Look, if you are going to tokenize your forms (and you should because of CSRF), you also need to have some active JS (or whatever) on the page that at least hides the form after the last valid token expires. For those of us who leave websites that we sign into open, we are tired of logging in twice! Citi.com I’m looking at you.
Archive for Development
Customer Spotlight: Lever Bar
Your Computer Genius has worked with Strength Productions LLC for a long time. When they needed a web site to support and sell their new product, YCG came through for them. Strength Productions is a training success story — once WordPress was installed, they practically designed and built their own site!
Visit them at LeverBar.com.
Setting up a Windows Development Server
Recently we acquired a new client and set up a new Windows development environment for their project from scratch. Here is a profile of the process we used.
We started working with a small business based in Vancouver, Washington, USA. This was a new client for us, and they desperately needed help with their business processes. (They also requested help with their website, but that is a separate topic for a different day!)
The client was using a mish-mash of common small office/home office software products, including Adobe Professional and Microsoft Office and the processes that were being used in their business were quite convoluted. For example, the order taking process, which was needed for each new order they took, had many repetitive steps across several different programs, involving cutting and pasting and lots of duplication of effort.
For our first step, we had a consultative meeting with the client. This meeting immediately produced a tons of value in the form of actionable insights. These insights showed exactly where we should help them optimize their business processes. This optimization, when complete, will save them lots of time in the order taking process and in following up on orders. This will enable them to spend less time processing the orders. This saves costs on the staff time it takes for each order, reducing the per-order overhead, as well as allowing the order taking process to scale better. This enables them to take more orders and do more business. This a great thing for growing the business!
During the initial meeting we took detailed notes and we identified the key elements in each process. We also began to outline the solutions we would implement at each step.
This is the same basic process development that we have been doing professionally for over a decade.
Since they had a Microsoft Access database in a core role in their internal processes, we outlined a path to step from Access to SQL and then to a web-based app which we would custom develop for them. This is the same basic process development that we have been doing professionally for over a decade. This client’s use case fit nicely with the profile for this kind of work.
In order to facilitate this development process, we immediately provisioned an Amazon EC2 instance with the latest and greatest Microsoft Windows Server. Going this route is much quicker to implement than provisioning local hardware and software, and it is also less expensive, more flexible, and offers better performance out of the box. The required software licenses alone for this development environment and the related production environment would easily be several thousand dollars. Amazon has low recurring fees for their Web Services that are based on usage. Those fees automatically account for the necessary licenses for the software we use.
Since we do so much development work locally, on either Macs or Linux-based machines, I was curious to see what tools we would set up on this Windows based server for our team to share. As I was the one setting this up, I brought along many of my favorites tools. Some of them seem outdated, but they still get the job done. First I installed the truly cross-platform (consistently developed for multi-platform) tools that remain the same across the various dev platforms.
In this case these were:
- Firefox (I couldn’t wait to ditch that “hardened” stock IE config)
- CrossFTP Pro (runs in Java, on Mac we use Coda or Transmit)
- Sublime Text 3 (developed on every platform)
- SourceTree (Atlassian just rocks, plain and simple!)
As far as Windows specific tools for this dev server, they included:
- XAMPP (by Friends of Apache)
- PuttyGen (2016 and there still is no “native” ssh in Windows??!)
- Microsoft Office/Access 2016 Runtime
- SQL Server
- SQL Server Management Studio
We connected SourceTree to our BitBucket account. With the distributed source tracking, all of the developers on our team are able to program, test, and debug on their local machines and then push and pull accepted changes to and from the central repository.
It’s been a little while since I set up a Windows Server as a Dev environment, and I guess I was a little surprised to see myself using the same old tools. However, it gets the job done, and that’s great!
Category: Development, Server Administration, Software, Toolbox / Tags: Atlasssian, CrossFTP Pro, Dev Environment, Server Admin, Software Development
Compiling the MSSQL.so extension for PHP 5.3.5 on MediaTemple DV 4
We just enabled the MSSQL extension via FreeTDS on a Media Temple DV 4 VPS. Here’s a line by line of how we did it, borrowing heavily from http://www.mavrick.id.au/2012/php-5-3-6-mssql-freetds/
, but adding the particulars for the MediaTemple DV and for the particular version of PHP (5.3.5) that we were using:
Make a directory to hold these sources:
cd / mkdir /source cd /source
Grab the source of FreeTDS:
wget http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/freetds/stable/freetds-stable.tgz tar zxvf freetds-stable.tgz cd freetds-0.91 ./configure –enable-msdblib –prefix=/usr/local/freetds make && make install
For some reason these files need to be copied over:
cp include/tds.h /usr/local/freetds/include cp src/tds/.libs/libtds.a /usr/local/freetds/lib cd /source
Adjust for your desired version of PHP (this example is 5.3.5):
wget http://museum.php.net/php5/php-5.3.5.tar.gz tar xvfz php-5.3.5.tar.gz cd php-5.3.5 cd ext/mssql phpize ./configure –with-mssql=/usr/local/freetds make
Now, when we first ran the make command we had to deal with a type redefinition in
nano /source/php-5.3.5/ext/mssql/php_mssql.h
Copy the extension to the proper directory… You can find out what directory it is with this command:
php -i | grep extension_dir
In our case it was /usr/lib64/php/modules.
cp modules/mssql.so /usr/lib64/php/modules
Edit php.ini file (this is the global one):
nano /etc/php.ini
Add:
extension=mssql.so
Then restart your web server:
/etc/init.d/httpd restart
and done!
Other PHP MSSQL Resources:
http://php.net/manual/en/mssql.setup.php
https://github.com/jamestkirk/devbox/wiki/install-mssql-php-extension
http://www.robert-gonzalez.com/2009/02/18/building-the-php-ms-sql-server-extension-from-source-on-ubuntu-810/
https://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Installing_MSSQL_for_PHP
http://howtogetitworking.com/2008/02/26/how-to-install-mssql-extension-for-php-on-unix/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-server-73/how-to-enable-mssql-on-linux-589956/
UPDATED:
(For reference:)
I compiled the pdo_dblib.so extension… but it looks like PHP is compiled with –disable-pdo. So I went back to mssql_connect as a connection method…
Logging in as the user to the bash shell, I could telnet to the database server’s ip at port 1433.
From the command line as well, I could run tsql (the diagnostic tool that comes with FreeTDS) and connect to the server, where I was able to verify that the hostname, instance, and dbname lookups are correct. I could even run T-SQL statements and query the database successfully from there.
I configured the FreeTDS conf file to have [appname] as a reference to the server, and then accessed via the following code in:
putenv("FREETDSCONF=/etc/freetds.conf");
$hostname = 'appname'; $username = 'username'; $password = 'password';
$databasename = 'database';
//connection to the database
$connection = mssql_connect($hostname, $username, $password)or die("Unable to connect to $hostname");
echo "
Connected to MSSQL
";
mssql_select_db($databasename,$connection);
$result = mssql_query("SELECT TOP 1 field from table");
$row = mssql_fetch_array($result);
echo("
Result from sample query: ".$row[0]."
");
Which outputs the expected:
Connected to MSSQL
Result from sample query: x
This was the missing puzzle piece:
putenv("FREETDSCONF=/etc/freetds.conf");
Apparently FreeTDS looks in /usr/local/etc by default, not /etc.
Custom Repositories for GitHub Forked Composer packages
So today we had to make a custom repository so that our composer installs could look for custom changes to a particular package that was causing a problem with one of our client’s production applications.
The only current change in this particular package was a solitary “if” statement added to a single line of code. This statement checks to make sure that the object operated on is indeed an object: in certain situations in the production app it throws a fatal exception claiming a “non-object.”
First we had to ask two (rhetorical) questions:
(1) Where do PHP Composer packages come from?
and
(2) How do you get composer to install a non-composer package?
The first step was to fork the package on GitHub:
The original package is Piotr Śliwa’s excellent:
https://github.com/psliwa/PHPPdf
And the fork lives here:
https://github.com/yourcomputergenius/PHPPdf
We looked at simply adding the forked package to Packagist, but although we intend on maintaining this as a “real long-term fork”, that is only if this change or an equivalent fix are not added to the primary package in the near to medium term. Since that seems like an edge case, we were happy to go the VCS route. Satis and Toran Proxy just looked like overkill for this simple implementation.
Once the forking was complete, we cloned the forked package into GitHub for Mac (nice!).
We branched into “missing-object-protection” (the name of the branch will be important later).
We edited the file “lib/PHPPdf/Core/ComplexAttribute/ComplexAttribute.php”, committed the change, and pushed.
Then on to editing composer.json.
We tried to run “composer require” and “composer update” on a development version of the application, after “composer remove” took care of the original psliwa/PHPPdf package. However, we ran into the issue that our newly created PHPPdf branch no longer satisfied the requirements for the PDF Bundle dependencies that was also used by the production app!
Back to GitHub we went, and we forked:
https://github.com/psliwa/PdfBundle
to:
https://github.com/yourcomputergenius/PdfBundle/
Then we cloned that into the desktop and made a solitary commit to the new fork’s master branch: a single commit updating the requirements in that project’s composer.json.
Then we updated our repositories in our development machine’s composer.json, just after the “require-dev” entry, so it contained entries for both newly forked packages:
"repositories": {
"yourcomputergenius/php-pdf": {
"type": "vcs",
"url": "https://github.com/yourcomputergenius/PHPPdf/"
},
"yourcomputergenius/php-bundle": {
"type": "vcs",
"url": "https://github.com/yourcomputergenius/PdfBundle/"
}
},
We were able to leave the names the same in the “require” section of the composer.json file — one of the beautiful (and maddening) things about composer is the presence of these sorts of conventions. Composer is smart enough to figure out which packages are being replaced by custom repos.
However, we did update the “require” section of composer.json to look for the “dev-missing-object-protection” branch, as below:
"psliwa/php-pdf": "dev-missing-object-protection"
The long and short of the day is that the application runs “composer update” and successfully grabs those two packages from the forked repos. Hooray!
Updates to PHP 5.4 Cause Errors in Pagelines
The error is: Warning: Creating default object from empty value in /wp-content/themes/platform/includes/class.layout.php on line 167
And the solution (turn off displayed errors):
add to wp-config.php
ini_set( ‘display_errors’, 0 );
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/warning-error-creating-default-object-from-empty-value
Category: Development /
