Php – Suggestions for Tech to use for Blog/Organiser/Gallery App Ideas

Data Storage:

• Specify the utf8mb4 character set on all tables and text columns in your database. This makes MySQL physically store and retrieve values encoded natively in UTF-8. Note that MySQL will implicitly use utf8mb4 encoding if a utf8mb4_* collation is specified (without any explicit character set).

• In older versions of MySQL (< 5.5.3), you'll unfortunately be forced to use simply utf8, which only supports a subset of Unicode characters. I wish I were kidding.

Data Access:

• In your application code (e.g. PHP), in whatever DB access method you use, you'll need to set the connection charset to utf8mb4. This way, MySQL does no conversion from its native UTF-8 when it hands data off to your application and vice versa.

• Some drivers provide their own mechanism for configuring the connection character set, which both updates its own internal state and informs MySQL of the encoding to be used on the connection—this is usually the preferred approach. In PHP:

  • If you're using the PDO abstraction layer with PHP ≥ 5.3.6, you can specify charset in the DSN:

     $dbh = new PDO('mysql:charset=utf8mb4');
    

  • If you're using mysqli, you can call set_charset():

      $mysqli->set_charset('utf8mb4');       // object oriented style
      mysqli_set_charset($link, 'utf8mb4');  // procedural style
    

  • If you're stuck with plain mysql but happen to be running PHP ≥ 5.2.3, you can call mysql_set_charset.

• If the driver does not provide its own mechanism for setting the connection character set, you may have to issue a query to tell MySQL how your application expects data on the connection to be encoded: SET NAMES 'utf8mb4'.

• The same consideration regarding utf8mb4/utf8 applies as above.

Output:

• If your application transmits text to other systems, they will also need to be informed of the character encoding. With web applications, the browser must be informed of the encoding in which data is sent (through HTTP response headers or HTML metadata).

• In PHP, you can use the default_charset php.ini option, or manually issue the Content-Type MIME header yourself, which is just more work but has the same effect.

• When encoding the output using json_encode(), add JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE as a second parameter.

Input:

• Unfortunately, you should verify every received string as being valid UTF-8 before you try to store it or use it anywhere. PHP's mb_check_encoding() does the trick, but you have to use it religiously. There's really no way around this, as malicious clients can submit data in whatever encoding they want, and I haven't found a trick to get PHP to do this for you reliably.

• From my reading of the current HTML spec, the following sub-bullets are not necessary or even valid anymore for modern HTML. My understanding is that browsers will work with and submit data in the character set specified for the document. However, if you're targeting older versions of HTML (XHTML, HTML4, etc.), these points may still be useful:

  • For HTML before HTML5 only: you want all data sent to you by browsers to be in UTF-8. Unfortunately, if you go by the only way to reliably do this is add the accept-charset attribute to all your <form> tags: <form ... accept-charset="UTF-8">.
  • For HTML before HTML5 only: note that the W3C HTML spec says that clients "should" default to sending forms back to the server in whatever charset the server served, but this is apparently only a recommendation, hence the need for being explicit on every single <form> tag.

Other Code Considerations:

• Obviously enough, all files you'll be serving (PHP, HTML, JavaScript, etc.) should be encoded in valid UTF-8.

• You need to make sure that every time you process a UTF-8 string, you do so safely. This is, unfortunately, the hard part. You'll probably want to make extensive use of PHP's mbstring extension.

• PHP's built-in string operations are not by default UTF-8 safe. There are some things you can safely do with normal PHP string operations (like concatenation), but for most things you should use the equivalent mbstring function.

• To know what you're doing (read: not mess it up), you really need to know UTF-8 and how it works on the lowest possible level. Check out any of the links from utf8.com for some good resources to learn everything you need to know.

"If you want to develop an Air application, you must use the Air SDK. If you want to develop a Flex application that runs on Air, you need to use both." - @joshtnjala

I believe @joshtnjala to be partially correct, but I wanted to add on it. If using the Flex 3.3 SDK, you no longer require the AIR SDK as those tools are available to the Flex 3.3 SDK. It is important to note, because I see a lot of confusion or misuse of the term, Flex is actually three things.

• Flex SDK (currently 3.3)

  allows developers without the Flash and/or Flex IDE's, to develop and compile/publish Actionscript3 and MXML code to flash content (SWF). For example, one could use FlashDevelop for an IDE, and compile the code using the Flex 3.3 SDK.

• Flex Framework

  (From adobe [http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/overview/][1]) Flex is a free, open source framework for building highly interactive, expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. It provides a modern, standards-based language and programming model that supports common design patterns. MXML, a declarative XML-based language, is used to describe UI layout and behaviors, and ActionScript™ 3, a powerful object-oriented programming language, is used to create client logic. Flex also includes a rich component library with more than 100 proven, extensible UI components for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs), as well as an interactive Flex application debugger.

• Flex Builder 3

  Flex Builder is merely an IDE to assist in the development of flash (SWF), or AIR content. This builder utilizes the SDK above to compile. The framework may or may not be used depending on the developers needs. Many developers have taken themselves out of the FLASH IDE (THAT NASTY TIMELINE!) and began scripting their AS3 purely in the Flex Builder IDE as it provides many useful features for the "advanced" programmer; Not to mention its a very clean UI and is built on eclipse so it has many plugins and a solid community behind its architecture.

That being said, to expand on what joshtnala said, the difference between using the AIR SKD and the Flex 3.3 SDK, is that if you merely want to build an AIR app, composed of Actiosncript3 code, the AIR SDK is all you need (33mb unpacked). If you intend to use MXML and any part of the "Flex Framework" then you must use the Flex 3.3 SDK (190mb unpacked). This will allow you to use the many available components such as Datagrids, Accordions, etc, in your AIR application. So in the end, both will develop an AIR application as Flex 3.3 SDK incorporates the AIR 1.5 development tools. Abstract your project out, figure out what you will need, if a component works for that, or if a custom implementation is needed, etc, then choose your toolkit.

Hope this helps.