· PErL, PHP, Ruby & java/J2ee

· Unix/linux

· Mysql

· Web development

· User interface design

·  Veritas

· Usability engineering

· Project management

· Leadership

· Software development techniques

· Software testing techniques

Thumbnail images guarantee you that the images displayed will never exceed certain height and width values. Creating a basic thumbnail is a five-stage process:

1. Load the source image into a PHP variable.

2. Determine the height and width of the original image.

3. Create a blank thumbnail image of the correct size.

4. Copy the original image to the blank thumbnail.

5. Display the thumbnail using the correct content type.

EXAMPLE: Suppose we have to create a thumbnail from a photo in JPEG format. First of all, we specify the path to the source image as well as our desired width and height in pixels:

$sourceImage = ‘SAMPLE_IMAGES/scenery.jpg’;
$thumbWidth = 200;
$thumbHeight = 200;

Next, we use imagecreatefromjpeg to load an image from the file system into a PHP variable:$original. The getimagesize function returns the width and height of the image.

$original = imagecreatefromjpeg($sourceImage);
$dims = getimagesize($sourceImage);

Then we use the imagecreatetruecolor function to create a blank image into which the thumbnail image will be placed: $thumb = imagecreatetruecolor($thumbWidth,$thumbHeight);

There should be a code for the point at which the thumbnail image is actually created from the original:

imagecopyresampled( $thumb, $original, 0, 0, 0, 0, $thumbWidth, $thumbHeight, $dims[0], $dims[1] );

At last, after we have sent the correct content type header, we’ll use imagejpeg to output the completed thumbnail:

header( “Content-type: image/jpeg” );
imagejpeg( $thumb );

To show how queries can be automated, consider an example from the online winestore. The shopping cart in the online winestore is implemented using the winestore database. As discussed in Chapter 12, when an anonymous user adds a wine to their shopping basket, an order row is added to the orders table. The row is for a dummy customer with a cust_id=-1, and the next available order_id for this dummy customer. A related items row is created for each item in the shopping cart. The order_id is maintained in the session variable order_no so that orders by different anonymous customers aren’t confused.

Our system requirements in Chapter 1 specify that if a customer doesn’t purchase the wines in their shopping cart within one day, then the shopping cart should be emptied. This is an example of a DELETE operation that should be automated. It is impractical to require the administrator to run this query each day to remove junk data.

The following query can be run from the Linux shell to remove all orders rows that are more than one day old and are for the dummy customer:

% /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -uusername -psecret
-e ‘USE winestore; DELETE FROM orders WHERE
unix_timestamp(date) <
(unix_timestamp(date_add(now( ), interval -1 day)))
AND cust_id = -1;’
The MySQL time and date function unix_timestamp( ) converts a timestamp attribute to an integer that is accurate to the nearest second. In this query, we compare the value of the entry in the orders table with the value of exactly one day earlier from the current date and time. If the row is older than one day, then it is deleted. The same query works for the items table, when orders is replaced with items in the FROM clause.

13.1.1 cron Jobs
Having designed and tested the query, it can be inserted into a Unix cron table to automate the operation. The crond daemon is a process that runs by default in a Linux installation and continually checks the time. If any of the entries in user tables match the current time, then the commands in the entries are executed. Consider an example:

30 17 * * mon-fri echo ‘Go home!’
This prints the string at 5:30 p.m. each working day. The two asterisks mean every day of the month, and every month of the year respectively. The string mon-fri means the days Monday to Friday inclusive. More details about cron can be found by running man crontab in a Linux shell.

We can add our housekeeping query to our cron table by running:

% crontab -e
This edits the user’s cron table.

We have decided that the system should check for old shopping carts every 30 minutes. To do so, we add the following two lines to the file:

0 * * * * /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -uusername -psecret
-e ‘USE winestore; DELETE FROM orders WHERE
unix_timestamp(date) <
(unix_timestamp(date_add(now( ), interval -1 day)))
AND cust_id = -1;’

30 * * * * /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -uusername -psecret
-e ‘USE winestore; DELETE FROM items WHERE
unix_timestamp(date) <
(unix_timestamp(date_add(now( ), interval -1 day)))
AND cust_id = -1;’
The first line contains the complete query command for the orders table from earlier in this section, and the second line the items query. The shopping cart orders DELETE query runs exactly on each hour, while the items DELETE query runs at 30 minutes past each hour. Different times are used to balance the DBMS load.

Reports, updates, delete operations, and other tasks can be added to the cron table in a similar way. For example, we can output a simple report of the number of bottles purchased yesterday and send this to our email address each morning:

0 8 * * * mon-fri /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -uusername
-psecret -e ‘USE winestore; SELECT sum(qty) FROM
items WHERE unix_timestamp(date) >
(unix_timestamp(date_add(now( ), interval -1 day))) AND
cust_id != -1;’ | mail help@webdatabasebook.com
We could also have automatically written the information to a log file or to a table in the database.

More PHP Tutorial

Step 1

Open Adobe Flash CS. Create a new document selecting Flash File (Action Script 2.0). You may be interested in Action Script 3 (AS3) but I choose Action Script 2 (AS2) for easier understand. Just step with me and I assure you, you will become a good Flash developer after reading this article. Now you will see a single tab namely ‘Untitled 1’ in the Adobe Flash. After saving the file ‘Untitled 1’ text will replace with your preferred filename. I named it ‘AspFlash.fla’. Remember FLA is a flash source file and your output movie will be SWF, which will need to be embedded in ASP.Net ASPX file later. Adobe Flash split-down with several window, do not confused. You do not need to know the all window features. Start with left called ‘Tools’, in the center top window called ‘Timeline’, next down window called ‘Scene’, next bottom window called ‘Properties’ and the right most window split-down with many window ‘Color’, ‘Align’, ‘Components’ and ‘Library’. Those entire windows can be switched on/off by ‘Window’ menu. Look at the ‘Scene’ window which will be your design area. From the ‘’Properties’ window you can change colors and size as per your requirements.

Step 2

Now add some component from the ‘Components’ window expand ‘User Interface’. Oh! lots of stuff. Drag only one ‘TextInput’ and one ‘Button’ on your ‘Scene’ window and align them correctly. Select ‘TextInput’ and put an instance name (e.g. TextInput1) from ‘Properties’ window. Without instance name, Action Script will not recognize any components. Do same for the ‘Button’ instance name (e.g. SendData) and from the ‘Parameters’ tab change ‘Button’ label (e.g. Send Data).

Step 3

Here we start out main coding part. Select ‘Layer 1’ from ‘Timeline’ window and press F9 (keyboard function key). You will see ‘Actions’ window, where you writes you’re AS code. Type or copy pest the following codes.

//************************************************//

SendData.onPress = function() {
//Declare and Initialize variable
var send_lv:LoadVars = new LoadVars();
//Assigning value to parameter, like Asp.Net QueryString
send_lv.mydata = TextInput1.text;
//Sending data
send_lv.send(‘default.aspx’, ‘_self’, ‘GET’);
};

//************************************************//

The LoadVars object is used for exchanging data between flash – server. The LoadVars object is capable of either sending data to the server for processing, loading data from the server, or sending data to the server and waiting for a response back from the server in one operation. The LoadVars object uses name-value pairs to exchange data between the client and the server. The LoadVars object is best used in a scenario that requires two-way communication between the Flash Movie and server-side logic, but doesn’t require large amounts of data to be passed

Step 4

Type or copy pest the following codes to read the QueryString in Flash – Action Script 2. In Action Script 2 there are no methods like ASP.Net provides, so I wrote the following codes to get QueryString from URL. The _url method returns the URL of the ‘AspFlash.swf’ file that was loaded with ASPX page.

//************************************************//

//Reading QuaryString
myURL = this._url;
myPos = myURL.lastIndexOf(“?”);
if (myPos > 0) {
var myRawParam = myURL.substring(myPos + length(‘mydata=’) + 1, myURL.length);
myParam = myRawParam.toString().split(“‘”).join(“”);
if (myParam != undefined){
TextInput1.text = myParam;
}
}

//************************************************//

Step 5

Save your file from File menu. Now we need to make the final SWF move and embed it to ASPX page. From File menu click ‘Publish Settings’ and you will see a new window containing three tabs (Formats, Flash and HTML). In the Formats tab check Flash and HTML types, so that you can get the SWF embedded code in HTML page. Now press button ‘Publish’ to build the final move. If there are no error occurred, flash will provide you to two files (e.g. ‘AspFlash.swf’ and ‘AspFlash.html’) in root folder where source file ‘AspFlash.fla’ located.

Step 6

Now start Visual Studio .Net (VS) and create a new website and name it ‘AspFlash’. VS creates a default page namely ‘Default.aspx’. From solution explorer double click on ‘Default.aspx’ file to view Markup code (also called Inline code) like following.

//************************************************//

//************************************************//

Now copy ‘AspFlash.swf’ and ‘AspFlash.html’ files in to your web root directory. I mean ASPX, SWF files should be located in same directory. Open ‘AspFlash.html’ file and copy the following lines and paste it inside tag of ‘Default.aspx’ file.

//************************************************//

//************************************************//

After pasting the above code little change needed on ‘AspFlash.swf’ parameter like the following. Look at the line ‘AspFlash.swf?mydata=’<% =Request["mydata"] %>’’ what we added. Flash read _url­ data with mydata which will be supplied by ASP.Net later.

//************************************************//

width=”550″ height=”400″ id=”AspFlash” align=”middle”>

‘” />

‘” quality=”high” bgcolor=”#ffffff”
width=”550″ height=”400″ name=”AspFlash” align=”middle” allowscriptaccess=”sameDomain”
allowfullscreen=”false” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer” />

//************************************************//

Finally, add two ASP.net standard controls on ‘Default.aspx’ page (e.g. TextBox and Button). Change Button text property to ‘Send Data’. The full ‘Default.aspx’ will looks like the following.

//************************************************//

<%@ Page Language=”C#” AutoEventWireup=”true” CodeFile=”Default.aspx.cs” Inherits=”_Default” %>

width=”550″ height=”400″ id=”AspFlash” align=”middle”>

‘” />

‘” quality=”high” bgcolor=”#ffffff”
width=”550″ height=”400″ name=”AspFlash” align=”middle” allowscriptaccess=”sameDomain”
allowfullscreen=”false” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer” />

//************************************************//

Step 7

In this step you need to open ‘Default.cs’ file by clicking ‘View Code’ pointing on ‘Default.aspx’ from Solution Explorer of VS. By default VS added Page_Load event procedure. You need to add some text on Page_Load event procedure along with button1_click event procedure like the following.

//************************************************//

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if(!IsPostBack)
if (Request["mydata"] != null)
textbox1.Text = Request["mydata"].ToString();
}
protected void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Response.Redirect(“~/default.aspx?mydata=” + textbox1.Text);
}

//************************************************//

Step 8

Now build the website using F5 (keyboard function key) and type some text in Flash movie and click ‘Send Data’ to send Flash data to ASPX page. You will see ASPX ‘TextBox’ text changed with your Flash ‘TextInput’ text.

Same way type some text in ASPX ‘TextBox’ and click ‘Send Data’ Button to send ASPX data to Flash movie.

Enjoy the communication technique between ASP.Net and Flash. If need further assistance, feel free to contact me via email.

Link1 Link2

Today in many cases this service is just another term for “I want a quick buck”. Some of the companies don’t really care for the people and are just out to make money.

The reason most people don’t find a solution right away is because they just fall prey of the seemingly good programs that they find first. One of the main reasons people fall into these traps is because the best companies are usually not so well know, so people don’t tend to go with these companies right away.

For starters it’s very much possible to be paying a cheap price and getting a premium service. Only a few companies offer such great services that they are worth finding in case you ever need anything.

So you’re not sure whether you’ve actually found the right service. Here are some of the features the “right one” will have:

MySQL, PHP, Python, Perl, CGI, Cron: All the technical stuff you may require should be included. If you don’t know what that means don’t worry, but it’s always good to have it around just in case.

Bandwidth: This is how many visitors your site will be able to host in a month. Anything more than 75GB will work fine for most people.

Monthly Price: Cheap doesn’t always mean bad, but sometimes it can hut depending on the web hosting. We recommend getting “healthy cheap” which is around 10 bucks a month. This gives a good price and gets you good service.

Proper Web Statistics: How much traffic you’re getting? What keywords are people using to find you? What sites link to you? All this stuff you’ll want to know.

Choosing the right service the first time is not easy, but it’s possible, research is the key.

We suggest doing your research and then signing up with the web hosting company that meets your needs and your price range. You’ll be glad you did and won’t have to change for years. So go and find yourself the right PHP web hosting for you. It’ll be worth every second of your time.

Even though many people are a pain and we hate to admit it, you’ll feel very comfortable once you have found the answer to your problem and you’ll know that you’ll keep this service for years to come, this is why this is so critical and important.

Creating ASP.NET Applications

Webaptive works closely with the web server to add CMS functionality to your applications.  From within IIS, you can choose the application you want to enhance. Once you make your selection and a database is automatically created, you can then enable existing applications or develop new ones.  Because the method in which Webaptive associates itself with applications is specific to the ASP.NET framework, it is strongly recommend that you create your pages and applications using standard ASP.NET programming practices.

CMS Features

Though rich in ASP.NET functionality, Webaptive offers many of the same capabilities found in other CMS products.  For instance, it has a built-in WYSIWYG editor for easily creating articles and blog posts, a CSS editing facility, and support for multiple authors.  Some of its more advanced features include localization and campaign management as well content inheritance options for managers and administrators.  Another unique quality of Webaptive its seamless integration with Perifigure, Striquent’s sister product.  Perfigure is a powerful analytic tool that analyzes site performance and provides detailed statistics on traffic, marketing campaigns and several other business related activities.  These capabilities alone make Webaptive a very attractive CMS for business users.

Standing Alongside and Out from the Crowd

Marketed as a CMSaaS product, Webaptive shares a few qualities with similar hosted SaaS CMS solutions such as CushyCMS and Surreal CMS.  Many of these platforms work by mildly blending content management features into a web page or website.  Though effective for the most part, they are not all that intrusive in regard to the core technologies and as a result, only provide limited CMS functionality.  Although Webaptive performs in a similar manner, it goes beyond the basics by digging into the code at the ASP.NET application level.  This gives it the ability to interact with ASP.NET controls as well as the standard HTML elements.  When all components are properly configured, this CMS can truly help you take your web applications to the next level.  Another difference is that whereas most SaaS CMS platforms are hosted solutions, Webaptive can be downloaded, installed and configured on your own server.

Availability and System Requirements

The Webaptive CMS is currently available in three versions: Community, Express and Enterprise editions.  In terms of functionality, the Community and Express versions are nearly identical.  However, the community version is free and therefore does not come included with reliable technical support.  The Enterprise edition is the most powerful version of the product as it is equipped with many advanced back-end versions and of course, paid support.  In order to run Webaptive, you will need the Windows Server 2003 operating system or higher and an SQL Server database.  These elements are needed to support your ASP.NET applications and web pages.

I will identify 6 major areas of concern, in hopes that even a small percentage of these website owners will come across this document at the right time, which is BEFORE they begin to develop their website.

1) Domain name registration & hosting. Make sure that when you register your website’s address that you register it for at least 5 years. Sites that register their site for a short amount of time send up a red flag at Google, who end up thinking that site site has been registered short-term in the hopes of helping another website, that is owned by the same person/company, to rank well by linking to it. When choosing your domain name, do not choose a URL that is riddled with hyphens between all your keywords. It is more important that you target this to your visitors than to the search engines.

2) Creating static URL’s. This is one of the most overlooked yet important things that you can do to ensure that your SEO campaign is a success. By eliminating dynamic parameters within your website’s URLs, you are ensuring that search engine bots will have no problems indexing all of your pages. Creating static URL’s can be accomplished by using the mod rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the root folder of your server. Here is an example of a dynamic URL (which you want to avoid), and a static URL (which you want):

Dynamic: http://www.yoursite.com/listings.php?ref=22

Static: http://www.yoursite.com/listings/22.html

Make sure that any potential programmer or designer that you hire understands that this will be a full requirement of the job.

3) Editing the head tag. There are three areas in the head tag that you will want to be able to either edit yourself or have your SEO edit. They are the page title, the description meta tag and the keywords meta tag. Having control over these for each of your top level pages (all the pages linked to from your home page), will be critical to your websites success in the search engines. You definitely do not want these to be the same on every page (they must be unique and reflect the nature of the content on the given page). For other pages that will be created in high volumes, you will want to make sure that there is a variable string (your web designer/programmer will understand what this is) in place for each of the three areas in question, so that they will automatically be filled with content that is the right length and reflects the content on the given page.

Again, make sure that your designer/programmer understands that this is a requirement of the job.

4) Clean, simple code. Ideally you want to define all aesthetic properties that different types of text on your site are going to have in a separate CSS file. This means that you want to avoid using as many tags as possible, especially font, size and color tags. You also want to avoid creating PHP scripts that are either two long, and contain a lot of unnecessary steps, or ones that rely heavily on javascript. It is best to avoid using javascript as much as possible.

Remember, the most important thing your site can be doing is making it easy for search engine bots to easy scroll through the code of your website and follow all the links that it finds. When there is unnecessary code and script on your site, it makes it a lot harder for them, thus hurting your SEO campaign.

Make sure that whoever is helping you build your site understands that there job is to output the cleanest, simplest code possible. If you have any questions about this or don’t understand it, it is best to talk to an SEO expert about it, to ensure that it is done properly.

5) Ensuring that visible written content is editable. The writing within the body of your site is one of the most important areas for you or your Optimizer to help your site increase it’s rankings. Ensuring that either of you can edit it at your own convenience is extremely critical to the entire SEO campaign. This because from time to time search engine algorithms will change, and that might mean that a strategy that was implemented in the past might not suffice, so you must be able to change it to keep up with the most up to date SEO techniques.

6) Site structure. Considering the nature of PHP, your site will most likely (and should) be created by a series of includes that puts all of the pieces of a given page together. You want to ensure that the layout and placement of graphics and navigational links within these includes is strategically correct. Remember, you don’t want to have to pay someone to go back and redo this, so it is critical to get it right the first time.

If you are unfamiliar with a lot of the information that I presented in this article, it is probably in your best interest to at the very least, consult with an SEO or SEO company during the entire design process. A good SEO will be very comfortable working with you and your design team to ensure that the end product will be one that will last you a long time, and will go a long way in helping your site generate revenue online.

ASP.NET carries a host of features, which are beneficial for website developers when it comes to saving precious time through a very user friendly interface. However, this doesn’t mean that people without experience in Microsoft programming will find it easy to work in ASP.NET. It’s therefore safer if you take the services of a .NET consulting company as they can do a better job than your in-house programmers. Another advantage of hiring a consulting house is that you won’t have to shell out extra money in acquiring the license that you will have to buy for its functionality.

When hiring an ASP.NET consulting company there are a few things that you need to keep in mind so you remain in a profitable position. ASP.NET is a highly multi supporting programming platform. The reason it is patronized by a growing number of website developers is because it is compatible with several programming languages. With this kind of benefit at your disposal you should try and make the most of it, which includes deploying professionals for the task instead of keeping in-house staff and blowing a small fortune on the license as well. Moreover, a consulting company engaged in this field aggressively will garner greater success than you can hope to achieve by yourself.

Hosting is all about storage on a hard disk (which resides on the web server) and bandwidth for your data. Till a few years ago, hard disk storage was not as large as it is now. Now-a-days hard disk drives come in a typical 400 GB to 500 GB capacity ranges. Even the smallest ones for home computer usage come in over 100 GB sizes. Compare that with a 40 GB hard drive just a few years ago.

A few of these 400 GB to 500 GB range hard disk drives in a typical Linux powered web server with 4 Intel Xeon Central Processing Units gives more than enough processing power and storage capacity to host hundreds of websites on one server, all of them running happily.

Throw in open source (free) Apache + PHP + MySQL combination and you have a recipe for hosting a real working dynamic website at very low costs. What was once a premium combination is now very standard and very cheap and very affordable. It is not uncommon to find hosting plans as cheap as just 99 cents per month, which come complete with all features including PHP and MySQL and enough storage + bandwidth.

There is, thus, no reason for anyone who wants to host anything from a personal homepage or a home business / small business wanting a dynamic website for their online business, to go only for simple HTML websites. No. That is long gone.

Shared web hosting has become very affordable for every kind of use and application. As storage and processing technology advances, hosting will be available with even better capacities and more powerful features. It makes complete sense to use the power of PHP and MySQL when it is well within everyone’s reach.

It is the n-Tier architecture which breaks the solution process into different projects as per the business requirements. It is easy to work with and also reduces complexity nature of a business. Hire the service of a .NET consulting company who understands you complex business requirements. There are three layers in an n-Tier application viz., the presentation tier, the business tier, and lastly the data tier. One layer has to interact with the layer immediate below and each layer performs designated functions. The presentation tier displays user interface to the end user or the programmer. This layer or tier is used by programmers for designing purpose. In ASP.NET it includes server controls, ASPX pages, and user controls.

The business layer acts as mediator through which the data from presentation layer is transferred. The architecture in ASP.NET includes the use of OleDb objects or SqlClient for retrieving, updating and deleting data from Access databases or SQL Server and the retrieved data is passed on to the presentation layer in a DataSet or DataReader object. The data layer after getting the data from the business layer sends the data to the database or vice versa. This data layer is sub divided into BLL (business logic layer) and DAL (data access layer). In ASP.NET it uses OleDb or SqlClient for retrieving data and sending it to BLL.

Thus the n-Tier architecture in ASP.NET backs a uniformed approach in application designing. So consult an ASP.NET consulting company for an end product, which is robust and dynamic.