I recently took over a product stream whose code was approximately two years old. I was shocked to see that it didn’t have any logging mechanism in place, which scared the hell out of me. In this article, I'll explain why it scared me, and the best ways to implement logging in PHP applications.
If there is no logging mechanism, then if there's a goof-up in a production environment, you have absolutely no idea what went wrong. The only thing which a support developer can do in this case is to reproduce the issue at the developer end, which sometimes work and sometimes don't.
In a Lamp stack (PHP environment), logs are being generated at many places. Apache creates its logs, PHP creates its logs and MySQL also creates its logs. You can get a lot of information from these logs, especially when there are errors. The problem with these logs is that they are server-specific rather than application-specific, so they would not log anything specific to the application.
Application logs are very important, and they must be implemented in even trivial applications. Some of the very basic reasons for which an application log is important are debugging during development, troubleshooting in a production environment, gathering statistics, fixing security loopholes, and so forth.
If you have a website, especially one that sells products or services, it can be useful to track the visitors to your site. This article explains how to write a program that will do just that.
There are many different traffic analysis tools, ranging from simple counters to complete traffic analyzers.
Although there are some free ones, most of them come with a price tag. Why not do it yourself? With PHP, you can easily create a log file within minutes. In this article I will show you how!
Making usage statistics on a web site is one of the most enjoyable things for me on the Internet. Thanks to the technology, you can see each click of each visitor, the date of the visiting, and how many seconds the user was reading your site. I use this feature to track which of my articles was read for the longest time. In this article I will show you how to store the statistics in a MySQL database, show the web stats in an HTML table and make figures based on the stats using the GD library.
In this article, Naeem shows us how to go about creating a statistical view of data, in the form of a clustered bar chart, using PHP and MySQL. He provides a real-life scenario, along with accompanying code, to demonstrate how the job can be accomplished.
To help developers learn to fit the benefits of probability modeling into Web application development, Paul Meagher introduces you to basic concepts, techniques, and PHP-based tools that define the area of probability modeling and probability distributions. He demonstrates how to develop univariate probability models in PHP; discusses how to fit empirical data distributions to a theoretical probability distribution; and showcases an important tool for all this -- the Probability Distributions Library (PDL).
Most Web hosting companies provide access to Web site statistics, but these server-generated stats often don't give you the complete picture. For example, a misconfigured Web server will not recognize certain file types, and unrecognized files will not appear in the stats. Luckily, you can get the information you need by using PHP to create a custom stats-gathering application.
Effective, multi-level analysis of Web data is a critical element for the survival of many Web-oriented businesses, and the design (and determination) of data-analysis tests is often the job of systems administrators and in-house application designers who may not have an understanding of statistics beyond tabulating raw counts. In this article, Paul Meagher delivers the skills and concepts Web developers need to be able to apply inferential statistics to their Web data streams.
Building a counter is easy. Building a counter that will tell you how many people have been on your website in the last five minutes takes a little more planning. During this tutorial, we'll show you how to spice up your website a little bit and build a tool to give you an accurate count of what's happening on your website at any given moment.
A missing, but powerful, tool in the PHP arena is a language-based math library. In this two-part series, Paul Meagher hopes to inspire PHP developers to develop and implement a PHP-based math library by providing you with an example of how a library of analytic models might be developed. In this first part, he demonstrates how to develop and implement the heart of a Simple Linear Regression algorithm package using PHP as the implementation language. In Part 2, the author adds features to the package for a useful data-analysis tool for small- to medium-sized datasets
