Regular Expressions or regex for short is a pattern that describes a set of strings. In their most general form they are used to define a set without listing out all the possible elements of the set. These expressions provide a flexible means for identifying text of interest including words, special characters, or character patterns.…

Overview A common task in various programming languages is to split a string based on delimiter and create a resulting array. In java we sometimes prefer to utilize collections instead of a basic array object, luckily java has the Arrays object that can be used to perform various functions on an inputted array. The Step…

What is iBATIS? iBATIS is a framework that utilize DAO and SQL Maps to create a light weight persistence layer interfaces that allows you as the developer to easily interact with your Database using objects and sql that you write instead of learning complex ORMs such as Hibernate. Simply put iBATIS acts as the mapper…

Email Validation is a tough subject to nail down, as their are tons of available code snippets that claim to validate an email address.  To make it easier below you will find the requirements for a valid email address as outlined by RFC 2822 followed by a script that can be used to validate email…

Remote Code Execution is a security vulnerability in where a malicious user manipulates input or a url to run code from a remote location.  Unlike Cross Site Scripting XSS where only the user is affected Remote Code Execution could run scripts that delete all files on your server. This security risk like most vulnerabilities comes…

Why spend the time to comment your code? As a programmer we spend our time writing code from simple one line scripts to complex applications. No matter what the size adding comments and documenting your code adds to the longevity of your project.  The reason I say this is that if you write a library…

Yahoo Finance Stock API? The Yahoo Finance Stock API appears to be both commonly and uncommonly known to the public.  The API is most easily seen by performing a stock quote search on the Yahoo Finance website and then selecting the “Download Data” link in the page details.  Looking at the link would show a…

What is cURL? Client URL Library or cURL for short is a library of functions designed for the purpose of safely fetching information from remote sites.  The purpose of the library is to send a request to a server using a defined protocol (http, https, ftp, etc) and to return the result back to you…

What is Harvest? Harvest is, simply put, an online time tracking application. Harvest works on the basic concept that your time is recorded on a per project basis and that each project belongs to a client. This allows you to easily generate an invoice for a project or at the client level depending on your…

Like all php programmers i have become more than familiar with the functions require, include, and require_once. All are for the inclusion and execution of scripts, or in simple terms a method to include classes or code contained in another file. An issue that faced when using these methods is knowing where to find the…