Collect - A PHP/JQM Mobile Framework

For nearly as long as I can remember, I've been trying to simplify my programming projects by breaking down long repetitive tasks down into as short and concise steps as I can. I shudder to think of the hours in my life spent putting together a web page that reads a list of items from a database, filters or transforms them, then renders out the appropriate html and attachments. So many times have I done this, across many languages, projects, and technologies.

For the past two years I've been reforming my interest in web, to an interest in mobile web. During this time, I've also run through all my regular distractions like creating a little mobile RSS reader, a mobile client profile database for a cousin, a mobile plumbing inspection checklist for another friend. All these very different projects have a lot in common. They need to capture, edit, delete and list objects. Throw in a little menu navigation and there you have a system. My goal with this PHP/JQM MVC project is to turn my dev cycle for small projects into 90% deciding what I want, 10% typing it in.

Now since I'm targeting mobile devices, form layout can simply default to a vertical list of form controls down the page. All that's really left is deciding what data needs to be captured in my simple data capture app. Here's an example set of definitions...

The Client Profile Demo

There are three object models there: A client, a client state, and a product. Clients have several details, among which is a state. They can be in only one state at a time. Clients can have many products. That may or may not look like a lot,.. but what does it get you?

• Six tables in your database, three data tables, each with a respective log table tracking all changes
• An API on the serverside to manipulate that data
• Clientside forms to edit instances of each of the models
• Some simple regex error detection in the forms
• Overview and list pages to navigate the data
• A dashboard to hold it all together
• The login procedure and managing users are also thrown in already

Here's some screen grabs of the app produced by the above definitions:

Download and Setup

You can freely download, copy, hack and sell this project from GitHub. To setup your own mobile app, the general process is as follows:

• Copy this project folder into your htdocs or respective web directory
• Edit the app/schema.json file to define your models and views
• Delete any existing app/database.sqlite files (if you want to start from a clean slate)
• Open api/check.php in a browser. This will create any tables that don't exist
• Now open your mobile web app in a browser window

Some Caveats

As per usual, I offer this simply as a mostly working prototype. I was actively working on this project more than a year ago, but since then time and priority has led to the inevitable disregard of maintaining it. I still use it often when I need a little admin panel for a website or project I'm working on. I find it workable, but there are definitely bugs, and features half baked in. Have fun with it.

PHP Image Server

One of my latest projects requires an image server which had to fulfill these two API requirements:

• Storing: Accept a URL as an image source then provide a token to address the cached/stored image.
• Reading: Accept a token to provide an image in a specified resolution and/or format.

Some secondary features required:

• The read API should provide a method to crop and resize images.
• For the purposes of my project, I require the machine to...
  • accept JPEG, GIF, PNG, and SVG
  • only serve JPG's

This image store facility is only going to be used by an automated robot, so no pretty human interface is required.

Download

The code is on GitHub. Download and modify as you please.

Basic API format

• Storing:

  /store/secret-key/base64_encoded_URL

• Reading:

  /key/token/size

Storing an Image

Calling the API with parameters something like this:

http://localhost/imagemachine/store/123/aHR0cHM6Ly91cGxvYWQud2lraW1lZGlhLm9yZy93aWtpcGVkaWEvY29tbW9ucy9iL2IwL05ld1R1eC5zdmc=

Where store is the action, 123 is the secret key to store images, and the last parameter is the base64 encoded result of "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/NewTux.svg"
Should result in JSON looking something like this:

{
 status: "ok",
 msg: "stored",
 guid: "de683d6b2e298de8e831b2f632132269"
}

The above means that the imageserver has decoded the URL, downloaded it, saved it in JPEG format (configurable), and returned a key for you to address that image in the future. The key is simply a hash of the URL passed in.

Reading an Image

Calling the API with parameters something like this (using the token from above):

http://localhost/imagemachine/~/de683d6b2e298de8e831b2f632132269

Will return an image in the default size and cropping.

The read key in this example is simply set to a tilde (~) as security for reading images out of this store is of no concern. To specify a size/cropping scheme, append one of the predefined sizes as another parameter:

http://localhost/imagemachine/~/de683d6b2e298de8e831b2f632132269/s

Where s has been setup as a "small" version of the image.

Demo Settings File

My Experience on a Hosted Solution

I use the GridService product offered by MediaTemple for my hosting. I followed this article to get the ImageMagick PECL working. But ended up discovering that the extension was quite limited compared to the native console convert. So I fell back to using PHP's exec.