Weblog

Financial data is now more accessible than ever via open APIs. This makes it easy to build Web or mobile applications that let you track your investment portfolio on a minute-by-minute basis (or at least as often as you care to check it). That’s the idea behind my new portfolio tracking application, which lets you create a virtual portfolio of stocks and then shows you the current market value at any given point. ...

Cloud storage is increasingly popular because it’s cheap and scalable. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is probably the most well-known, but almost every serious cloud vendor now has a storage offering. Cue my research into IBM Bluemix and its Object Storage service, which lets you attach cloud storage to your Bluemix application. Bluemix’s Object Storage service is based on OpenStack Swift and follows Swift’s three-tier hierarchy for organizing data: accounts, containers and objects. To try it out, I built a photo storage application hosted on Bluemix and integrated it with the Bluemix Object Storage service. With a little help from the IBM jStart PHP client library, it was easy enough to implement single-user photo upload and storage. And because Bluemix’s Object Storage service supports multiple sub-accounts per service instance, it wasn’t too hard to extend the base application to support multiple users and multiple containers per user. ...

I’ve been using IBM Cloud (aka IBM Bluemix) for various projects, but one of the things that often frustrates me is the lack of debug information available. For example, it’s quite common to upload a new PHP application to IBM Cloud and then see a blank page when attempting to access it. ...

Google makes a number of APIs available for free - I’ve previously written about the Google Tasks API and the Google+ API. I recently came across another interesting one - the Google Places API. As the name suggests, the Google Places API lets you retrieve information about shops, businesses, and other establishments by location or keyword. The information returned by the API is quite detailed - it includes place names, place types, coordinates, addresses, opening hours, all coupled with a unique place ID. ...

If you’re a developer used to developing and testing applications locally, moving your code to the cloud can be a bit daunting. First, you have to choose a cloud from the numerous options availabe. Then, you need to deal with the nitty-gritties of pricing, provisioning, application deployment, scalability and security. And finally, you need to keep track of server performance, debug application issues and find ways to cost-efficiently improve performance. ...

I first came across PHPCR through my work with Magnolia CMS, an open source Java CMS. Magnolia CMS uses the Java Content Repository (JSR-283) as its content storage mechanism and PHPCR is a PHP adaptation of that standard. It’s great for storing semi-structured content in a hierarchical format and it also includes support for content versioning and indexing. The cool thing about PHPCR is that it lets PHP developers interact with content stored in a JCR-compliant content repository using PHP objects and APIs…no Java knowledge needed. This means that you could save data to a JCR repository using a Java application, then read or modify that data using PHP, simplifying data reuse and interoperability between applications running on different platforms. ...

The Nutritionix API is an online API which lets you access a massive database of nutrition information, covering both generic and branded food items. I came across it recently when looking for something else, and was promptly diverted from my original goal into trying it out. While playing with it, it occurred to me that this could be the basis of a very neat little application to track calorie consumption. Ideally, it needed to work on a mobile device so that it would be at hand at meal-times, and be simple, interactive and easy to use. After a little thought, I had my requirements and design down, so I went ahead and built it. ...

I’ve been experimenting with IBM Bluemix for some time now and a few weeks ago, I decided to try hosting a custom REST API with it. I built the API using Bullet, a PHP micro-framework, then deployed it to Bluemix and connected it with Bluemix’s MySQL service. It worked out pretty well…as you can see by trying this live demo. In case you’re interested in learning how I went about building this, you can read all about it in this IBM developerWorks article. In this article, I explain how to implement the four basic REST methods using Bullet, then add support for API authentication and multiformat support, and finally deploy the API to Bluemix. Take a look, then download the API source and see what you think! ...

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to Bluemix, IBM’s new cloud infrastructure platform for developers. With a bunch of pre-configured runtimes for Java, Node.js and Ruby, plus MongoDB, MySQL and various other database services, BlueMix provides a platform for quick app development and deployment. Bluemix is currently in beta and doesn’t support PHP (yet) but I found a blog post which suggested it was possible using the Zend Server PHP buildpack. However, on trying it, I came across a problem: my Web application (built with Slim Framework) needed URL rewriting for its custom routes to work, but I couldn’t find a way to edit the nginx configuration file included with the Zend Server PHP buildpack. The search for an alternative led me (via Q&A in this thread) to the Cloud Foundry PHP buildpack, which solved my problem. ...

I’ve been working with Zend Framework 2 for a while now, trying to learn it and map its concepts to those from Zend Framework 1. One of the things that hasn’t changed is the framework’s support for security - it still has a bunch of useful components which let you protect your PHP application from SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, spam, and brute-force password hacking. You don’t need to be using Zend Framework either - the framework is loosely coupled, so you can use the components on a standalone basis. If you’re not familiar with framework-based development, this gives you all the benefits of components like Zend\InputFilter and Zend\Escaper without the additional overhead and learning curve. ...