The Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern is widely used in web development, including in PHP. It provides a structured and modular approach to building complex web applications, allowing developers to separate the concerns of data, presentation, and business logic. In this essay, we will explore the key concepts of MVC in PHP and how it can be implemented in practice. The MVC pattern consists of three core components: In PHP, the MVC pattern can be implemented using various frameworks, such as...
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How to Sort a Table by a MySQL Table Column
Web development and content management is essentially the alpha and the omega. Manipulating data can be a rather daunting task and requires a good grasp of overall app flow in terms of how data changes when X things happen during its use. In this post we’re going to learn how to create a container that shows all those popular blog posts that we have in our app, sorted in ascending or descending fashion. So where do we start? The simplest...
Continue reading...Working with Files in PHP (The Brief Way)
Files are essential to large scale web applications. Wherever we have some kind of resource management and planning, the idea to log changes and variations or create reports it’s crucial for providing optimal insight to sales, accounting and managing departments. Even from the developers’ perspective, being able to generate CSV or JSON files on demand for various purposes, will speed up development and boost productivity, leading to more features for other departments to leverage. PHP offers an very robust way...
Continue reading...Get JSON data from PHP file
Having a PHP file spit out JSON as its main function can be really useful when you want to execute an AJAX call so you can refresh some content on the page, without reloading the page. Since the development of AJAX calls, a long wished dream was fulfilled for almost every web artisan. Being able to fully change parts of the content on a page without reloading everything was huge and certainly made each project more instant, direct and user...
Continue reading...How to create a JSON Object in PHP?
JSON or JavaScript Object Notation is a powerful format that’s been used mainly whenever we need to include some kind of dynamic data fetching within our website, using JavaScript. It’s the ideal format when working and communicating with application programming interfaces. To create a JSON object in PHP you simply call the json_encode() function by passing an array of your choice as parameter. For instance, suppose we have an array of objects that contain an id and a label.$arr =...
Continue reading...How can I remove a specific item from an array?
Usually when working with arrays we are in need to remove a targeted element and execute a specific operation with it. In this post we’ll learn how to use the following function to remove an item by value from the designated array. To remove a specific item from an array you need to traverse the array, check each value with the one you want to remove and then create a new array with all the other elements. The resulting array...
Continue reading...How to check if an array is empty in PHP?
To check if an array is empty in PHP your best bet is to count the number of items that contains. To do that you need to simply apply the count function on your array. Let’s try that using the code below: $arr = array();if (count($arr) == 0) { echo ’empty’;} The count function however may not be great for performance if the data is too large so you may need to use a safer way using the negation operator...
Continue reading...What does date() do in PHP?
Talking from experience, being able to manipulate time as developer is a great asset that many beginners and even senior developers fail to invest the time and effort to learn how it can be used effectively. With pretty much every system, there’s the need to work with timestamps and dates to keep track application cycles and recursive operations that may be executed in a period of time. What date() does is to create a string of the current unix timestamp...
Continue reading...What is a PHP class?
As a newbie developer I have struggled a lot in the past to understand what I’m going to share with you below and I hope I can save you some time and effort by giving you the tools to harness this exceptionally useful and robust principle, the class. A PHP class it’s a blueprint that instructs the creation of a certain type of object. Object’s characteristics are determined by its properties and methods that incorporates. Each object may differ upon...
Continue reading...Foreach in PHP
While developing web applications there are always routines that display some kind of information on the screen. Apart from displaying data, it is absolutely crucial to be able to modify it as well in a massive scale. Such functionality calls for the foreach structure. Foreach is essentially a structure that is responsible for traversing an iterable given some expression. With each iteration, foreach may execute a defined action to the data, either to modify the value, create a new iterable...
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