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Summer

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Is over, yay! My favorite time of the year is here.

So over summer I should have been working on my University project, I did some.  I have instead, taken residence at a local creative studio writing loads of code and sipping lots of coffee, good times!!

I have been focusing on my iOS development and as a result have done 5 news apps.  Heres the bad news, one got rejected! its nothing special or bad, just a poor attempt at an app.

Heres the list…

Big Brother 2011

Yes, Big Brother has returned so why not?  The initial version was pretty shocking cosmetically, but that was addressed in the latest update.

Check it out here http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/big-brother-news-2011/id446685894?mt=8

This has been pretty successful thanks to having the market to myself.  Channel 5 did have word of releasing a iPhone app however none have yet appeared.

The celebrity version has just finished and the normal version is about to begin so there is life yet in this app.

F1 Rumours

Formula 1 is one of my favorite sports, so it made sense to do this.  This contained the same source code as the Big Brother app above but used a different data source.

Check it out here http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/f1-rumours/id445282041?mt=8

X-Factor

This has been a very poor performer, partly thanks to the free and official app.  Again, as with F1, BB, this has the same base source code.  I have not updated this app, so what you see here is what the initial versions of BB and F1 looked like.

Check it out here http://itunes.apple.com/br/app/x-factor-rumours/id446693498?mt=8

And finally….

As my time with the University of Bolton is coming to an end.  I have about 2 months remaining and should I complete my project, I will graduate.  I decided to give something back.

I created a simple iPhone app. This is still waiting to be released on the App store but should be available soon.

It’s pretty basic at this stage but shows both university and student news from the website, shows the university twitter account. And a cool feature, allows you to view your timetable from within the app.

Here are the screenshots.

Out with mysql in with PDO

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A not so new feature of PHP which dates back to version 5.0 is PDO (PHP Data Objects).  PDO is a data-access abstraction layer that can access several database engines whilst maintaining the same set of functions.  I’m surprised I hadn’t discovered PDO earlier considering its been around way before I knew PHP.

As part of my project, my sponsor has asked me to look into the differences between mysql, mysqli (which will replace mysql at some point in the future) and PDO methods of interacting with a MySQL database.  The following table which I stumbled upon whilst researching explains it pretty well.

Source: http://www.php.net/manual/en/mysqli.overview.php

The original mysql extension listed in the third column has a development status of maintenance only.  My interpretation of this is that at some point, in a future release this extension will be dropped, meaning it’s time to move on and use something more up to date.

The mysqli (with the i meaning improved) extension looks to be the replacement for the original extension and the preferred for new projects.

The major difference between PDO and Mysqli is (of course) mysqli is limited to a MySQL databases.  PDO is an abstraction layer which can interact with a number of databases – the complete list of drivers are here.

Reading further into the two, another key difference between the two is that PDO allows prepared statements with named parameters.

So where the following would work with both PDO and mysqli

SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = ? AND display = ?

Only the following would work with PDO

SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = :id AND display = :display

Not a great difference, however the second option would in my eyes, be the preferred method of doing a prepared statement for the sake of readability.

Therefore, for my project, I will dump the old mysql extension and handle all database actions through the PDO layer.