One of the major negatives of using Oracle 10g and PHP to build applications is the obvious lack of connection pooling.

Without pooling, frequent connection creation and destruction can be expensive and crippling to high scalability. Oracle's traditional middle-tier connection pools were not applicable to the multi-process PHP architecture. Caching connections within PHP removed connection creation and destruction costs but did not achieve optimal connection resource utilization, incurring unnecessary memory overhead in the database.

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I've been working hard to get thompsonbd.com ported over to CakePHP 1.2. Originally, I had a custom build "framework" that I used to string the site together. After having worked with CakePHP at my day job for the past six or seven months, I couldn't wait to bring home the things learned while at the office and try some it out on my own site.

Even after working heavily in a LAMP environment for the past four or five years, I had never heard mention of a PHP framework. When the need arose at my office to start moving our current site [Read More]

Seeing as how I have started working solely with Oracle 10g at work, I have moved away from monitoring changes to the MySQL database and now watch changes coming from the Oracle camp. One of the biggest issues that the developers and my company face is moving all our code from an antiquated scripting language over to PHP. PHP and Oracle has a decent agreement when it comes to handling database transacations, but it's nothing to write home about. The PHP lacks any form of good database connection pooling when it comes to Oracle.

For sites that get a couple dozen thousand hits a day, [Read More]

Having setup about a dozen sites using the e107 CMS package, I have become quite familiar with the pros and cons of the different PHP/MySQL CMS packages out there. e107 offers a great middle ground between the easy to use, but under powered CMS to the hard to master, over powered.

Something that has always been missing with e107 is the ability to manage two different domains with the same user database table. After thinking about written up the mod for my new gaming community network of sites, I stumbled across [Read More]

While searching the internet for information on using the PHP GD image library to create images on the fly, I a killer way of graphically displaying information using the GD library. Sparklines are described by Edward Tufte as

"intense, simple, wordlike graphics."

Not much development has happened on the PHP sparkline package, but it is definitely a good starting point for putting sparklines on your own site.

I was luck enough to already have browser tracking code implemented on this [Read More]

Alright, alright. I know it took way to long for me to get around to updating guestMap, but I finally did it. Mainly, I put the code in process.php back into a function, inside a class due to the fact that IE has a problem with the code if it's not inside a function.

Still having a major issue with Firefox displaying the infowindow, so if anyone could give me a hand figuring that out, I would appreciate it greatly.

Take a look at my newest project over at www.pinnacleguild.com. This is the Everquest 2 guild that I am a member of.

We started work today on a custom module for Copper Project. Copper Project is a PHP/MySQL project/client/employee management web application. The code is written in a manner that would suggest that the creators intended to allow users to write custom modules.

After spending all day today trying to find basic parts of the code, I have come to the realization that either the creators don't want it to be easy to make a module, or they want it to be impossible. I have written modules before for web applications such as [Read More]

I found a great tutorial for easily adding a calendar to your blog system. Luckily, I planned ahead for adding a calendar so I have been inserting dates along with the blogs that I make. The tutorial can be found at Zend's website. I am still having problems linking the calendar to the blogs, but it does create and draw the calendar with no problem.

As you can see I haven't changed anything about the calendar from the tutorial, but I will be rewriting it soon to reference the blog id instead of the blog date to create the links from the calendar.

PCLZip is a open source class file for use with PHP that I have recently used for an online script. The script takes a zip file located on the server, opens it, extracts all the files to a specific folder and renames them. The class was written by a French guy I believe so the documentation on it isn't very good, but it works extremely well and is a simple solution to zipping and unzipping files on a server without having a php module or apache module installed. This is good for those of us that don't have access to the php.ini file or httpd.conf files on our web servers.

A [Read More]

I have finally finished a working and fairly stable version of PHP guestMap. This is a web based application that allows people that visit your site, to click on a map of the world, and insert their information, and place a "marker" on your map.

With the boom of blogging, I believe this will be a huge hit and will quickly take off. It utilizes one of Google's open source API's to display a zoomable map ofthe world.

Once I have completed a better working version, I will release it for download. So tell all your friends to come check it out.