Open Power Classes: Visit information

Zyx — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:55:00 +0200

I'm currently working on a project written in Zend Framework and while trying to secure sessions, I noticed that this utility does not have any class that collects everything about the visitor and the request. The problem is quite serious, as many values in $_SERVER depend on the installed server software, PHP mode (module, CGI, FastCGI...) and many other things. This means that the scripts should not rely on them without a proper processing, because it can even crash whole website after the software change (I experienced it not so long ago). Thankfully, I noticed that in the old OPF code, I have a class called opfVisit that does this job. Now it's a part of the new Open Power Classes project :).

Currently, the class Opc_Visit provides the following information:

IP address
Host address
Current request addresses, paths, file names, all server-independent, mod_rewrite-independent etc.
Accepted browser languages, sorted by the priority.
Cookie server and cookie path detection.
Protocol and port detection.
Browser detection (recognizes 26 browsers and search engines)
Operating system detection (recognizes 10 Windows versions, 14 Linux distributions and 7 other Unix clones, including MacOS).

Below, we can see a sample test script output called on my computer as http://opl.libs.lh/trunk/dev/opc/test_visit.php/foo?bar=joe:

IP: 127.0.0.1
numericIP: 2130706433
host: localhost.localdomain
currentAddress: http://opl.libs.lh/trunk/dev/opc/test_visit.php/foo?bar=joe
currentFile: http://opl.libs.lh/trunk/dev/opc/test_visit.php
currentParams: /foo
currentPath: http://opl.libs.lh/trunk/dev/opc/
fileName: test_visit.php
pathInfo: /foo?bar=joe
protocol: http
port: 80
secure: false
languages: array ( 0 => 'pl-PL', 1 => 'pl', 2 => 'en', )
browser: Opera 9.52
OS: Arch Linux 
cookieServer: opl.libs.lh
cookiePath: /trunk/dev/opc/

The class API is more than simple:

php
<?php
	// OPL Initialization
	require('../../lib/opl/base.php');
	Opl_Loader::setDirectory('../../lib/');
	Opl_Registry::setState('opl_debug_console', true);
	spl_autoload_register(array('Opl_Loader', 'autoload'));
    
	try
	{
		$visit = Opc_Visit::getInstance();
    	
		$paramList = array(0 =>
			'IP', 'numericIP', 'host', 'currentAddress', 'currentFile', 'currentParams', 'currentPath', 'fileName',
			'pathInfo', 'protocol', 'port', 'secure', 'languages', 'browser', 'OS', 'cookieServer', 'cookiePath');
		
		echo '<ol>';
		foreach($paramList as $par)
		{
			$value = $visit->$par;
			if(is_bool($value))
			{
				$value = ($value ? 'true' : 'false');
			}
	 		elseif(is_array($value))
			{
				$value = var_export($value, true);
			}
			echo '<li>'.$par.': <code>'.$value.'</code></li>';
		}
		echo '</ol>';
	}
	catch(Opl_Exception $e)
	{
		Opl_Error_Handler($e);
	}
?>

We have here the singleton implementation and the magic __get method used to generate and return the requested values.

The class will be available in our SVN repository tomorrow or on Thursday, because I must clean up the code and add the recent inventions, such as Google Chrome or Windows Vista to the detectors.

Invenzzia... in English - Tag - visit

Open Power Classes: Visit information