To follow-up on the Flex and PHP tutorial we did earlier I thought it would be nice to do a complete tutorial on php, mysql, flex, and json. This tutorial should show a decent way to send data in a database to and from flex to php using json. I will explain this in more detail in just a moment.

Included in the tutorial is a sample of the end result and all of the code you'll need - the database setup, the PHP code to connect to it and pass along the JSON message content, and the Flex/code XML to handle the creation of the requests and update the data in the app according to the response.

There are lots of pre-packaged scripts out there to do almost anything you want, but in my experience a lot of them either do too much or don't do enough. Finding that Goldilocks style of "just right" takes a lot of searching and experimenting, or just plain hacking of existing scripts. But for simple functions, writing your own script that does exactly what you want can often be quicker and more satisfying.

He goes through what a rating system is and can be used for before getting to the code (as well as other things that could be tacked on at the end to make it a bit more complex). Then, it's on to the code - first the database layout, then the script to store the rating the visitor gave the item, and the script that shows the averaged results.

Included in the list are books like:

• Luke Welling and Laura Thomson's PHP and MySQL Web Development
• Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition by Jason Gilmore
• Chris Snyder and Michael Southwell's Pro PHP Security (Pro)

I wanted to have a page that shows the books I've written, together with their Amazon sales rank and the average customer rating and number of reviews. It's really easy. I took one example out of the PEAR book and slightly modified it.

The script needs to few things to get up and running, so he points out those (an AWS id, the PEAR pacakge) and the simple path the application will take to grab the information (request/response). Then it's on to the actual PHP code - all 60 lines of it, including the HTML for the output.

It makes the request with the Services_Amazon package for the given item numbers (he happened to have already) and pulls the results back, looping through them displaying sales rank, title, author, the average rating, and the number of total customer reviews - all in a handy unordered list.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

Those higher on the list are Java, C, Visual Basic, and C++, though C++ seems to be fading and Visual Basic growing by leaps and bounds. In the long term trends they record, PHP is showing a rising trend, quite a bit up from even just February of this year.

Finally the much awaited PHPBB Olympus is out as a public beta. In this review i am gonna list my experiences as i test fire the new beta.

Ok starting with a bit of history. I first tried phpbb 2 years back and i didn't like it at all. Now with Olympus i reckon we have some real good competetion. It might still not face up feature to feature with vbulletin, but its no pushover either. Considering its free and considering that it enjoys the support of an extensive modding community, i see great things happening with olympus.

They cover the normal flow of a user first installing the package:

• installation (of course)
• configuration
• the user control panel
• the overview and forum management sections
• user management
• attachment control
• styling options
• maintenance/system options
• viewing the forums/threads

Quite an exhaustive list, and for each item there's a brief bit of opinion by the reviewer on how good it was accomplished and a rating (out of ten) at the bottom of each page.

He explains the concept behind the system before ever getting into any code - a visual representation of the rating users are giving a particular article/posting. With that out of the way, he gets into the HTML first, explaining how the table is laid out before giving the code to pull together the images and form one seamless one representing the correct rating. He also demonstrates the use of a "secret hash" to protect the script against abuse.

Next up, he creates the PHP/SQL backend to handle the Ajax requests coming back in from the page, and setting a cookie to protect (somewhat) against more than one vote. Finally, he gives the Javascript you'll need to create the Ajax connection and relay the JSON message back to the server on the rating the user chose.

Of course, the code is available for download as well.

Among those on the list, included are:

• PHP Edit
• ActiveState Komodo
• EditPlus
• PHPEclipse
• BBEdit

Each of the editors on the list is linked to the php-editors.com review for it, giving you more information than just the version, license, OS, and general rating in Justin's post.]]> Fri, 31 Mar 2006 07:03:45 -0600