July 2010

Code Standards

As I have been going through different code bases, I keep seeing things that just really amaze me. It all surrounds coding standards, or the lack thereof. Different places have different ideas of what is best, and I can only offer mine to the fray. However, once a standard is in place, no matter how odd it may be, it is important to keep to those standards. This is for a few reasons.

First, it is important for readability. By seeing the code in the same format and structure it helps to get through lines of code quickly. It helps because all of the code is in the same format throughout the code. The person looking at the code can quickly understand without having to go back and figure out what is happening because the code is all of a sudden out of whack and what you may think is happening may not be happening. Especially when indentation may also be out of line and brackets are not used. Take for example the two examples below

$fin=0;
foreach($var as $v){
if($v==3){$fin=$v+3}
unset($fin);echo $v; 
}

As a stand alone example it may be easy to decipher what is happening. In a file that has over 3000 lines of code, it may be overlooked and even cause issues if changes are made that affect that block. By breaking from the set coding standards and doing it “your own way”, sure it may be quicker for you, but it creates havoc, even for you later on.
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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

PHP

PHP 5 News

I am going to take a break from the NuSOAP server finish up, and that will come soon. Instead, the update to PHP 5.2.14 has come out. What is really odd about this news, is that according to the release of the news, it also

“marks the end of the active support for PHP 5.2. Following this release the PHP 5.2 series will receive no further active bug maintenance. Security fixes for PHP 5.2 might be published on a case by cases basis. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.”

There are a lot of different applications that are just now adopting 5.2, and it will not be actively supported.
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Monday, July 26, 2010

Applications / PHP

Finishing up the NuSOAP server

In the last post, the NuSOAP server introduced a new level of complexity, and had a multidimensional array, along with creating a more robust status message for the client to help determine the success or failure of the request. This post will examine the remaining functions in the NuSOAP server, and making the rest of the functions work, and more complex types including third and fourth level complexities along with a non-named (integer) array for the result.

We will be building on the code we used last time, so as a refresher, the code from the last post can be located at:
http://www.hirdweb.com/webservice/20100710_server.txt
http://www.hirdweb.com/webservice/20100710.txt

First off, here are the remaining functions to be exposed in the service:

showGroupItems – Shows what is needed based on a set event, all items are made up of course
showMadLib – Returns a mad lib based on passing in a number of different items
showNumbers – Returns a non associative array of numbers, requires an ID, and returns the numbers associated with that ID

Each of these webservices will require a little different structure.
showGroupItems will have a third level of complexity
showMadLib will require a long list of strings as the input
showNumbers will return an array of string elements, integer value for the element, instead of a named element
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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Applications

Building on the NuSOAP Server

The NuSOAP server consists of a function that will take an ID and a name/phrase and inserts that into the Shakespeare quote. The function returns a semi-complex type which consists of 2 array elements, a status message and the phrase. However, the webservice needs to expand, add a new function, and make error messages dynamic. So the first thing we will tackle is getting the status message into a more dynamic format.

First, plan it out, always plan it out. The status message will need to accept an “error code”, a string for the struct name, and a variable for a custom message if it does fit in within the specified error codes. Now, just as a disclaimer here, this is just an example of how it can be planned. Some services may not need this extent, some may need a lot more. Remember that it needs to be able to handle the requirements of your application.

With that planned out, here is a possible solution to the function.

function error($err, $struct = 'phrase', $message = ''){
	$error['status']['status']='error';
	$error[$struct]= '';
	switch ($err) {
		case "empty":
			$error['status']['message']='There was nothing passed to the webservice, so nothing can be returned.';		
			break;
		case "partial":
			$error['status']['message']="Not all required parameters were passed, so the webservice can not return any information.";
			break;
		case "not_found":
			$error['status']['message']='The parameter you passed was not found, please try again.';
			break;
		case "bounds":
			$error['status']['message']='The ID that was passed is out of the allowable boundaires. Please try your request again.';
			break;
		case "less_than_zero":
			$error['status']['message']='The number recieved is less than zero, and will not work with this service. Please double check the number and try again.';
			break;
		case 'custom':
			$error['status']['message'] = $message;
			break;
		default:
			$error['status']['message'] = 'There was a problem with your request, please try again.';
			break;
	}
	return $error;	
}

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Saturday, July 10, 2010

Applications

Simple NuSOAP Server

In the previous post, we examined the client side of NuSOAP. In this post, we examine a very simplistic approach to building a server. In this example, it is going to use a very basic set up, and will return only a string. No complex data will be returned, and it will be a quick look at how to create a NuSOAP server. The more complex approaches will come later.

Using the previous information in the post, we have a client that we can text the service on. Before I complete the webservice server, I always do some quick testing of the functionality before sending it to the web service. In this example, we will use one of the services built previously:
showPhrases – Phrases from Shakespeare plays that replace the names in the phrase with the passed in name/string

This webservice requires 2 items to be passed:
id – A number from 0 to 4 (In this example I only used 5 phrases)
name – A name or variable that can be used to replace the names in the phrases

The first thing we should always do, is map out the plan for this function.
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Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Applications / PHP

Web Services with NuSOAP

Doing a lot with webservices lately. Which is really a great thing if there is a central repository of information that needs to be disseminated between different external systems. I am doing a lot with NuSOAP and php SOAP. But this tutorial is going to be about the NuSOAP libraries. You can get these libraries from:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nusoap/

First thing to do is to download this, and install into a directory that you can access. For different security reasons, it may be needed to keep these libraries outside of the accessible web directories.

The next step is to determine what needs to be required to get the data. This may include authentication and credentials, id’s, phrases, or anything else. It could be possible to not have anything required and just return all records. And that is the next step: determine what to expose. What type of information would you want to send back to the world? Hopefully it is not sensitive data, and only the data that needs to be exposed.

Now with that in mind, we are ready to go. I have set up a webservice server that has five different functions:

showPhrases – Phrases from Shakespeare plays that replace the names in the phrase with the passed in name/string
showTaxes – Calculates the tax based on the passed in price and state
showGroupItems – Shows what is needed based on a set event, all items are made up of course
showMadLib – Returns a mad lib based on passing in a number of different items
showNumbers – Returns a non associative array of numbers, requires an ID, and returns the numbers associated with that ID

Each of these functions provides a little more to view based on the webservice. The first and fourth functions will return a string of data. The second function returns an array with different data types. The third returns a complex type of a multidimensional array. I did this because there are many different tutorials out there using NuSOAP, but only seem to return a basic type and has very little to help when setting up the WSDL when it needs to be more complex. The fifth function demonstrates how to return a non associative array with the webservice in a complex type.

I will break down each function per post. But now we need a way that we can test these functions when we get them going. So the first thing to do is create a NuSOAP client to grab the exposed data. For the client, we will use the showTaxes example that has been created.

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Friday, July 02, 2010