Tag: PHP

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From CodeIgniter to Laravel | part 2: orientation

UPDATE: I have re-written this article for the new Laravel 4. You’ll find the updated article over at Geek & Dummy.

Contents

Signpost at North Point, Barbados, Feb.1998I’ve used CodeIgniter for many years, but I have always, I confess, proceeded knowing just enough to get by. So forgive me if my approach seems a little clunky. I have never, for example, used CodeIgniter’s routes. I like my web application files nicely categorised into Model, View, Controller, Library and, if absolutely necessary, Helper.

Controllers

So for now, I want to carry on using Controllers, if that’s okay with you. Controllers are stored under application/controllers. Sound familiar?

Here’s a sample controller:

<?php

// application/controllers/news.php
class News_Controller extends Base_Controller {

	public function action_index() {
		echo "News index page.";
	}

	public function action_item($item) {
		echo "News item $item.";
	}

}
?>

In CodeIgniter, that’s all you would have needed to do, due to automatic routing. In Laravel, you need also to add the following to application/routes.php:

Route::controller('news');

To view these pages, you just visit yourdomain/news (/index is implied) and yourdomain/news/item/x (where x will probably refer to a specific news item, possibly by data id).

Note the naming of the functions – action_item, etc. The part after the underscore represents a “method” or page of your web site. Laravel’s routing magic makes sure you get the correct function. If you’re creating a RESTful API, you can use additional function names beginning get_, post_, etc. Check the Laravel documentation for more.

Views

Views are pretty straightforward and similar to CodeIgniter. Place them in application/views. Extending the example above, our controller could now look like this:

<?php

// application/controllers/new.php
class News_Controller extends Base_Controller {

	public function action_index() {
		echo "News index page.";
	}

	public function action_item($id) {
		$data = array('id' => $id);
		return View::make('results', $data);
	}

}

?>

Note that data can also be passed through to a view like this:

	public function action_item($id) {
		return View::make('item', $data)
		    ->with('id' => $id);
	}

And then your view (application/views/item.php) could be like this:

<h1>News flash</h1>
<p>This is news item <?php echo $id; ?>.</p>

Obviously your real views will be more syntactically complete.

Models

Models are created under application/models. Unlike CodeIgniter, Laravel comes with its own object relational mapper. In case you’ve not encountered the concept before, an ORM gives you a convenient way of dealing with database tables as objects, rather than merely thinking in terms of SQL queries. CodeIgniter has plenty of ORMs, by the way, it just doesn’t ship with one as standard.

Laravel’s built-in ORM is called “Eloquent”. If you choose to use it (there are others available), when creating a model, you extend the Eloquent class. Eloquent makes some assumptions:

  • Each table contains a primary key called id.
  • Each Eloquent model is named in the singular, while the corresponding table is named in the plural. E.g. table name “newsItems”; Eloquent model name “newsItem”.

You can override this behaviour if you like, it just makes things a bit more convenient in many cases.

Example model application/models/newsItem.php:

<?php
class NewsItem extends Eloquent {

}

(You can omit the closing ?> tag.)

Because the Eloquent class already contains a lot of methods, you do not necessarily need to do more than this. In your controllers, you could for example now do this:

$items = NewsItem::all();

foreach ($items as $item) {
  // Do stuff here
}

This is barely scratching the surface. Head on over to the official Laravel documentation for much more on all this.

Signposts image copyright © Andrea_44, licensed under Creative Commons. Used with permission.

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From CodeIgniter to Laravel | part 1: installation

UPDATE: I have re-written this article for the new Laravel 4. You’ll find the updated article over at Geek & Dummy.

Contents

Laravel logoIn my final “how-to” guide on self-hosted web design, I gave a special mention to a relatively new PHP framework, Laravel. I’m very familiar with CodeIgniter, but due to some of its limitations (including concerns over licensing, going forward), many developers have been moving to Laravel. Laravel has been on my “must try it out” list for some time. In this article, I’ll take you through initial installation and some of the issues I faced.

Prerequisites

Since this “how-to” follows my DIY web hosting series, I’m going to assume we’re starting with a similar setup: a virtual web site powered by Apache and PHP on Linux. Other environments work too. See the Laravel documentation for more details.

Installation

The Laravel setup guide is a little unclear about the correct location for its files. Here’s what I’ve found to work. This guide is for Laravel 3.2, but I suspect it will also hold true for later versions in due course. (At the time of writing, 4.0 is still in beta.)

If you’ve created a virtual web site with Virtualmin, you’ll have a new public_html directory at, for example, /home/fred.bloggs/domains/my.funky.site/public_html. Change to the directory above public_html (e.g. /home/fred.bloggs/domains/my.funky.site and proceed as follows, from an SSH login. Make sure you perform these steps as the web site owner (e.g. su fred.bloggs):

wget http://laravel.com/download -O laravel.zip
unzip laravel
rm laravel.zip
mv laravel-laravel-*/* .
mv laravel-laravel-*/.[gt]* .
rmdir laravel-laravel-*
mv public/* public_html/
mv public/.h* public_html/
rmdir public
chmod -R ug+w storage/views

If you read the Laravel installation instructions linearly, you’ll see that you need to make a change to application/config/application.php. It contains a line like:

'key' => 'YourSecretKeyGoesHere!',

The recommendation is that you insert 32+ random characters in place of YourSecretKeyGoesHere!. There’s another way of doing this, if (and only if) the key field is blank. Laravel comes with a CLI (command line interface) called Artisan. If you issue the command php artisan key:generate, a random key will be generated for you automatically and inserted into the file.

To remove “index.php” from your URLs, edit that same file (application/config/application.php). Find the line 'index' => 'index.php', and change it to 'index' => '',. Laravel comes with a .htaccess file in the public directory, which contains the necessary Apache magic to make this all work.

Having done the above, fire up your web browser and point it at your new site. You should arrive at a default introductory Laravel page:

laravel_default

Other frameworks

Now would be a good time put to put Twitter’s Bootstrap and jQuery in place, if you’re planning to use them. Check the download URLs are current before you do this:


wget http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/assets/bootstrap.zip
unzip bootstrap
rm bootstrap.zip
mv bootstrap/css/* public_html/css/
mv bootstrap/js/* public_html/js/
mv bootstrap/img/* public_html/img/
rm -rf bootstrap
cd public_html/js
wget http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.1.min.js

Configure your development environment

I use NetBeans for development. If you don’t already have a preferred IDE (integrated development environment), I recommend you check it out. Another favourite is Eclipse. You could use an ordinary text editor, but then you’d be missing out on a lot of things that can make your coding more comfortable and efficient.

Having installed Laravel and the other frameworks on my web server, next I use NetBeans to pull the code across to my development environment. Before you do this, still in your SSH shell, you may wish to delete some of the typical directories that Virtualmin creates but which you don’t really need:

rmdir cgi-bin/ homes/

In the NetBeans “New Project” wizard, select the option “PHP Application from Remote Server”. In the remote configuration, ensure that you choose as your “upload directory”, the directory above public_html, since that contains the private (non-web-accessible) Laravel directories, which we will also be playing with.

Once the code has copied across, you’ll want to exclude a couple of Virtualmin-generated directories from further synchronisation. In the project’s properties, go to “Ignored folders”. Add there /logs and /public_html/stats.

Where next

I’m slowly writing additional tutorials, while I take time to learn the framework. See the contents list above for other posts in this series. I also recommend you check out Dayle Rees’ tutorials. Happy coding!

Posted on

Rackspace API for CodeIgniter

Logo_lockup_version-2 SPOTRackspace is a great email hosting company, providing, amongst other things, a handy API for creating bespoke email solutions. The exercise of integrating that API into your application is of course left to the end user. I’ve spent some time working on a Rackspace API library for the PHP programming framework, CodeIgniter. This is not functionally complete – I have only implemented the interfaces that I needed – but it should provide a useful springboard for your own projects.

Configuration

In /system/application/config/RackspaceAPI.php:

<?php  if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

$config['user_key']   = 'your user key';
$config['secret_key']     = 'your secret key';
$config['user_agent']     = 'name of your app';
$config['api_version']    = 'v0'; // amend if necessary
$config['rackspace_host'] = 'api.emailsrvr.com'; // amend if necessary

/* End of file RackspaceAPI.php */
/* Location: ./system/application/config/RackspaceAPI.php */

Library

<?php  if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
/**
 * Uses curl and pecl_http
 */
class Rackspace_API {
    
  /**
   * Store recent http_message
   * @var object
   */
  protected $_http_message;
  
  /**
    * CI object
    * @var object
    */
  protected $_ci;

  /**
   * Rackspace config items
   */
  protected $_user_key;
  protected $_secret_key;
  protected $_user_agent;
  protected $_api_version;
  protected $_rackspace_host;
  
  function __construct() {
    $this->_ci =& get_instance();
    $this->_ci->config->load('RackspaceAPI', TRUE);
    $this->_user_key = $this->_ci->config->item('user_key', 'RackspaceAPI');
    $this->_secret_key = $this->_ci->config->item('secret_key', 'RackspaceAPI');
    $this->_user_agent = $this->_ci->config->item('user_agent', 'RackspaceAPI');
    $this->_api_version = $this->_ci->config->item('api_version', 'RackspaceAPI');
    $this->_rackspace_host = $this->_ci->config->item('rackspace_host', 'RackspaceAPI');
  }


  /**
   * Get info about a domain
   * @param string $domain
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | stdClass Object
   */
  public function getDomainInfo($domain) {
    return $this->genericGet('/customers/me/domains/'.$domain);
  }

  
  /**
   * Get all domain names
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | array (domains)
   */
  public function getDomains() {
    $obj = $this->genericGet('/customers/me/domains');
    if(!$obj->error){
      // Reformat into an array of domains
      foreach($obj->result->domains as $domain) {
        $domains[]=$domain->name;
      }
      $obj->result = $domains;
    }
    return $obj;
  }


  /**
   * Get info about a mailbox ($domain@$id)
   * @param string $domain
   * @param string $id
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | stdClass Object
   */
  public function getMailboxInfo($domain, $id) {
    return $this->genericGet('/customers/me/domains/'.$domain.'/rs/mailboxes/'.$id);
  }
   
 
  /**
   * Used by Get functions above - generalised use case
   * @param string $url - see the API; constructed by the calling function
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | stdClass Object
   */
  private function genericGet($url) {
    $this->get(
        $url,
        'application/json');
    if($this->_http_message->getResponseCode() == 200) {
      // Call worked.  JSON is missing enclosing brackets, apparently needed by json_decode
      $json = '['.$this->_http_message->getBody().']';
      if(is_string($json)) {
        $obj = json_decode($json);
        $result->error = false;
        $result->result = $obj[0];
      } else {
        // JSON failure
        $result->error = true;
        $result->result = 'Failed to parse JSON';
      }
    } else {
      // API call failed
      $result->error = true;
      $result->result = $this->_http_message->getHeader("x-error-message");
    }
    return $result;
  }
  

  /**
   * Create a mailbox ($domain@$id)
   * @param string $domain
   * @param string $id
   * @param string $first: First name
   * @param string $last: Last name
   * @param string $name: Display as
   * @param string $office: Name of office/profit centre
   * @param string $locno: Office/profit centre number
   * @param string $password
   * @param string $fwd: comma-separated forwarding address(es) - max 4 off domain
   * @param string $save: save forwarded email - 'true' or 'false'
   * saveForwardedEmail
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | stdClass Object
   */
  public function addMailbox($domain, $id, $first, $last, $name, $office,
          $locno, $password, $fwd, $save='true') {
    $fields = array(
        'password' => $password, 
        'emailForwardingAddresses' => $fwd,
        'firstName' => $first,
        'lastName' => $last,
        'displayName' => $name,
        'saveForwardedEmail' => $save,
        'organization' => $office,
        'organizationUnit' => $locno);
    return $this->genericPost( '/customers/me/domains/'.$domain.'/rs/mailboxes/'.$id, $fields);
  }


  /**
   * Used by Post functions above - generalised use case
   * Note: Rackspace API suggests use POST to add, PUT to edit
   * @param string $url - see the API; constructed by the calling function
   * @param array $fields - data to be POSTed
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | stdClass Object
   */
  private function genericPost($url, $fields) {
    $this->post(
        $url,
        $fields,
        'application/json');
    if($this->_http_message->getResponseCode() == 200) {
      $result->error = false;
      $result->result = $this->_http_message->getBody();
    } else {
      // API call failed
      $result->error = true;
      $result->result = $this->_http_message->getHeader("x-error-message");
    }
    return $result;
  }


  /**
   * Edit user's forwarding
   * @param string $domain
   * @param string $id
   * @param string $fwd: comma-separated forwarding address(es) - max 4 off domain
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | stdClass Object
   */
  public function changeForwarding($domain, $id, $fwd) {
    $fields = array(
        'emailForwardingAddresses' => $fwd
        );
    return $this->genericPut( '/customers/me/domains/'.$domain.'/rs/mailboxes/'.$id, $fields);
  }
  
    
  /**
   * Edit user's location
   * @param string $domain
   * @param string $id
   * @param string $office: Name of office/profit centre
   * @param string $locno: Office/profit centre number
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | stdClass Object
   */
  public function changeLocation($domain, $id, $office, $locno) {
    $fields = array(
        'organization' => $office,
        'organizationUnit' => $locno);
    return $this->genericPut( '/customers/me/domains/'.$domain.'/rs/mailboxes/'.$id, $fields);
  }
  
    
  /**
   * Edit user's name
   * @param string $domain
   * @param string $id
   * @param string $first: First name
   * @param string $last: Last name
   * @param string $name: Display as
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | stdClass Object
   */
  public function changeName($domain, $id, $first, $last, $name) {
    $fields = array(
        'firstName' => $first,
        'lastName' => $last,
        'displayName' => $name);
    return $this->genericPut( '/customers/me/domains/'.$domain.'/rs/mailboxes/'.$id, $fields);
  }
  
    
  /**
   * Edit user's password
   * @param string $domain
   * @param string $id
   * @param string $password
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | stdClass Object
   */
  public function changePassword($domain, $id, $password) {
    $fields = array(
        'password' => $password);
    return $this->genericPut( '/customers/me/domains/'.$domain.'/rs/mailboxes/'.$id, $fields);
  }
  
    
  /**
   * Used by Put functions above - generalised use case
   * Note: Rackspace API suggests use PUT to edit, POST to add
   * @param string $url - see the API; constructed by the calling function
   * @param array $fields - data to be PUT
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | stdClass Object
   */
  private function genericPut($url, $fields) {
    $this->put(
        $url,
        $fields);
    if($this->_http_message->getResponseCode() == 200) {
      $result->error = false;
      $result->result = $this->_http_message->getBody();
    } else {
      // API call failed
      $result->error = true;
      $result->result = $this->_http_message->getHeader("x-error-message");
    }
    return $result;
  }


  /**
   * Delete a mailbox
   * @param string $domain
   * @param string $id
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           'result' => string (error message) | stdClass Object
   */
  public function deleteMailbox($domain, $id) {
    return $this->genericDelete("/customers/me/domains/$domain/rs/mailboxes/$id");
  }
  
  
  /**
   * Used by Get functions above - generalised use case
   * @param string $url - see the API; constructed by the calling function
   * @return stdClass Object ( 'error'  => bool,
   *                           ['result' => string (error message)]
   */
  private function genericDelete($url) {
    $this->delete($url);
    if($this->_http_message->getResponseCode() == 200) {
      // Call worked.
      $result->error = false;
    } else {
      if($this->_http_message->getResponseCode() == 500) {
        // Internal server error
        $result->error = true;
        $result->result = 'An internal server error occurred deleting  object.  Url: '.$url;
      } else {
        // API call failed
        $result->error = true;
        $result->result = $this->_http_message->getHeader("x-error-message");
        
      }
    }
    return $result;
  }
  

  
  // The remainder of this file is mostly lifted from Rackspace's examples: http://api-wiki.apps.rackspace.com/api-wiki/index.php/PHP_Examples_(Rest_API)
  private function get($url_string, $format) {
      $headers = array("Accept: $format");
      $curl_session = self::construct_session($url_string, $headers);
      $this->_http_message = self::send_request($curl_session);
  }

  private function post($url_string, $fields, $format) {
      $headers = array("Accept: $format");
      $curl_session = self::construct_session($url_string, $headers);
      curl_setopt($curl_session, CURLOPT_POST, true);
      curl_setopt($curl_session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields);
      $this->_http_message = self::send_request($curl_session);
  }

  private function put($url_string, $fields) {
      $curl_session = self::construct_session($url_string, array());
      curl_setopt($curl_session, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'PUT');
      curl_setopt($curl_session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields);
      $this->_http_message = self::send_request($curl_session);
  }
  
  private function delete($url_string) {
      $curl_session = self::construct_session($url_string, array());
      curl_setopt($curl_session, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'DELETE');
      $this->_http_message = self::send_request($curl_session);
  }

  private function send_request($curl_session) {
      $response = curl_exec($curl_session);
      curl_close($curl_session);
      /* Reponse string may contain two HTTP sessions, if there was an initial
         "HTTP/1.1 100 Continue" response.  So strip that first response out.  Eg:
                  HTTP/1.1 100 Continue
                  Via: 1.1 [proxy]

                  HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
                  Via: 1.1 [proxy]
                  Connection: Keep-Alive
                  Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive      
                  ...     
       * 
       */
      $response = preg_replace('|HTTP/1.1 100.*HTTP/1.1|isU', 'HTTP/1.1', $response);
      return new HttpMessage($response);
  }

  private function construct_session($url_string, $existing_headers) {
      $headers = array_merge(
              self::authorization_headers(), $existing_headers);
      $url = self::construct_uri($url_string);
      $curl_session = curl_init($url);
      curl_setopt($curl_session, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
      curl_setopt($curl_session, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
      curl_setopt($curl_session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
      return $curl_session;
  }

  private function authorization_headers() {
      $time_stamp = date('YmdHis');
      $data_to_sign = $this->_user_key . $this->_user_agent .
          $time_stamp. $this->_secret_key;
      $signature = base64_encode(sha1($data_to_sign, true));
      $headers = array();
      $headers[] = "User-Agent: " . $this->_user_agent;
      $headers[] = 'X-Api-Signature: ' .
          $this->_user_key . ":$time_stamp:$signature";
      return $headers;
  }

  private function construct_uri($url_string) {
      $url = 'http://' .  $this->_rackspace_host . '/' . $this->_api_version . $url_string;
      return $url;
  }
}

?>

Example

Example usage:

function testRackspace() {
    $this->load->library('Rackspace_API');
    $client = new Rackspace_API();
    $obj = $client->getMailboxInfo('somedomain.com', 'test.user');
    if($obj->error) {
      echo 'Error: '.$obj->result;
    } else {
      var_dump($obj);
    }
  }

Image copyright © Rackspace Ltd. All rights acknowledged.

Posted on

Connecting to Windows/MSSQL 2008 from Linux/CodeIgniter/PHP

Update: I’ve written a new article, covering CodeIgniter 3 and Ubuntu 14/16. Read it here.

Microsoft SQL Connecting to Microsoft SQL Express 2008 from Linux/PHP is a lot trickier than I expected. These notes are really for my own benefit so I can reproduce the setup, but maybe they’ll help you too. One of the problems is that many existing PHP drivers for MS SQL have difficulty talking to SQL 2008. Here’s a workaround using FreeTDS and ODBC.

My web application is built using CodeIgniter, the PHP application framework. It resides on an Ubuntu Server box, running Apache. Prerequisites on that Ubuntu Server (which I installed using Aptitude, but your favourite package manager will do):

  • unixODBC
  • FreeTDS
  • FreeTDS development package/(header files and libraries)

To my freetds.conf file (in /etc/freetds on my server) I added a section that looks something like this:

[my-server]
host = my.server.local
port = 1433
tds version = 9.0

Note: TDS version 9.0 should work with SQL 2008.

In /etc/odbcinst.ini, add the following ODBC driver (32-bit):

[TDS]
Driver = /usr/lib/odbc/libtdsodbc.so
Description = FreeTDS driver
Setup = /usr/lib/odbc/libtdsS.so

or 64-bit:

[TDS]
Driver = /usr/lib64/libtdsodbc.so
Description = FreeTDS driver
Setup = /usr/lib64/libtdsS.so

(You may need to check the precise location of the driver and setup files.)

And to /etc/odbc.ini, I inserted a DSN similar to the following:

[my-server]
Driver = TDS
Description = My Server
ServerName = my-server
Database = my-db

Generally within CodeIgniter, I am connecting to MySQL databases and that’s how my default connection is configured. I therefore added a second configuration to my database.php configuration file, like this:

$db['my_server']['hostname'] = "dsn=my-server;uid=myusername;pwd=mypassword";
$db['my_server']['username'] = '';
$db['my_server']['password'] = '';
$db['my_server']['database'] = '';
$db['my_server']['dbdriver'] = 'odbc';
$db['my_server']['dbprefix'] = '';
$db['my_server']['pconnect'] = TRUE;
$db['my_server']['db_debug'] = TRUE;
$db['my_server']['cache_on'] = FALSE;
$db['my_server']['cachedir'] = '';
$db['my_server']['char_set'] = 'utf8';
$db['my_server']['dbcollat'] = 'utf8_general_ci';

Now the ODBC driver within CodeIgniter can produce queries that MS SQL doesn’t like. We can fix this with a hack. You really REALLY shouldn’t do it this way (!) but to get things working and as described >here<, I edited the CodeIgniter core file system/database/drivers/odbc_driver.php. The function _from_tables() has a line reading:

return '('.implode(', ', $tables).')';

I changed it to this:

return implode(', ', $tables);

(In other words, we’re removing the spurious parentheses.)

I created a database method m_my_server.php like this:

/**
 * NOTE: We're using a feature-incomplete driver here.  Don't attempt to use
 * CodeIgniter's ActiveRecord Class or num_rows().  Use bare queries instead.
 */
class M_my_server extends Model {

  var $my_server;

  function M_my_server() {
      parent::Model();
      $this->my_server = $this->load->database('my_server', TRUE);
  }

  function get() {
    $query = $this->my_server->query('SELECT TOP(100) * FROM dbo.tblUserSummary');
    $result = $query->result_array();  // note ->num_rows() doesn't work with this driver
    if(count($result) > 0) {
      return $result;
    } else {
      return false;
    }

  }
}

/* End of file m_my_server.php */
/* Location: ./application/models/m_my_server.php */

At the SQL Server end, I set up a new standard SQL user (myusername/mypassword) rather than attempting to get Windows authentication to work (I bet it wouldn’t).

My SQL instance wasn’t listening to TCP/IP connections by default. I fired up SQL Server Configuration Manager and browsed to SQL Server Network Configuration –> Protocols for [my db instance]. Then you have to right-click TCP/IP and click Enable.

With all that in place, the following controller produces successful results:

  function SQLtest() {
    $this->load->model('m_my_server');
    $result = $this->m_my_server->get();
    if($result) {
      print_r($result);
    } else {
      echo 'nada';
    }
    exit;
  }

It’s not ideal; for one thing, bare SQL queries involve learning Microsoft’s particular dialect of SQL (whereas I’m used to MySQL). The tables I’m querying are generated by Microsoft Forefront TMG though, so I’m basically stuck with MSSQL. At least now I can query those tables from my favourite PHP application framework.

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