Installing Laravel in wamp by Composer

Are you going to install Laravel in WAMP? So you have to install composer windows installer to achieve your target. After installing composer you can normally run composer in command prompt.

Here are the two methods of installing Laravel by Composer.

• composer create-project laravel/laravel your-project-name

• composer install

  (To install dependencies after manually downloaded the files)

   But when run this command I got some problem. I got this error message,

PHP Warning:  file_get_contents(http://github.com/patricktalmadge/bootstrapper/zipball

/master): failed to open stream: Unable to find the socket transport "ssl" -
did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP? in C:\wamp\www\laravel-m
aster\laravel\cli\tasks\bundle\providers\provider.php on line 69

 After I Googled, there are various answers to this problem.

;extension=php_openssl.dll

Uncomment this line in php.ini file. But just remember there are two php.ini files in Wamp Server. It didn't work for me by right clicking Wamp icon and select php.ini file. Rather than I had to manuallu search for php.ini files. Those are in

1. C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.13\php.ini
2. C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.22\bin\php.ini

So just uncomment in both files. It'll work nicely.:)

Sources :
http://laravel.com/docs/quick
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13276298/cannot-install-laravel-bundle
http://www.nemesis.co.nz/2013/05/composer-and-wamp-unable-to-find-the-socket-transport-ssl/#comment-265

PHP serialization of Arrays & Objects

Serializing in PHP is converting an Array or Object to storable String. This Serialized String can be used to store in databases,  the places where cannot pass data types except  String etc. After serializing an Array/Object, it actually encodes to a decodable string. This encoding is lack of human readability. 

To serialize, we can use serialize() method and to unserialize, unserialize().

.When storing data in SESSIONs, COOKIES, and passing data in HTML forms this method is more usefull.

Think you want to pass an Array from html form.

$user =  array(
    'name'=>'Alimankada Suwaris',
    'age'=>93,
    'city'=>'kimbissa',
    'birthday'=>'1892-05-11'
);

Traditionally you can assign hidden elements for each values.  But what will happen you want add more elements to the array. So it easy to searize this Array and pass it as a single hidden field.

$seriaziedUser = serialize($user);

//string 'a:4:{s:4:"name";s:18:"Alimankada Suwaris";s:3:"age";i:93;s:4:"city";s:8:"kimbissa";s:8:"birthday";s:10:"1892-05-11";}' (length=117)

<input type=”hidden” name=”user” value=”<?php echo $seriaziedUser; ?>” />

Because this serialized data contains quotes, this can be inturupt the data. So you might have to use htmlentities() before pass it through form.

DISADVANTAGES

it's really hard to work in SQL with that data : how do you write conditions on serialized data ? Even harder : how do you update it ? Do you really write a PHP script that fetches every lines, unserialize those, modifies them, re-serialize, and stores them back in DB L

the day you will want to migrate your data to another software, it'll require more work to migrate the data (if the new software is not written in PHP)

After requested data from html form,  the serialized data might not be unserializeble. Because if using of htmlentities(), the structure of serized data is alted.  So it should format to correct format and unserialize().

So web developers more prefers to use json_encode()  instead of serializing. Json encoded data have more advantages than serializing.

• It’s more human readable.
• Easy decoding & using.
• Faster than serialize()
• Flexible for more faltforms

This is json encoded string of our Array.

string '{"name":"Alimankada Suwaris","age":93,"city":"kimbissa","birthday":"1892-05-11"}' (length=80)

If we try to check performance of both functions.

$start = microtime(true);
$serializedArray = serialize($data);
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end-$start . '<br/>';

$start1 = microtime(true);
$jsonArray = json_encode($data);
$end2 = microtime(true);

echo  $end2-$start1;

1st round 
2.3841857910156E-5 :serialize
1.6927719116211E-5 :json

2nd round
2.7894973754883E-5 :serialize
2.0980834960938E-5 :json

3rd 
2.598762512207E-5 :serialize
2.0980834960938E-5 :json

So you can see every time json wins.

Thanks