Tech, Gaming and Food Enthusiast
Web Dev
Integrating PayPal with PHP and IPN
Apr 13th
PayPal has a huge API reference to integrate it’s services into any website. But from personal experience I found that the theory is far more simple than the practice. There are various methods to implement PayPal’s services including Soap webservices with ‘Express Checkout’ and ‘Website Payment Pro’. This tutorial will focus on ‘Website Payment Pro’ and the ‘IPN’ event listener.
IPN Services use an HTTP _POST or _GET conversation method. Your application sends a form request to PayPal’s web services which then send an HTTP request to an event handler. The event handler must then re-send the same post request back to authenticate the transaction as valid. Once returned and verified we can then process the transactions.
Client side searching with jQuery
Mar 20th
In my previous post about sorting data I explained the brilliance of client side sorting using jQuery. When researching various other jQuery plugins I discovered tablesearch which can be invaluable when searching smaller data sets.
As in my previous jQuery post we will start with a standard HTML table, giving it an id of “myTable” of course if you wish to use multiple instances on the same page a class is a far more elegant solution.
High level search with PHP and Apache Solr
Mar 18th
When data sets get large and MySQL database querying to search become too load heavy and slow, full indexing is required. Several solutions are available but in this article I will be demonstrating the Apache foundations Solr Java Lucene implementation. For this a Java build will be required. Linux or Mac is less of a problem but for windows I use the Apache Tomcat server.
Extending CodeIgniter’s validation routines
Mar 16th
One of the primary issues that developers avoid is code repetition, especially when more that 3 instances exist. When developing I follow the guidelines best explained by:
If you do it more than 3 times, functionalise. If you do it more than 10 times, refactor.
My most recent project is built using the CodeIgniter (CI) framework which I was extremely impressed with. The level of abstraction and ability to extend makes CI a very appealing solution to any developer.
JavaScript – experience enhancer or dictator
Feb 18th
A few days back it nearly ruined both my life and my sanity!
When I first started working as a commercial web developer the first idea that really hit me was the use of JavaScript and AJAX. My first senior developer always ranted on at me about ‘graceful degredation’ and I plodded along, blissfully unaware of the implications of ‘enhancing’ a website using JS.
The main issue that I was missing was that a very very very small percentage of users actually do browse with JavaScript disabled. “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?”, I thought. I fought for a long time with the idea that someone would actually purposefully disable a feature which makes browsing 10 times easier.
