Phil Thompson's Blog: 7 PHP functions that saved my life
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On his blog, Phil Thompson lists seven PHP functions that "saved his life" when developing his apps:   From time to time, I've struggled with minor pieces of coding for what seems like an age and then I've discovered PHP has a ready-made function whose express purpose seems to be to fix my exact problem. Today, I name and honour those PHP functions which saved my life, my career and my sanity.  Functions that made the cut include:  number_format array_values isset() array_diff()   He has his own reasons for each - all of them being handy little functions that fill a specific niche in PHP's vast array of abilities.
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This week's edition of PHP Magazine's PHPBarnstormer has been released - Issue #22.
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Aaron Wormus is back today on the Zend Developer Zone with another in his "Hidden Gems" series. This time, he takes a look at the "Zend Plumbing", those bits of connective code that help you make your Zend Framework applications work.   The functionality that he covers in this article are some of the min parts that a lot of ZF coders use every day and might not know it:  the Zend class (providing a suite of helper methods) built in Wrapper functions:  loadFile loadClass loadInterface isReadable dump exception  the Zend registry  Each of these is briefly described with some sample code for the loadFile, loadClass, exceptions and the Registry to give you an idea of how to use it all. As always, you can check out the Zend Framework website for all the details on each of these functionality bits.
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Ben Ramsey, a speaker at both the Zend/PHP Conference 2006 and the International PHP Conference 2006, has posted a monster wrap up for both events to his blog today.   This post is long overdue, but I was finally able to sit down and type out my thoughts about the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo and the International PHP Conference.    First up is his look at the Zend conference - largely a good experience. He specifically mentions the talk from Rob Richards, the "Extending PHP" tutorial session (with Sara and Marcus), and the infamous misunderstanding about his laptop bag (which was resolved shortly after the conference had concluded).   His experience with the International PHP Conference went equally well, despite the location of the event being slightly more out of the way than some liked. He comments on the excellent conference materials provided, the types of attendees, and some of the talks he attended - Aaron Wormus' "Mastering enterprise-level PHP tools PEAR, PhpDocumentor and testing" and Sata Golemon's "Navigating Streams" being among them. If you like to check them out, he's also posted some photos of the conference and a night out around the town he took.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:The Bakery: Six New Articles/Tutorials PostedEvert Pot's Blog: PHP: Arrays vs. ObjectsDevArticles: Learning AJAXInternet Super Hero: PHP: mysqli_fetch_all()David Coallier's Blog: PHP Namespaces (Part 1: Basic usage & gotchas)I/O Reader: 15 Cool Things & 12 Things to Dislike About PHPProPHP Podcast: Newscast - August 16, 2007PHPBuilder.com: Dynamic XML with PHPSite News: Popular Posts for the Week of 08.17.2007PRADO Watch Blog: PRADO Watch: Interview With Timani Tunduwani - Why I Moved From CakePHP to PRADO
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There is a new column from the folks over at PHP Magazine for your enjoyment:
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP-Coding-Practices.com: Try-Catch Syntax WeirdnessPHPBuilder.com: Cross-Platform Database PHP DevelopmentIBM developerWorks: Java and PHP technology on AIX - Integrate the Java business application w/ DB2OpenSourceCommunity.org: What do you think makes a good CMS?Jonathan Snook's Blog: Elemental: Conditional Content with CakePHPDevShed: The Basics of Using the Factory Pattern in PHP 5Builder.com.au: PHP exploit code plants itself in GIFJohn Cox's Blog:  Linux.com Now PHP PoweredNick Halstead's Blog: Solving Programming ProblemsPHP-Tools Blog: Testing FIT
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In this new post to his blog today, Tim shares some of the tools that he uses to develop his PHP applications (including supporting the CodeIgniter project).   IÃ¢ÂÂve been asked on several occasions to spill the beans on my development environment. Sadly, itÃ¢ÂÂs probably not the easiest setup - but it works for my stubborn mind.   Applications included in his list are things like PHP Eclipse, CuteFTP, XAMPP and Subversion. He also mentions a Firefox extension, Devboi, that offers quick access to several different reference manuals on the web.
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In his latest post, Jacob Santos talks about global functions and some of the dangers behind using them in your code (as per his own experience debugging with them in place).   When I develop in PHP and code functions, I always either place them in a file or place them at the top of the script. Well, this is more about C++ and how I totally freaked out my teacher, by breaking his paradigm of thought. You see, you can have a definition of a function at the top of the page and then code the body of the function later.   He soon discovered his problem in debugging the script - he was too used to having the global functions at the top (as in C++) and not mixed in with the code - or at the bottom of the script.    If there is something at least somewhat common about popular scripts that people use and extend, is that the functions are placed in organized manner. Reforming otherwise is a bitch and I remember rewriting the entire script anyway. You can't reform when you can't reuse anything.
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Sara Golemon brings us some news from the front about PHP6 in her latest blog entry today.   While everyone else has been busily gearing up for the release of PHP 5.2 and the new features that are going to come with it, Andrei and his small band of merry babelonians (yours truly included) have been making inroads on preparing PHP6 for a preview release. In the past week we've managed to roughly double the number of builtin functions (those which are part of the main distribution) that have been reviewed for unicode safety, either flagging them as good or upgrading their functionality   She also talks about what kinds of functions this entailed and how far along they are total (around 22%). She also encourages anyone that wants to get involved to help to jump right in.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Christopher Jones' Blog: Review: PHP Web ProgrammingCommunity News: PHP Conference BrasilWebReference.com: Creating a Custom RSS Feed with PHP and MySQLThe Shadow Fox Network: Create Dynamic URLs With Mod_Rewrite and PHP FunctionsJoshua Eichorn's Blog: Official WebThumb Contest rules publishedDevshed: PHP EmailHowTo Forge: Installing A LAMP System With Fedora Core 6ThinkPHP Blog: Oracle with PHP and PDODevShed: Creating an Administration Area for a Simple Threaded Discussion ForumDevShed: Setting up the Foundation for an Extensible Website Engine with PHP 5PHPBuilder.com: PEAR's HTML_QuickFormAndi Gutmans' Blog:  PHP and Database Connection PoolingInternational PHP Magazine: Poll Question: The Biggest Advantage of PHP 5 is?Greg Beaver's Blog: PhpDocumentor 1.3.1 is releasedAlexander Netkachev's Blog: Practical PHP events
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DevShed continues their series looking at connecting a PHP5 script to the powerful Yahoo! search backend with part four of the series today. This part focuses on reworking some of the previous examples to make them more modular using custom defined functions.   Logically, these examples can be really useful for learning the basic concepts surrounding the use of these search services, but undoubtedly, it's necessary to modify and improve their source code to make it more compact and completely reusable.   They start the overhaul with the web search (complete with example results) then push on to the video and image searches and work them over the same way.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:WaxJelly Blog: Simple PHP script using the YouTube API (with pagination)DevShed: Uploading Files and Navigating Directories in PHPPHPit.net: PHP5 Class Basics, Part 1SpinDrop.us: Using Zend Search Lucene in a symfony appCommunity News: PHP Appalachia IRC ChannelZend Developer Zone: Work with XML Data in the Zend FrameworkColdScripts.com: Mapping Framework PopularityWaxJelly Blog: A More Complex PHP script using the YouTube API (with video details) PART 2KillerPHP Blog: PHP Interfaces: when and why you should use them instead of classes?PHP-Tools Blog: Analyzing aide (advanced intrusion detection environment) output with PHPZend Developer Zone: Pro PHP XML and Web Services Sample ChapterZend Developer Zone: Cool Image Thumbnail ClassNefarious Designs: Object-Oriented PHP Part 4: PHP5's Improved FeaturesSebastian Bergmann's Blog: Zend/PHP Conference 2006William Candillon's Blog: phpAspect presented at the EPFL
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Matthew Turland, like many in the PHP community these days, has been pondering PHP6 and what it might mean to both the developers and to the language itself:   Be that as it may, as a user with about five years under his belt as of now who has seen all qualities of PHP code ranging from pristine to pedantic, a thought or two has crossed my mind on the subject of the latest upcoming incarnation of the language.   Specifically, he talks about some of the hot topics like namespaces, the mysqlnd driver, Unicode support, and named parameters. Overall, though, his comments are positive, looking toward a brighter future for PHP with this upcoming edition.
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The PHP Community is buzzing about a new article, posted on the O'Reilly Ruby blog, about how the author (Derek Silvers of cdbaby.com) made the decision that Ruby on Rails just wasn't right for the project he was working on.    Back in January 2005, I announced on the O'Reilly blog that I was going to completely scrap over 100,000 lines of messy PHP code in my existing CD Baby  website, and rewrite the entire thing in Rails, from scratch. [...] The first few months showed good progress, and Jeremy could not have been more amazing, twisting the deep inner guts of Rails to make it do things it was never intended to do.   But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails' preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It's do-able with a lot of glue. But it's damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you're really doing this.)    Recounting the rest of the story, Derek mentions the turning point ("Is there anything Rails can do that PHP CAN'T do?") and the speed at which they were able to make up for the two years of lost development time. To helps others make a decision for their project, he also includes seven reasons why he made the decision to switch back, including:   Our entire company's stuff was in php: don't underestimate integration Don't want what i donÃ¢ÂÂt need I love SQL Programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because *you* are better   There's also been several bloggers in the PHP community that have responded to the article:   Elizabeth Naramore - "Derek Sivers' Article on RoR vs PHP" Paul Jones - "Is there anything Rails can do that PHP cannot do? *No.*" Terry Chay - "Why PHP triumphs over Ruby" Jeff Moore - "Ruby versus PHP or There and Back Again"
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On the PHP Security Blog, there's three new posts that Stefan Esser has written up that demonstrate some of the more destructive uses of Javascript that he's found:  JavaScript/HTML Portscanning and HTTP Auth Bruteforcing HTTP Auth in Firefox with JavaScript JavaScript Scanning and expose_php=On    While the first two are interesting, it's the last of these that most directly applies to PHP. He gives a simple "proof of concept" that checks to see if the embedded image is the correct "size" to be related to a webserver running PHP with the expose_php setting set to "on".
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:PHPBuilder.com: Using Ajax with PHP to Create an Interactive Web PageJSLabs Blog:  Top 5 PHP ToolsLorenzo Alberton's Blog: Navigation Through Paragraphs in an ArticleChristopher Jones' Blog: Review: Easy Oracle PHPStoyan Stefanov's Blog: The PEAR bookScott Mattocks' Blog: Crisscott OnForce Client DesktopDevShed: Developing a Form Director ClassDevShed: Creating a Simple Threaded Discussion ForumLeendert Brouwer's Blog: Writing Secure Web Applications with PHPPower Creative Seeks Interactive Developer/Analyst (Louisville, KY)PHP Security Consortium: New Product Launch - PHPSecInfoMarket Day: At A Glance: ASP.net vs. PHPJob Posting: LAMP Developer (PHP/MySQL) (Nashville, TN)Community News: Symfony Turns OneBard Farstad's Blog: Optimizing PHP for Intel based Mac