Alex Ivaylov web developer blog.
 

 

About Zend

Posted on December 16th, 2018 in category Uncategorized

PHP was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. He is still the lead of the PHP group today. It was a template layer for his software that was written in C. He open sourced it and people loved it. More and more functionality was added over the years and the language grew significantly from its original idea.

In the years 1997-1999 two students named Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans re-wrote the core of PHP and released it as version 4. This new core that they wrote was named the Zend Engine. “Zend” comes from their names. This is still the main engine that operates inside PHP today. In 1999 they founded the company Zend technologies. In the years between 2000 and 2010 Zend technologies receives a number of findings from various investors.

Over those years, they are the main contributor to PHP. They call themselves “the PHP company”. Their business model is offering paid PHP products and services to enterprise-class customers while helping and grow the open source PHP community.
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Show PHP server2server connections in Fiddler (part 2)

Posted on December 15th, 2018 in category Uncategorized

This is the second part of my original article “Show IIS PHP server2server connections in Fiddler”. Here I will be talking about the PHP’s CURL extension.
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Installing imagick on Windows

Posted on August 30th, 2017 in category Articles

A few years ago i wrote a post moaning about how difficult it is to install imagick on Centos. Well i have to say that was a breeze compared to installing it on Windows..

As we know it is a PECL extension. On the page we see this “This extension requires ImageMagick version 6.5.3-10+ and PHP 5.4.0+.”.

But what they are not saying there is that you should not use the official windows binaries that you get from imagemagick.org. In fact they are saying the opposite.

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Show IIS PHP server2server connections in Fiddler

Posted on April 24th, 2017 in category Uncategorized

So I am running PHP on Microsoft IIS web server. I have to open some sort of a socket to a remote host. I would like to inspect that socket because I would like to see the data being exchanged between PHP and the remote web service. In our case you could call this a server to server connection. But remember that as far as the remote web service is concerned PHP is acting as a client. Fiddler is an irreplaceable tool. I have been using it for years and I really can’t imagine my life without it.

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Copy Mac OS X installation from physical to virtual machine

Posted on April 10th, 2016 in category Uncategorized

I am writing this guide because I couldn’t find a working solution to the problem where you might want to clone a complete installation of Mac OS X on a physical hardware Mac to a Parallels virtual machine. In order to do that you would need to take full DMG image of the whole hard drive. Most solutions out there suggest that Parallels should automatically prompt you to conver the DMG file to its .HDD format when you add it to the VM, so you should try that first. However, that method did not work for me.
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dynamically manipulate a jQuery Mobile Control Group

Posted on May 18th, 2015 in category Articles

I could not find a working answer to the question How to dynamically populate a control group in jQuery Mobile and programatically change its selected value in the search engines, so I though I would write this quick article.

Now, lets say your HTML looks like this:
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Enabling PHP in a single directory

Posted on March 10th, 2015 in category Articles

I am writing this because I couldn’t find any information on how to enable PHP for a single directory.

Let’s say we have a website example.com, whose documentRoot is in /var/www/vhosts/example.com. I want PHP disabled for the entire website apart from the directory /myApp.
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Upgrading PHP?

Posted on January 27th, 2014 in category Articles

If you think that by upgrading to the latest version of PHP you will be more secure than before you might be wrong. Some security features such as magic quotes GPC and safe mode have been removed as of 5.4.

In HTTP all of the communication coming into a web app from the outside world happens via one of the 3 channels (Get, Post and Cookie). The magic quotes GPC feature automatically escapes the input.

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Kitchens Website

Posted on November 23rd, 2013 in category Projects

I’ve just finished working on this website for my uncle in Bulgaria who has a kitchens company. Check it out:

http://kitchens.bg/en/


Copying a LAMP web application

Posted on June 12th, 2013 in category Articles

One of the most common things a web professional does is copying a website from one web server to another. Whatever the reason – deploying, debugging, upgrading – it doesn’t matter. A few years ago when I started working with the web – I was using FTP. The more I was digging into the Linux Command Line the less I was using things like FTP until the point I completely stopped using it. You will see how quicker it is doing a copying via SSH compared to downloading all files via FTP and then uploading them again. The 5 main steps you need to take when copying a website are described below:
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June 2013 already?

Posted on June 12th, 2013 in category Articles

Is it June already? Time flies when you are having fun! haha… Last time I wrote here was in January, so I guess the plan to start writing here more often failed. The truth is that I have been busy with soo many different things.

On the personal side of things – it’s all the same (partying, travelling, socialising, living life to the full and enjoying the small things). I must admit – the weather in Scotland has been lovely for the last few weeks. I think that Europe and Scotland exchanged – while EU gets all the rain – we got the sunshine in Scotland 🙂

On the technology side of things I have been digging deep into the mobile side of the web (building HTML5/CSS3/jQueryMobile web apps in Cordova) as well as trying to build the perfect MVC PHP framework to use for my own projects (I might release it under the GNU/GPL one day).

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The Modulus operator, The Ternary operator and FizzBuzz in PHP

Posted on January 6th, 2013 in category Articles

Happy new year! I’ve disabled my Facebook so I think I will start writing here more often..

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the Modulus operator % in PHP (which is very similar to most other programming languages).

From the PHP docs, we know that it returns the “Remainder of $a divided by $b“. But what does that mean?

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From MySQL to SQL server for PHP devs

Posted on November 16th, 2012 in category Articles

As you know, I have been a LAMP developer for years. I simply love all the things that make LAMP amazing – Apache, PHP, MySQL and Linux. Last year some fellow developers were trying to convince me to move away from Apache and switch to nginx but they failed. I am that type of developer who always try to use the most used technologies. The reason for that is because they are usually the most stable.

Recently, I have been asked to develop a PHP application that runs on Windows Server’s IIS and uses Microsoft SQL server as a RDMS. As you might have expected this has been a new experience for me and it has been rather bad.

The reason why I am doing this post is to try and help other developer with PHP/MySQL background switch better. So lets get started!
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a hotel website

Posted on September 6th, 2011 in category Projects

Me and the Sco.Biz team have just finished working on Lunin Links Hotel’s website (those of you who are from Fife know this hotel for sure), so check it out:

lundinlinkshotel.com


printing website

Posted on August 13th, 2011 in category Projects

We have just finished working on an online printing e-commerce website. See

extant-print.co.uk


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