On the 9Lessons blog there's a recent tutorial showing you how to log into Instagram via OAuth with the help of their Instagram class.

The very quick registration gives you many users to your web project, we already published login with Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus now time to think about very popular photo sharing portal Instagram. This post explains you how to login with instagram Oauth API and importing user data. Create an instagram account and take a quick look at this demo thanks!

The tutorial walks you through the process of setting up an application in the Instagram service, configuring the scripts with the API key/secret and callback as well as the code for a simple login page. They've also included code to grab the user's information and "popular media" from the web service and pull that information into a local MySQL database.

In this quick post to his blog, Mike Purcell mentions the deprecation of the "assertType" assertion and includes some code you can add to correct the issue in your tests.

We recently upgraded phpunit from a very old version to the current 3.6.x version (at time of writing). During the upgrade I noticed that assertType is no longer supported in many of our tests which were testing if something was a string, an array, or an object. So I had to write a quick script to update assertType to assertInternalType and figured I would post it for others if they needed to do the same.

The code goes into each of your tests (recursively) and finds the places where the "assertType" assertion is used and replaces it with its newer cousin "assertIntrnalType".

New on the Code2Learn site there's a tutorial showing how to integrate HighCharts, PHP, MySQL and CodeIgniter to create a simple graph based on database data.

While working on a project I found out that HighCharts is the best to display graphs on webpage as it has less overhead and requires less space. But the biggest challenge was to implement it using php and not jQuery. We will implement it using MVC pattern as CodeIgniter follows the same.

Included in the post is a library for interacting with HighCharts from PHP, configuration settings for CodeIgniter and the model/view/controller pieces to tie it all together. You can see an example of the end result here.

Artur Ejsmont has a new post sharing some benchmarks he put together about the "messages per second" and "time to execute" when using PHP to pull from various messaging backends.

I have looked at the state of different messaging backends recently and i ran a little benchmark to see what is the rough comparison of message publishing throughput. Results that i got are quite surprising. What i wanted to achieve is some sort of reassurance before choosing a messaging bus for my PHP project.

Running both the PHP and the messaging test scripts on the same server, he pulled from a few different backend systems - RabbitMQ, MySQL, MongoDb, Memcached and ActiveMQ. The results were interesting, showing an interesting result in the time it took to execute versus the number of messages per second pushed in.

In this recent post to his blog Thilanka Kaushalya shows how to use transactions in MySQL databases (using mysqli

Web applications are more popular today than ever with the increasing number of internet users. Most of the standard alone applications converted as web based applications or at least they try to provide a web interface for users. PHP and Mysql are two leading technologies which allow uses on rapid development of web based systems. "Transaction" is a powerful concept which comes with Mysql 4.0 and above versions. Lets explore that.

He introduces the concept of transactions first, providing an example of a bank transfer between two individuals. He uses this to create a simple code sample that turns off the autocommit for the connection (using mysqli_autocommit set to false) and running the SQL in order before the commit. He also includes an example of using the rollback function to return the data back to its original state if there's an error.

Joseph Scott has a new post to his blog looking at "why PHP strings equal zero" - that when you use the "==" operator on a string to compare to zero, it's true.

The issue of PHP strings equaling zero has come up a few times recently. [...] Running that will display Equals zero!, which at first glance probably doesn't make much sense. So what is going on here?

He gets into the specifics of what's happening - a bit of type jugging, less strict comparison since it's the "==" versus "===" and how the PHP manual talks about strings being converted to numbers.

While I still think it is odd that the string gets cast as an integer instead of the other way around, I don't think this is a big deal. I can't recall a single time where I've ever run into this issue in a PHP app. I've only seen it come up in contrived examples like the ones above.

In this new post Gonzalo Ayuso talks about "using eval without using eval" in PHP applications - executing PHP code without having to use the eval function to do it.

Yes I know. Eval() is evil. If our answer is to use eval() function, we are probably asking the wrong question. When we see an eval() function all our coding smell's red lights start flashing inside our mind. Definitely it's a bad practice. But last week I was thinking about it. How can I eval raw PHP code without using the eval function, and I will show you my outcomes.

He includes some sample code showing a basic script with a class and a loop executing normally, then an "eval version" that puts it all in a string and executes it. He offers a different method - not an ideal one since it requires being able to write to the local file system, but prevents the need for eval - writing the PHP code to a temporary file and using a "fake eval" to pull it in.

As Daniel Krook mentions in his latest blog post, the IBM developerWorks site has just posted the last part of a series he's been writing about migrating a PHP application's backend over to DB2.

IBM developerWorks has just published the final part in our series on migrating a PHP application from MySQL to DB2. [...] In addition to sharing our own experience, the series highlights the number of resources available to you to carry out your own migration.

The series is broken up into four parts:

• Prepare for your migration
• Migrate your data
• Convert your PHP code
• Deploy your application

Brandon Savage has a new post to his blog about what he calls a XSS vulnerability in the making, something to watch out for when you're doing validation in PHP involving the possibility of numbers as strings.

Back in September, Socorro received a security bug relating to the method we were using for processing inputs for the duration of certain reports. The vulnerability included a proof of concept, with an alert box popping up on production when the link was followed. [...] I was quite surprised at the root cause of the vulnerability. We had opted to compare the incoming data against a known set of valid values - a common practice when whitelisting certain inputs. [...] As expected, when this [example] code is tested, a string of '3' and an integer of 3 work equally well, and a string of '5' and an integer of 5 fail equally.

This automatic casting that PHP does internally caused another issue as well - if the string passed in even started with a valid number from their whitelist set, it still passed.

At first we thought this surely had to be a bug in PHP. However, Laura Thomson told me "If comparing two values, type juggling is performed first, which means that the string is converted to a number. This is done by taking the first number found in the string. So this may be confusing/a quirk/a gotcha, but it isn't a bug." And she's right: this isn't a bug per se, but it's certainly an interesting "gotcha."

Jeremy Cook has put together a new post showing how he got PUPUnit, Doctrine and MySQL to "play nicely" together when he was writing up some of his tests in a current application.

One of the pain points for me though has been in getting Doctrine setup with PHPUnit for testing. One of the main Doctrine contributors, Benjamin Beberlei, has written a package called DoctrineExtensions which amongst other things adds a class called DoctrineExtensionsPHPUnitOrmTestCase which extends PHPUnit's DbUnit database test case class. This all works well in principle but hits a major snag in reality: MySQL doesn't allow InnoDb tables with foreign keys to be truncated. PHUnit's database extension truncates the database tables before each test run and inserts a fresh set of data to work with.

To work around this issue Jeremy by porting over a method posted by Mike Lively over to Doctrine as a custom "MySQLTruncate" class (code included in the post). He also includes some sample code showing it in use - a basic ORM test case that calls the truncate method when its set up.