Archive for June, 2008
whoisi.com
John Resig posted a note on his blog about whoisi.com, a social network aggregator. The system is ingeniously simple, do a search for the name you are looking for, I did a search for myself 
.
All similar names are listed, if the name is not listed, just add it. To each name you can attach a bunch of links, as for instance facebook, twitter, linkedIn, blogs and so on. Everyone has the possibility to add a person and attach a links.
My page on http://whoisi.com/p/1383
Firefox killing the sound on my Ubuntu box
Tonight I encountered a rather strange problem on my Ubuntu box. While doing nothing special on my machine, just surfing and listening to music and suddenly there are no sound?!?
Doing a quick search on ubuntuforums.org I quickly found the solution. The problem seems to be Firefox, killing the firefox sessions and restarting the alsa-utils did the trick for me, and voila the sound is back 
The howto get the sound back is found here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2742327
BTW: starting firefox again did not cause any problems 
PHP Vikinger
I attended the PHP vikinger unconference in Skien on Saturday. Rather than writing my own wrap up of the unconference I choose to link to the wrap up written by Mats Lindh and Derick Rethans
Notes from Mats: http://e-mats.org/2008/06/php-vikinger-notes/
Notes from Derick: http://phpvikinger.org/news/news-2008-05-23
Project managment
Adaptive path has a brilliant article about project management and how to create a center of creativity and productivity.
I’ve had the chance to work with a couple of project managers which had the same philosophy as described in the adaptive path article, and can with certainty say that such an approach does work and give the project members a real boost of creativity and efficency.
I’m looking for a job in Newcastle (UK)
I’ve started to look for a job in Newcastle Upon Tyne since my girlfriend and daugther are moving there in September. I’ve posted my resume and profile on totaljobs.co.uk, monster.co.uk, cwjobs.co.uk and justengineers.net. I’ve also set up a few job mailers which sends me the most recent IT jobs registered on the sites mentioned above.
So far I haven’t found any perfect matches, however, I’ve applied on a few jobs that sounds interesting.
Please take a look at my linkedin profile or resume If you are hiring and looking for a web developer or software engineer, and do not hesitate to contact me.
It is a bit sad that I have to resign from my position in Derdubor AS, because I got a couple of really good colleagues there and I learn a lot working there. However, I’m looking forward to new challenges in Newcastle.
Writing SOA applications with PHP
Lately I’ve been working a lot with data integration between several web applications, and a natural choice for the integration was to use a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). I’ve built both SOA servers and clients before using the SOAP approach, which is a superb way of transferring data when not knowing who the user of the service is, or when you are a client of such a service. However in this setting I knew who the user was, I knew what the service would be used for, also had the chance to write both the client and server.
The choice fell on a simple implementation using the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data structure. This is really easy using the built in json library in php. The server use the json_encode() function and the implemented sub class of the client use the json_decode() function.
To simplify this further I implemented two abstract classes, a ServiceServer class and a ServiceClient class. The service server class contained a very simple displayJSONResult function, which sets the correct header, encode the data as json data and echo the data.
The service client class has two main functions, doGetRequest and doPostRequest, both functions use the cURL library in PHP.
Server
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<?php
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abstract class ServiceServer
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{
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public function __construct(){}
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protected function displayJSONResult($data)
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{
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header('Content-type: text/plain');
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echo json_encode($data);
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exit();
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}
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}
Client
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<?php
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/**
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* ServiceClient
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*
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*
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* @author Kristian Lunde
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*
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*/
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class ServiceClient
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{
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public function __construct(){}
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/**
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* do a post request to a service
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*
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* the params parameter must be a string with the format:
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* key=val&key2=val2&key3=val3
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*
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* @param string $url
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* @param string $params
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*/
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protected function doPostRequest($url, $params)
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{
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$ch = curl_init($url);
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curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER , false);
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curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER , true);
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curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST , 1);
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curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS , $params);
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$result = curl_exec($ch);
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curl_close($ch);
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return $result;
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}
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/**
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* do a get request to a service
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*
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* @param string $url
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*
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* @return mixed
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*/
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protected function doGetRequest($url)
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{
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$ch = curl_init($url);
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curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER , false);
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curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER , true);
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$result = curl_exec($ch);
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curl_close($ch);
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return $result;
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}
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}
Example
To illustrate the easiness and simplicity of this SOA approach I written a small example. In this example the server finds the country of a city using POST parameters or it can find cities using the country as a GET parameter.
Example server
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<?php
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/**
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* Example of using the ServiceServer class
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*
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* Returns countries or cities
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*
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* @author Kristian Lunde
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*/
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require_once('ServiceServer.php');
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class ExampleServer extends ServiceServer
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{
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public function __construct()
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{
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$this->countries = array('norway' => array('Oslo',
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'Trondheim',
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'Bergen',
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'Halden',
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'Sarpsborg',
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'Hammerfest'),
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'sweden' => array('Stockholm',
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'Gothenburg',
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'Karlstad'),
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'england' => array('London',
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'Newcastle',
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'Bath',
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'Liverpool'));
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if(isset($_GET['country']))
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{
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$this->findCitiesByCountry(trim($_GET['country']));
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}
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if(isset($_POST['city']))
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{
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$this->findCountryByCity(trim($_GET['city']));
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}
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}
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public function findCitiesByCountry($country)
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{
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$cities = 'Not found';
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$country = strtolower($country);
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if(isset($this->countries[$country]))
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{
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$cities = $this->countries[$country];
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}
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$this->displayJSONResult($cities);
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}
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public function findCountryByCity($city)
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{
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$country = 'Not found';
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$break = false;
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foreach($this->countries as $key => $val)
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{
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for($i = 0, $count = count($val); $i < $count; $i++)
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{
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if($city == $val[$i])
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{
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$country = $key;
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$break = true;
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break;
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}
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}
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if($break)
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{
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break;
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}
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}
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$this->displayJSONResult($country);
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}
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}
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$obj = new ExampleServer();
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?>
Example client
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<?php
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/**
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* Example of using the ServiceClient class
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*
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* does a request to the ExampleServer
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*
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* @author Kristian Lunde
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*/
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require_once('ServiceClient.php');
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class ExampleClient extends ServiceClient
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{
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public function __construct()
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{
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$this->getCities('Norway');
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$this->getCounty('Bath');
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}
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public function getCities($country)
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{
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$url = 'http://files.klunde.net/files.klunde.net/ExampleServer.php?country=' . $country;
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echo $this->doGetRequest($url);
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}
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public function getCountry($city)
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{
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$url = 'http://files.klunde.net/files.klunde.net/ExampleServer.php';
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$params = 'city=' . $city;
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echo $this->doPostRequest($url, $params);
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}
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}
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$obj = new ExampleClient();
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?>
I’m quite satisfied with this implementation because it is so easy to maintain and even more important, implementing new services and clients for the services is straight forward and supports rapid development.