During the past few weeks I have been working on a brand new PHP extension to provide an easy object oriented interface for the GeoIP library from MaxMind. The original module (that I did not write) had two main issues. First the directory to find the databases could not be changed except in PHP.INI before PHP loads (so not even ini_set would work). Second was that it was old school and not object oriented. Another issue (so that really makes three) is that it will throw E_WARNINGS for dumb things like records not being found. If there is no record found when you ask for it I would much rather just be handed a FALSE.

[update 2011/10/26] Official GeoIPo manual/documentation is here.

This new one is nearly complete, but I am still waiting to be accepted into PECL. However it works and I have the source available for use on GitHub. Here is a little how-to on how to set up the GeoIP database and use this module.

Why use GeoIP?

• Perhaps your project has support for English, German, and Polish languages. With GeoIP you can try to guess what country your visitor is from and if they are from a country with a language you support you can set that language default for the user. Things like that go very far towards user experience.
• If you have a website, I doubt many people can honestly tell me they are not curious what country their visitors are from. GeoIP is an important part of determining your reader demographics. You know all those maps that show dots about where visitors are from? You need GeoIP info to do that.
• And the bane of all internet users – lets say you are the owner of YouTube/Spotify/iTunes and you need to prevent a certain country from viewing/watching/listening to specific content because of license restrictions. You are going to piss people off, but I guess for legal reasons it just needs to be done.

These are only three of the many valid reasons you might need GeoIP information. Over here I have a page demoing the readout of the server and visitor’s GeoIP info, with a link to the visible source at the bottom.

Continue reading about setting up and using php-geoipo

Twice now this week, which is impressive as it is only Tuesday, questions about variable types have popped up on IRC chat about how strings get evaluated and converted. PHP has the soft variable type system that allows you to do things like compare strings to integers, or take a variable that used to be an integer and store a string in it instead. This is unlike the strict typing of languages like C where when you create an integer variable, you better not be trying to store anything except an integer in it.

To hopefully clarify things for more people and also create a link I can send instead of re-explaining it every time, lets take a look at comparing and converting strings.

Continue reading about comparing and evaluating strings…

My day started off fairly simple, I wanted to write a function that could take a string of things like “True” and “Yes” and return boolean true, thusly “False” and “No” would return me boolean false. PHP has a function that can handle the basics of this already, filter_var, however it only works on variants of true and false, not yes or no. Keeping with PHP’s strtolower and strtoupper naming I named this function strtobool and stuck it in my utility function namespace.

I then compared it speedwise to the built-in filter_var function, even though filter_var cannot do what I want at the scope I want it – it would still be a good test to see if it was even worth supporting “Yes” and “No”. Here are the results of that test.

Continue reading about the speed of PHP functions and namespaces

At the DallasPHP meeting this month I gave a presentation called “Building from the Ground Up, Can Has Framewerk?”, where I discussed a bit about what gives a code framework its structure, highlighted a few popular frameworks, and then discussed provisions you should think about when planning to build your own framework from scratch.

To my suprise, the presentation lasted just over an hour and had some good question/answer time afterwards. Unfortunately the camera we used to record the meeting uses a FAT file system (or something) and quit recording after the file hit 4GB, cutting off the last 20 minutes or so of the presentation.

Here are the slides and demonstration code I used for the presentation!

• Download Slides (PDF)
• Download Demo Code