Stefan Mischook's Blog: Object Oriented PHP Tutorial Released
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Stefan Mischook has updated his "Object  Oriented PHP for Beginners" tutorial with more new steps bringing the count up to 11 of the 20 planned steps.   Based on an article I wrote for a web design magazine; the tutorial is presented as a series of simple steps where I walk the reader through the process of building objects while at the same time, exposing them to basic object oriented concepts.   Eventually, he will be producing videos similar to these for all of the sections to help make things easier for the beginners out there.
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Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review for one of Sams Publishing's latest PHP-related offerings, "PHP 5 In Practice" by Elliott "Eli" White III (Senior Programmer over at digg.com.   First let me say, if you are new to PHP or programming in general, skip this book. This is not a how to or even a cookbook for simple concepts. To get the most from this book you need to have a firm grounding in programming.   He sets the tone for the rest of the interview right there, noting that most of the book is made up of little examples, helpful bits to fill a need rather than teaching you the basics (or more advanced features) of PHP as a language. Cal spotlights this kind of content by talking about the "binary tree implementation" section. Check out the rest of the review for the full story.
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Nefarious Designs continues their object-oriented PHP series with part four posted today, a look at some of the new features that PHP5 brings to the table.    After a welcome break, over the late summer public holiday here in England, here's the final part in my object-oriented PHP series. Sorry about the rather extended pause since "Part 3: Taking Relationships Further".   Having already looked at definition, relationships and taking those relationships further, I'm going to look at how PHP5's new Object Model introduces more advanced functionality.    In this latest part they look at clas constants, abstract classes, object interfaces, and magic methods (including overloading).
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Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk
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Sandro Zic recently gave a presentation on Java and PHP, and posted his slides here. I didn't attend his talk, so I don't have all the facts, but I would like to comment on one of his slides [...]. First, a minor point. Limited or no OOP has rarely stopped any software from being enterprise-ready. Most modern operating systems continue to be written in C, and the large Cobol programs running on mainframes that manage your bank accounts and insurance do not use OOP. [...] Let's address some of his other criticisms: Virtually no multi-threading, Lack of maintenance tools, and Immature frameworks.
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest poll conducted over this past week asking which, of their given options, is the best helpful hint for creating a web application in PHP.   Two of the options ranked higher than the rest with one (Page/object caching) coming out on top of the other (Don't save performance testing for the end of the project). The remainder of the votes were divided pretty evenly between the last three options: "Use multi result set queries to your database", "gzip compression", and "Tune your web server".   While you're in the polling mood, you should check out this week's new poll that wonders which of their options might be the biggest hindrance to PHP5's adoption in the community.
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While attending Gunter Kniesel's "Aspect-Oriented Software Development" lecture yesterday it occured to me that it might be possible to (ab)use PHP 5's __autoload(), __call(), __get(), and __set() interceptors to facilitate Aspect-Oriented Programming with PHP.
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This is a followup on Marco Tablini's discussion of the PHP programmer availablity and my earlier attempt at defining enterprise PHP.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted a review of Packt Publishing's "Learning PHP Data Objects" book writen up by Akash Mehta.   In Learning PHP Data Objects, the author Dennis Popel examines this new [database access] system and explains how to begin using PDO in development as a replacement for typical database drivers. The book is an excellent introduction to the data abstraction layer and also provides essential insight into the inner workings of database interaction with PHP.   Akash talks briefly about the history of PDO and what it can be used for first, then gets into the contents of the book (things like the intro chapters and the quality of the writing). The thing he thinks makes the bok stand out, though, is the examples and sample code that reflect both simple methods and more complex issues PDO developers might run into.
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Apparently PHP5 RC3 is going to be the last release candidate. This is supposed to be coming out at the end of this week, so PHP5 will probably be released next month.  It's a bit like looking through a window into a candy store. The sweetener I most look forward to is the improved object assignment semantics.
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Michael Kimsal has posted some more thoughts on what he calls the "sad state of PHP development" pointing out some of the practices of the PHP group surrounding the development of the language.   Every few months there's a release, whether large or small, which introduces new features and bug fixes. However, with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason other than someone with commit access decided they liked the 'new' way better than the old way.   He points out a specific example, get_object_vars and how its return values were changed in an earlier release as well as the update to glob made recently to change its return types.    In his opinion:   No changes should be made to the PHP core without an issue being opened, either in the 'bug' tracker or some other issues tracker.   Be sure to check out the comments for other great opinions on the topic.
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DevShed continues their tutorial series looking at working with PHP and databases today with more excerpted material from the O'Reilly book "Programming PHP, Second Edition" (by Kevin Tatroe, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Peter MacIntyre).   Picking up from where we left off last week, we'll be discussing shortcuts, query responses, metadata, and more.   They start off looking at shortcuts, those handy things the PEAR DB package offers to make life simpler (like getRow and getAssoc) before moving on to how to get the details about the response itself (like affectedRows and tableInfo). Next up is working with the metadata (using getListOf) and, finally, a sample application to tie them all together.
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This week's edition of PHP Magazine's PHPBarnstormer has been released - Issue #22.
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DevShed is continuing on with their series looking at advanced concepts of object oriented PHP with this new tutorial. It's part three of four parts, looking this time at polymorphism and design patterns in PHP.   Last week, we continued our discussion of the object-oriented features of PHP 5 by taking a first look at design patterns. This week, we will continue looking at design patterns, and examine polymorphism. This article, the third of four parts, is excerpted from chapter two of the book Advanced PHP Programming, written by George Schlossnagle.   They cover some of the more handy features OOP in PHP5, including interfaces, type hinting, the factory pattern and the singleton pattern.
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Gerd Schauffelberger writes on the PHP-Tools Blog today about the contents of the latest issue from the German PHP Magazine, specifically an article covering the PEAR package HTML_AJAX.   This article's target is (1st) to give a brief introduction to AJAX and how things work from Javascript an PHP side in contrary. Also (2nd) I wanted to show that you actually don't have to muck around with a mess of Javascript (browser compatibility issues and such) because it's it is all done by the Joshua Eichorn's HTML_AJAX framework.    The article doesn't build up an entire application (as Gerd mentions) but it does provide you a good base to work from and gives you a good direction to head from to learn more about this powerful package.
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Hasin Hayder has posted an announcement about the Object-oriented Programming with PHP5.   This book will teach users to understand the core object-oriented programming concepts with PHP and to write manageable applications with ease.  Here's the official press release from Packt on the book:   Learn Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 with new book from Packt  Packt is pleased to announce the release of a new book titled Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5. Written by Hasin Hayder, this book will teach users to understand the core object-oriented programming concepts with PHP and to write manageable applications with ease.   Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that uses "objects" and their interactions to design applications and computer programs. It was basically introduced to ease the development process as well as reduce the time of development by reducing the amount of code needed.  PHP is one of the most popular languages for web application development, and PHP5 supports OOP very well. This book will help users to master core OOP features in PHP as well as advanced Topics like Design Patterns including Model-View-Controller (MVC), and Unit Testing.   Comprehensive documentation and working examples on the Standard PHP Library (SPL), which are hard to find elsewhere, are provided in this book. Users will find this book useful to leverage PHP's OOP features to write manageable applications with ease.  Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 is published and is available with Packt. For more information about this book, please visit www.PacktPub.com
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On the PHPClasses.org website there's a new entry covering, among other things, one handy feature PHP includes to let developers read and write their data more flexibly - streams.   This article explains what are stream handlers and how they simplify PHP developers lives by allowing PHP applications to easily read and write data from containers, like remote Web pages or e-mail messages, as if they were files. [...] The article also presents more examples of cool stream handlers classes submitted to the PHPClasses site by several authors.   He describes the abstraction that the streams interface allows, how they can make your life easier, a real-life example of streams in action (working with POP3) and some of the classes that have been contributed to PHPClasses.org that use them.