PHP is a powerful open source server-sided scripting language that can be used on a wide variety of operating systems and webservers, including Apache on UNIX and IIS on Windows.
PHP contains numerous extensions which enable you to dynamically create images and flash files, parse xml, connect to remote servers using pop, imap, ftp, http and raw sockets, natively access many database servers including PostgreSql, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, compress and decompress files, lookup domain names and and much more.
PHP has an excellent manual and online documentation which covers every function for every extension available.
Some of the upcoming jQuery posts I will be publishing will be making AJAX requests so I thought it fitting to post how to tell if the incoming request is an AJAX request in PHP for the PHP programmers out there. This is useful if your script handles both AJAX and non-AJAX requests and you need to know which sort it is.
Last week I looked at how to see if a function exists in PHP and this time will look at how to check if a class method exists in PHP.
Since PHP 5.1.0 it has been possible to change the default timezone that PHP uses using the date.timezone configuration, which can be set for the entire server in php.ini or httpd.conf, on a virtualhost by virtualhost basis, or using the ini_set() function. This post looks at how to change the timezone in PHP using the ini_set function.
Just a quick little post to remind that PHP/Apache sets the content-type header by default to text/html. If you are serving other content, such as an RSS feed, you need to remember to change the content type to the appropriate format.
Although you can set content type in the HTML <head> section of a web page the web server can also send the content type as one of its headers, and it can cause unexpected consequences when rendering a page in a browser. This post looks at how to set the content encoding type header with PHP.
PHP has the class_exists() function to check if a class has already been defined. You may need to take action depending if a class exists or not, and need to watch out for "gotchas" when also using __autoload().