RIT48 Challenge

This past weekend (March 25-27) I got a collective six hours of sleep. This comes from the fact that I was participating in a challenge at RIT called the RIT48 Challenge. Essentially, this challenge required participants to design, plan, and launch a web startup company in just 48 hours. Participants are judged on their business models, plans, product designs, etc.

I joined a team at the last minute when their web developer had a family emergency. The team already had their idea in place, we just had to wait until the start of the event to work on it (participants can only work on their ideas during the 48 hours). My team's idea was to create a new content distribution system for small publishers, web artists, videographers, photographers, etc. Essentially, we wanted to create a site that would allow larger companies to get in touch with smaller companies / content producers in regards to licensing their content.

After 48 hours of almost no sleep, our product and business model were in place. Although we didn't win the competition, I really learned a lot during that weekend. I learned a ton about team work, business models, how to launch a startup company, and a lot more. I also met a ton of interesting people in all areas.

RIT48 was an amazing challenge, and I'm already planning on competing next year.

Convert a PHP Array to a JavaScript Array

Many times when working with advanced web applications it may be necessary to convert an array of PHP variables into an array of JavaScript variables. I stumbled upon this issue in some recent web development work and most of the solutions online seemed incredibly complicated for such a simple task.

JavaScript is different than PHP because JavaScript allows manipulation of the page data on the client side (meaning no page refreshes are necessary). PHP works by sending information to a server (server side) to manipulate and return. This means that page refreshes are necessary (typically). So let's say you have an array of strings in PHP; we'll call it "phpArray()". This array may be created in PHP with the following PHP code:

$phpArray = array("Word One", "Word Two", "Word Three", "Word Four");

Now we have a $phpArray variable in PHP that contains the words as strings. To convert this array to a JavaScript array, we are going to first create a string from the PHP array by running through a PHP loop. First, we will declare a string variable in PHP to hold the loop's contents:

$string = ""

Now we're going to loop through the loop and add each element of the array to the string with quotes around it. (Note: this is for an array of strings. An array of ints should be handled as strings in PHP, but passed to JavaScript without the quotes.)


foreach ($phpArray as $a) {
$string .= "\"" . $a . "\", ";
}


This code creates a PHP string that looks like:

$string = "Word One", "Word Two", "Word Three", "Word Four",

Now, we need to do one final thing. This code loops through the array and adds a comma (,) and space( ) to the end of each array element. That means that the resulting code will appear as "Last Word", We don't want this because it will mess up our JavaScript. To cut off this last comma and space, we will do:

$finalstring = substr($string, 0, (strlen($string) - 2));

This code removes the last comma and allows us to place it into our JavaScript. In the JavaScript section of our page, we're now going to add:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
            var jsString = new Array(<?php echo $finalstring; ?>);
</script>


We now have a JavaScript array called "jsString" which contains all of the elements of the PHP string array. It would be the same as writing:

var jsString = new Array("Word One", "Word Two", "Word Three", "Word Four");

That's all there is to it. If you have any questions, just leave a comment!