PHP

Building a March Madness Bracket in PHP

Jim Hall — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 18:24:59 +0000

Jim Hall takes his March Madness script to the next level.

Every year in March, my office closely follows the NCAA college basketball tournament, also known as March Madness. You can print out a bracket and make your own predictions as to which team will win at each round. Several of my co-workers take this somewhat seriously, and they always print out their brackets and tack them to their work cubes for all to see. Generally, the winner buys a pizza lunch for the others who played.

I like to join in, but unfortunately, I lack one thing to participate effectively: I don't really follow basketball.

But, I don't like to miss out on March Madness, so a few years ago, I created a Bash script to help me fill out my March Madness bracket. This worked pretty well. I ran the script, and then I used the results to fill out my March Madness bracket.

See my previous two articles for more info on the script: Bash Shell Script: Building a Better March Madness Bracket (2017) and Bash Shell Script: Building Your March Madness Bracket (2016).

This year, I decided to take things to the next level. Rather than run a Bash script, why not create a web page that automatically fills in the winners for each round? That way I won't really even need to fill out a March Madness bracket; I can just print out the results from my web page.

Guessing the Winners of Each Game

In the NCAA college basketball tournament, 64 teams from four regions compete in a series of single-elimination games. "Single-elimination" means that after each round, the winning teams move on to the next round; the losing teams are out. The NCAA seeds the first round with the top teams from each region and assigns a ranking value to each team. Usually, the higher-rated teams (1–8) fare better than the lower-rated teams (9–16).

You can use this "rank" value to guess who might win or lose an individual contest. A rank 1 team should perform better than a rank 16 team, but a rank 8 team should perform about the same as a rank 9 team. I found that the best simulation of a game's outcome is to create a virtual "die" that I "roll" to determine the winner. The die has faces relative to the chance of each team to win, as represented in this simple algorithm to generate a custom die:

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Rogue Wave Software's Zend Studio

James Gray — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 11:52:35 +0000

by James Gray

The quick pitch for Rogue Wave Software's Zend Studio, recently updated to version 13.6, is "the PHP IDE for smarter development". Zend Studio 13.6, says Rogue Wave, offers 3X faster performance in indexing, validation and searching of PHP code, and it allows users to code faster, debug more easily and leverage the massive performance gains in PHP 7. It is the next-generation PHP IDE designed to create high-quality PHP apps while boosting developer productivity. The platform automatically scales according to the DPI settings of the underlying operating system and supports HiDPI monitors.

The main focus in this new release is the support for PHP 7.1, which contains useful language improvements like nullable types, void return type and catching multiple exception types. Additional feature improvements relate to Composer and JavaScript tooling, and Zend Studio 13.6 takes advantage of the tern.js intellisense engine, providing intellisense for a long list of JavaScript frameworks, namely AngularJS, Closure, CordovaJS, Dojo, ExtJS, jQuery and Node.js.

Finally, the release comes with the latest and greatest release of the Eclipse Platform, Neon.3, which brings with it its own slew of improvements.

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The Family Dashboard

Shawn Powers — Tue, 23 May 2017 14:52:10 +0000

by Shawn Powers

I've written a little about PHP before, because I think it's a great utility language for writing quick things you need to do. Plus, it allows you to use a web browser as your interface, and everyone has a web browser. That makes it very convenient for my family, because I can make simple web interfaces for the various things I normally have to do from the command line. (This is extremely useful when I'm gone to a conference and the Plex server needs to be rebooted, or any of a dozen other things need to be done that are hard to explain over the phone.)

My "Family Dashboard" will look different from yours, but the concept is pretty simple. PHP allows you to execute local functions on the server, and so as long as you can create a bash script that does what you need it to do, it can be launched from the "dashboard" you create for your family. Here's a sample dashboard file I've created, so you can see how simple it is to create a custom page that does what you need it to do (see Figure 1 for a screenshot of the dashboard in action):


My Dashboard

You need to enter some commands and possibly options,
 ↪or just press a button:







Press a button!";

}

?>

Figure 1. My dashboard is simple, but it's just a front end for the code beneath.

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PHP for Non-Developers

Shawn Powers — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 14:00:00 +0000

by Shawn Powers

After years of making it clear that I'm not a developer in just about every article I've written here at Linux Journal, I do have a confession to make. I can write the "Hello World" equivalent in almost every programming language out there. In assembly, it might have been "1+1", but my lack of advanced skills should be evident. The thing is, I've always wanted to learn how to program, but I hate the process so much I never get past "Hello World".

Then I met PHP.

I know PHP is no longer cool. I know that compared to Python it's extremely limited. But I also know that with PHP, I actually was able to create useful programs from the beginning. I suspect that's why I love Bash scripting so much. With Bash, I always start with a problem to solve and use scripting to solve it. I never "learned" to write Bash scripts, I just did it. My goal in this article is to throw you right into writing useful PHP code. If you really want to make "Hello World" appear in a browser window, by all means do so. But I'm not going to teach you how!

Preliminaries

Server:

One great thing about PHP is that just about every Web server has it installed and ready to go. If you get advanced and want to start making system calls to the underlying Linux OS, you might have to tweak php.ini a bit, but getting a PHP platform is usually as simple as installing a Web server with a LAMP stack.

One thing that makes programming easier for me is to make sure my user account has write access to the place I'm writing code. My process usually involves making a small change and clicking refresh on the browser to see if it worked. If you have to sudo cp localfile serverfile every time you make a change, it will be no fun. Worry about proper file permissions when you release your code to the Internet, but not while you're developing.

The only other server tweak I recommend is adding a .htaccess that turns on error reporting. I don't always have errors display on the page, but if you get the dreaded "php blank page", it's nice to turn on error reporting quickly so you get a nice message telling you where you forgot a semicolon. I usually create a file called "err" and quickly rename it to ".htaccess" when I want to see errors displayed. You probably will have to modify your Apache server, telling it to "AllowOverride" for the folder you're using, but it's worth the effort. Here's what my .htaccess file looks like:


php_flag  display_errors        on
php_value error_reporting       2039

Editor:

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PHP

Building a March Madness Bracket in PHP

Guessing the Winners of Each Game

Rogue Wave Software's Zend Studio

The Family Dashboard

You need to enter some commands and possibly options, ↪or just press a button: Weather Bing ↪Photo Kernel ↪Name Unix ↪Time

PHP for Non-Developers

Preliminaries

You need to enter some commands and possibly options, ↪or just press a button: