alif's blog

Recently, I have been working on an Application which involved rating system. There are 2 cases where we would want to display ratings. On 1st case, we would just want to display the list of contents (videos, blogs etc.) with its rating (just displayed).

On another case, show the rating and also allow viewer to rate content. There are already several blogs relating to 2nd case (CSS Star Rating), so, I will only discuss the 1st case.

Where I work, my company uses Akamai as the CDN for all properties. Initially our company used non-RTMP downloadable URL from Akamai, but, later after some struggling (in May 2008 or so) I was able to figure out how to extract RTMP from Akamai's XML File.

Recently, a friend of mine asked me if there's an IMDB Parser that allows to fetch information about any Movie on IMDB. Unfortunately, IMDB does not offer an API, so , after doing a bit googling I found nice IMDB Grabber (PHP IMDB Grabber), despite it being a good one, I decided develop my own class relying on XPath and Dom Traversing.

XPath allows traversing through XML elements and attributes very easily. For complex XMLs, using XPath can significantly reduce the complexity of coding.

Good Tutorial of XPath can be viewed on W3C schools here. Reference on DomXPath can be viewed here.

XPath is useful if someone needs to extract a specific node from an entire XML, rather than parsing the entire XML by running a query. Below I will explain how to use DomDocument and DomXPath to read XML. At first I will start with a simple XML, and then more complex.

This is a continuation of previous article, where I wrote on how to use PHP'5 DOM to read XML Files easily. But, for large files, its better to use XMLReader. Unlike DomDocument, XMLReader does not load the entire File on memory. It reads an XML file one node at a time. I hardly use XMLReader because it requires writing a lot of codes, but for extremely large XML Files, its better to use it. Full reference on XMLReader can be viewed here. It requires PHP 5.2.

PHP-5's DOM and XMLReader provides the ability to read XML files easily. The good thing about PHP-5's DOM (mainly DomDocument, DomNodeList, DomNode) is that it implements the standard DOM features as specified by W3C. W3C's reference on DOM can be viewed here. So, if someone has used DOM before (say on JavaScript), then it would be easy for him/her to grasp PHP-5's DOM.

Since I wrote my ZCE Exam in last Sept 08', I have been using DomDocument mainly to generate XML files. Its a powerful library of PHP-5, one thing I find surprising is the lack of tutorials on the web on PHP-5's DomDocument. So, I decided to write a simple tutorial on how to use DomDocument to write XML. In this article, I will try to explain the basics of DomDocument and then will create a couple of simple XML files.

.htaccess (Hypertext Access) files is a configuration file on Apache web server. It allows users to do many powerful features just by writing few lines.

Since this is a topic which has been widely blogged, I decided to write a topic which is hard to find, and followed by links to other blogger's site (which explains htaccess extensively).

I decided to create a carousel which will be efficient and offer graceful degradation. The only Carousel I came across which offers such feature is the one of Yahoo! Canada (Featured Area of Home Page). Turn off the JS, and you will still see the same layout, with each Items on the right now acting as a link. Upon clicking them will take you to their corresponding page.

This is a Graphing Calculator I made many years ago (I think back in 2003). It was the first time I got introduced to programming in Turbo C.