I'd like to create an RPG in JavaScript. The RPG will have a lot of dialog in it. I have heard XML is the way to go..., but I have no experience using XML, and a good amount of experience with PHP and MySQL.
My questions are:
Would it be better to store dialog in a MySQL database and access it with PHP using IDs? Or should I just keep it all on the front end by accessing XML files with Javascript?
If I use XML, do I need to run the javascript on a webserver (Like WAMP)? Or can I parse it locally with:
function parseXML() {
xmlhttp=new window.XMLHttpRequest();
xmlhttp.open("GET","dialog.xml",false);
xmlhttp.send();
xmlDoc=xmlhttp.responseXML;
}
(Which is currently giving the error XMLHttpRequest cannot load file:///C:/Users... Cross origin requests are only supported for HTTP.
Even after reading up on XML, I'm still not sure how I can integrate it with JavaScript. Can someone help give me an example of how I could take a sample rpg XML dialog and meaningfully parse it in JavaScript?
Thank you
Why don't you use JSON instead? It's much easier to use from JavaScript code. While you're at it, avoid usind XMLHttpRequest by hand and use some library that handles the bad stuff for you (e.g., jQuery).
For the "dialog" part, I'm not sure what you're gonna use MySQL for. Anyway, you can use any form of storage on the server side, provided that your PHP scripts give well-formed replies to the client side code.
Would it be better to store dialog in a MySQL database and access it
with PHP using IDs? Or should I just keep it all on the front end by
accessing XML files with Javascript?
The main advantage of having a database here is that you gain a lot of flexibility. You can create/edit/delete a piece of dialogue and its relations quite easily and without having to maintain/regenerate a huge data file every time (As you would do with a XML or JSON or w/e formalism you choose).
On the other hand, this solution might be overkill if you just have simple dialogues with no relations and limited content.
Since you are about to do a game in Javascript, and if your content is not changing that much, you can consider a JSON encoding for your dialogues. You could parse the data instantly via Javascript and still have the possibility to make all kind of complex relations between dialogues as you would in XML.
If I use XML, do I need to run the javascript on a webserver (Like WAMP)? Or can I parse it locally with: ...
You have this error because you indeed need to run a server here. If you just want to do some tests, no need to use WAMP or whatever big webserver, just run a python server for now and that will do the trick.
cd /yourProject
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Let the server run and open your browser at:
http://127.0.0.1:8000
Give the input file a base url like http://localhost/rpgame/dialog.xml.
Related
I am currently trying to load an HTML page via cURL. I can retrieve the HTML content, but part is loaded later via scripting (AJAX POST). I can not recover the HTML part (this is a table).
Is it possible to load a page entirely?
Thank you for your answers
No, you cannot do this.
CURL does nothing more than download a file from a URL -- it doesn't care whether it's HTML, Javascript, and image, a spreadsheet, or any other arbitrary data; it just downloads. It doesn't run anything or parse anything or display anything, it just downloads.
You are asking for something more than that. You need to download, parse the result as HTML, then run some Javascript that downloads something else, then run more Javascript that parses that result into more HTML and inserts it into the original HTML.
What you're basically looking for is a full-blown web browser, not CURL.
Since your goal involves "running some Javascript code", it should be fairly clear that it is not acheivable without having a Javascript interpreter available. This means that it is obviously not going to work inside of a PHP program (*). You're going to need to move beyond PHP. You're going to need a browser.
The solution I'd suggest is to use a very specialised browser called PhantomJS. This is actually a full Webkit browser, but without a user interface. It's specifically designed for automated testing of websites and other similar tasks. Your requirement fits it pretty well: write a script to get PhantomJS to open your URL, wait for the table to finish rendering, and grab the finished HTML code.
You'll need to install PhantomJS on your server, and then use a library like this one to control it from your PHP code.
I hope that helps.
(*) yes, I'm aware of the PHP extension that provides a JS interpreter inside of PHP, and it would provide a way to solve the problem, but it's experimental, unfinished, would be still difficult to implement as a solution, and I don't think it's a particularly good idea anyway, so let's not consider it for the purposes of this answer.
No, the only way you can do that is if you make a separate curl request to ajax request and put the two results together afterwards.
I need to write a script that takes a link and parses the HTML of the linked page to pull in the title and a few other pieces of data like potentially a short description much like when you link to something on Facebook.
It will be called when a user adds a link to the site, so could see a decent number of hits when the client launches the site.
I am curious if I should do this on the server side with PHP or the end user side with Javascript? I have been writing the logic behind trying to figure out which areas of the markup are filled with potential content and it made me wonder if the load would be too much if I continue in PHP.
The client has just the one decent web server and I worry parsing/analyzing HTML pages may be too much load where we could do it in Javascript and farm it out to the user adding the link.
Any advice or thoughts on the matter would be awesome. Thank you.
Edit: This data is not going straight into the database, it is used to help the user by auto filling the description of their link which still goes through my regular vetting before being stored to the DB.
Well, this is an easy one, because performing this from the client-side purely with JavaScript just plain isn't an option at all due to the same origin policy.
Parsing HTML isn't that heavy of a task, you should be fine doing it in PHP.
I would offload this to the end-user via javascript, with a listener you could then bind it back to the server. The reasons why are simple:
This is a helper to the front-end not the backend (values aren't stored or manipulated on the backend directly.)
The load is better spread around than localized on your server, also you'll probably give a better user experience here if the end-user is only pulling 1 url vs. the server pulling thousands.
Processing in the front-end also mitigates the possibility of malicious code being executed directly on your server.
If you're thinking about having the client actually got and fetch some random site, parse it for you in Javascript, grab the title, description and other data and then submit that in your form for you, your form's submit time is going to be held hostage to your user's network connection speed for fetching that page and whatever overhead (likely miniscule) for parsing the data. If you do that server side using cURL, the hit will be in parsing the document for what you need. the best speed solution would probably be to let the person enter the URL, get it back in PHP, have PHP hand it off to a Perl script (which has some wicked fast DOM parsers) and get the required data back for the PERL script. From personal experience, the Perl scripts outperform cURL all day long, and cURL generally outperforms javascript AJAX gets by a wide margin just by nature of being on a bigger pipe than a home user.
You can do both....
1) PHP:
checkout HTML DOM Parser, could be helpful
or use php curl and then parse with DOMDocument
2) JavaScript:
you don't have to bother your server (pro)
parsing content with jQuery is easy (pro)
you need to handle cross domain policy (cons)
The situation is next:
I have php file, which parses a web-page. on that web-page is a phone number and it's digits are mixed with each other. The only way to put each digit on the correct place is to use some JS functions (on the client side). So, when I execute that php file in linux console, it gives me all that I need, except js function's result (no wonder - JavaScript is not a server-side language). So all I see from JS - only a code, that I have written.
The question: can I execute js files via php and how?
Results of a quick google search (terms = javascript engine php)
J4P5 -- not developed since 2005 [BAD](according to its News)
PECL package spidermonkey
a 2008 post by jeresig points to PHPJS but can't see when it was last updated.
I'm sure you'll find many more links on that google search.
Alternatively:
you say that the digits are scrambled and you need to "unscramble" them using js. Can you code that unscrambling logic into a PHP function and just use it? Will sure save you a lot of trouble, but if learning to use js in php is what you're after, then its a whole different story...
Zend tutorial: "Using javascript in PHP with PECL and spidermonkey"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Server-side_JavaScript_solutions
Alternatively, PHP has simple functions for executing other programs and retrieving their output (I used this along with GPG once to create a PHP file manager which could live-encrypt files as you were uploading them and live-decrypt as you were downloading them)
Using those functions along with http://code.google.com/p/v8/ you should be able to interpret any javascript.
Not unless you know someone who's implemented a Javascript engine in PHP.
In other words, probably not.
Without some sort of browser emulation or passing the unparsed js off to a server side implementation of javascript (maybe node.js?), you won't be able to execute it.
However, does the page use the same js function to unscramble the phone number every time? You should be able to read the incorrect digits and shuffle them with PHP.
If you're prepared to do a bit of work building your own JS runtime to work with it, Tim Whitlock has written a javascript tokenizer and parser in pure PHP
node.js is server-side... but full JS :) no PHP in it so I don't it answer your needs...
Anyway, here is an example : a chat in JS both client & server-side : http://chat.nodejs.org/
Plus, not every host allows you to use the v8 engine...
If you have Javascript data objects, and you need to convert them to/from PHP arrays, that's quite easy using PHP's json_encode() and json_decode() functions.
But actually running Javascript code? No. You can't. You might be able to find a JS interpreter written in PHP (a few other answers have pointed a links that may or may not help you here), or more likely execute the JS using a stand-alone JS interpreter on your server which you call out to from PHP. However if the JS code includes references to the browser's DOM (which is highly likely), that's a whole other set of issues which will almost certainly make it impossible.
Given the way you describe the question, I'd say the easiest solution for you would just be to re-implement the JS code as PHP code; it's unlikely that all the work arounds being suggested would be appropriate for what sounds like a fairly simple bit of utility code.
I want to change my HTML page as an image. Is there a way in PHP to change or save an HTML page as an image?
This is not easy; as NullUserException says in his comment, you would need to render the HTML page on the server-side, which is not something PHP (or any other server-sided language) has built in.
The approach that comes to mind would be to write a program (probably not in PHP, but rather something like C# or C++) that runs on your server, fires up a web browser, and does a series of screen captures (possibly combined with page scrolls). As this is a very nontrivial and bug-prone process, I would suggest looking into third-party components that are capable of doing this.
You would then execute this program from PHP, and when it's done running, display the results from the file it output.
I would advise you to use an external service with an api. This list might be a good start: http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2008/07/10/9-ways-to-put-site-screenshots-in-your-web-app/
Thumbalizr seems great, they allso provide a php script so you can cache the images locally:
http://www.thumbalizr.com/apitools.php
Try taking a look at browsershots.org - source code is available for it if you want to install it locally. Essentially it uses a browser to take screenshots, and can be controlled via an XML-RPC interface, which you can call from PHP.
As others have said this is not a simple job, and not something you can do directly in PHP, so use an external service.
(I'm not affiliated with browsershots.org in any way)
i have a php script who parser a rss and give me the data in a know pattern. Im very new with ASP, JavaScript and Jquery so i dont have any idea of how to autoupdate the script and display the new data with a smooth animation (see this example, that exactly what i want). Thanks for the support and if you know a good script to made this i will appreciate it.
Seems like you're looking for this:
http://leftlogic.com/lounge/articles/jquery_spy2/
It's PHP (not ASP), so that might be an issue, though the code is SUPER easy to implement (I've written by own implementation on three separate occasions).
The site itself has some decent documentation on getting things up and running, but if you need some extra help, comment and I'll point you in the right direction :)
Good luck!
The resources people have linked here are helpful and merely mentioning jQuery means you're probably headed in the right direction. But if you're new to this it might still be worth mentioning some of the concepts you'll be looking to play with here.
First of all, you'll probably want to stick with one language on the client side and one on the server side. This means choosing either PHP or ASP -- this isn't clear from your question but I'll assume you're dealing with PHP since that's the language I use for this kind of thing. JavaScript + jQuery is the right choice for the browser (client) side of things.
Like Luca points out, you'll have to set up some JavaScript code that goes live on page load and "polls" the server at a set interval. In JavaScript you do this using something called XMLHttpRequest (or "XHR") and it's pretty complicated. You could use combination of jQuery and a library like the one Matt points to in his answer, or just jQuery -- sample code abounds but it's basically a loop with a function call and sleep timer.
That function call is going to be one of the more difficult parts if you're trying to emulate the Twitter World Cup site. But here's the basic idea: You need to populate a list using jQuery and a data standard like JSON. Since the RSS feed you'll be parsing is written in XML, you'll have to write a server side (PHP/ASP) script that fetches, parses and converts the feed to JSON. In PHP, this is best done through cURL (file_get_contents() if you're lazy), SimpleXML and json_encode(), respectively.
Your JavaScript should load the list based on JSON. To do this, and display any new items, what you'll do is load the JSON from the client (browser) side using a jQuery method like getJSON(). Then you spin through the array object and add any new items to the list by adding new <li> elements to the "DOM." The same jQuery code that does this can easily also do the cross dissolve with something like fadeIn().
It looks like the script on that example page has an Ajax request running every TOT seconds.
You could simply have your PHP script return the RSS data (in JSON format say) and let JavaScript parse it and generate some HTML with it.
If all of this doesn't make sense to you I advice reading a little about JavaScript and PHP... there's plenty of good books.