Felix Geisendorfer's Blog: Sorting Challenge
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Felix Geisendorfer has a quick little sorting example posted today showing on way to sort a multi-dimensional array.   Quick challenge, lets say you have an array and you want to iterate through your products by [the key of each subarray in $products] Product.ordering ASC. Whats the fastest way to do this?    His solution involves using an array_flip call on the extracted information (using Set::extract), ordering it with ksort and pushing the values back into the $product array in the right order.   Check out the comments for more examples including ones that make use of array_multisort.
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PÃ¡draic Brady continues his series looking at the creation of complex views in the Zend Framework with part six today all about gathering together the thoughts and ideas from the previous articles into a cohesive whole.   Part 6 now takes our previous fragments of theory and attempts to stitch them together into a cohesive whole - a description of a possible end solution. Yes, I know code talks loudly, and we'll get there with an almighty bang in Part 7 (which I promise is no more than a week away). Until then it's more verbosity.   He suggests a list of six terms to help get everyone on the same page when talking about the complex views:   Includes Partials Dispatches Layouts Placeholders Response Segments   Since these terms would mean nothing without proper definitions, he provides a few paragraphs on each explaining what they are and, where necessary, using code to illustrate the point.
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Nick Halstead has announced a contest on his blog today for PHP developers everywhere to participate in - a programming competition surrounding a challenge he's created.   It has been a lot harder than I thought to come up with a fair programming challenge that would not take too long or require lots of knowledge in any particular framework or other associated technology. It could have been to make use of a whole host of currently available API's and to make a useful mash-up but these again require other external knowledge beyond just PHP. I finally settled on a logic problem that is hopefully not too hard to solve but will test a range of PHP skills.   The problem he's worked up involves changing a word, one letter at a time, into another word using user-defined lists and choice of word. There's several requirements you'll need to follow an d rules for things like the submission process and what server setup can be used.   So, what's the motivation? First prize is a copy of Zend Studio Professional and a year of support, second prize is a Zend t-shirt, and third is a Zend Pen. For full information on participating and on all of the rules you'll need to follow, check out Nick's full post.
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Michael Kimsal has come up with the start of a series to introduce PHP developers to the world of Grails (the Java framework).   The comparisons I plan to make will be mostly to PHP, cause that's what I'm most familiar with, though there may be some other comparisons from time to time.  This is a work in progress, but I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone out there interested in this aea - Grails, Groovy, PHP, why another language/platform/framework, etc.   The first two installments have been posted - part one and part two - with an introduction to what Grails is and a brief dip into some "Hello world" sort of code to give you an idea of the structure.
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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Some months ago I started collecting the pieces I needed to build my own 64-bit computer. I'm not a complete stranger to building machines, I've put together a dozen or so during the past twenty years, but it's been quite a while since I started one from scratch, and my experience with this machine was more instructive than it was meant to be. Nevertheless, at long last Studio Dave has gone 64-bit crazy. Well, not really crazy, but certainly more than mildly enthusiastic.
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By Chris Tomlinson  You may have noticed that the web is obsessed with lists. This is either something to do with ordering content logically or the autistic genius of its early creators.
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In my last blog post, I mentioned the work on rubinius (then at a 0.7 release and now at 0.8) and JRuby.  I also promised I&#8217;d follow up on them.  Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s been going on so far.
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Ben Ramsey has posted a (quick) new items over on his blog that looks at solving two problems he was having with his blog - the now non-functional Flickr feed and a sorting problem with array_multisort.   I recently upgraded a few things around here (in particular, an upgrade to PHP 5.2), and I noticed two issues that occurred after the upgrade. [...] I easily solved both of these issues.   The correction to the Flickr feed involved changing the namespace information for his request (adding a trailing slash) because the SimpleXML functionality got a bit more particular about the format.   The problem with array_multisort involved adding in a parameter that was implied in previous PHP versions, SORT_STRING, to get his code correctly working.
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Ordering take-out, finding phone numbers and a slew of alternative search engines
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Google buys a mapquest of its own. Also: Sharp takes us to the future of television in 3-D & hellip;.  PayPal finds a way to make amends for mistakes & hellip;. and more.
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A lot of things are happening in the Ruby world right now, and I wanted to highlight a few of them here:  At FOSCon this year, Amy Hoy has asked people to start writing more instructive articles about parts of Ruby or Rails so that newbies would have more "fine manuals" to read.  I've tried to do my part with two short series (so far), one on RubyInline and the other on ruby-prof.  The RubyInline articles are: RubyInline, making making things faster easier, and RubyInline: Going a bit Further.  The ruby-prof articles are:  Profile and ruby-prof, ruby-prof and call graphs, and Profile and ruby-prof:  getting specific. Another blog related event is the current blogging contest being run by Ruby Inside.  They're offering $100 US to their favorite informativ, ruby related blog post this week (Aug 14-20).  There have been a lot of interesting entries so far.  It would be pretty cool to see more contests like this crop up. We're getting close to a couple of Ruby conferences, I wrote about RubyConf*MI in my last post.  RailsConfEurope is also comingu up quickly.  If you're reasonable close to either of these, you should consider registering. O'Reilly has released the Ruby Cookbook.  It's a massive tome, chock-full of Ruby goodness.  I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet, but what I've read looks good, and I'm hearing good things from folks I trust.  Looks like another good book to add to your Ruby bookshelf. APress is getting ready to jump into Ruby and Rails in a big way.  They've got ten titles listed on their 'Rails Roadmap', and have lined up some well known Ruby names to write for them.  They're still looking for some Ruby authors according to this blog post. No Starch Press is also starting to make some Ruby related noises.  I can't be specific yet, but there's a good looking Ruby book on its way into their catalog.  If the book is half as good as what they've talked to me about, it's going to be another 'must have'. The Pragmatic Programmers also look like they're set to add some more titles to their Facets of Ruby line.  James Gray has said that he's writing a book for them that should be announced soon, Ezra Zygmuntowicz also has a book on the way, and I've recently signed a contract with them for a Ruby related book.  It looks like the PragProgs aren't going to be content to sit on their Ruby laurels. Finally, Developerdotstar is close to announcing a couple of books about programming.  Neither of these is Ruby specific, but from everything I've heard I think they're going to be solid, language independant books about becoming a better programmer.  Just the kind of thing you'd expect from these guys.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Stijn Leenknegt's Blog: [PHP6] function-return-array idea!GeesNotNerds Blog: Free PHP + Ajax chat appStefan Mischook's Blog: Object Oriented PHP Tutorial Updated - Steps 18 - 22Dave Dash's Blog: SymfonyCampWebDigity.com: PHP geotargeting techniquesEtienne Kneuss' Blog: Late Static Bindings ExplainedDevShed: Handling Static Data with PHP 5PHP-Learn-It.com: Cooking Cookies with PHPMichael Kimsal's Blog: PHP PredictionJob Posting: Steinman Recruiting Seeks Senior Developer (Littleton, CO)
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On the LivePipe blog today, there's a quick new article demonstrating a sorting method that can be used for more than just simple datasources:   Most often when I need to sort complex data sets, I'm using some sort of SQL backend. Today I needed to do complex sorting of Reflection objects for some auto generating documentation I'm working on for the upcoming Picora release. [...] In the usort() examples, I had always been under the assumption that the return values had to be 0, 1 or -1. Today I learned that is not true at all, and you can come up with your own scoring system with any range, negative or positive.   He illustrates the point with a simple example showing the sorting of the documentation for Picora. In his protected function, scoreFromMethod, he defines the return array with several values instead of just the one.
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One recent Saturday morning, I woke with one seemingly simple thing in mind: cleaning out and organizing the closets in my bedroom. If my closets were a database system, the contents would be stored as BLOBs (binary large objects) of varying sizes with no defining structure â just a dumping ground for stuff. As I began dragging things out of the closet, I found items as varied as a backpack, a pair of old ski gloves, about 10 square feet of foam padding, and pocket change in three different international currencies (anyone need Thai bahts?). Faced with a mound of the messy detritus of my own life, I did what most people would probably do: I went to the store to buy even more stuff to organize the stuff I already had.
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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Cal Evans and the Zend Developer Zone are hosting a new contest for all of the avid PHP readers out there - a giveaway for free PHP-related books.   There are a lot of good programming contests out there for PHP programmers to enter and win. Most of them require you to write a piece of code or solve a problem. There's nothing wrong with that but programmers are busy people. So I've come up with a contest for busy programmers. Give blog about PHP Abstract and you could win a free book. Not just any book though, these are programming books. (you know the ones, when you go to check out at your favorite book store they charge you by the pound.)   Entering the contest is simple - just blog about your favorite episode of PHP Abstract (DevZone's great podcast series) and get it tracked on Technorati.    Cal will scan the listings each week and pick the one he likes the best. He'll send along the book of his choice and will spring for the postage to send it along. Nice and easy - so check out their podcast series and find an episode you like the best (or just talk about it in general) and get it tracked.   Click here to subscribe to their podcast in your favorite feed reader.