up-to-date WAMP package so far (I mean next or equal to Zend). Rest of all WAMP packages take week to months to bundle latest version of Apache, PHP or MySQL but I have observed Uniform Server very quick with that. This is main benefit if you are really looking for such option to use on production server.

Installation is simplest - extract and done. Comes with minimum, no big bucket (just 11-13MB in size).

Comes with some handy plug-ins for FTP, Resin, Tomcat etc. It has e-Accelerator packed with it is recommended for production use.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Paying the bills.!