Grammars shine at 'adding value'
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Children make more progress in England's grammar schools than in comprehensives, figures show.
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As mentioned by Ed Finkler, there's a list of signs your PHP needs refactoring from Soledad Penades.    I have had to go through a php application recently which has given me more than one headache and has required me to use all my possible patience. While working with it, I thought This is good material for an article, so that nobody else does the same in the future, and nobody else will need to experience the same displeasure as I have had to.   So here are the signs your PHP application needs a serious refactoring, right now    Included in the list are things like:   Uses global variables Everything's an array The neverending switch Interface inconsistency   It hits on one of the thing that bugs me too, the problem of "Brackets galore" - so many subarrays that you have to resort to three or more sets of bracketed keys to get to the value you want. It's bad enough trying to follow someone else's code without having to "trace down" an array to figure out which of the values they're talking about.
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A new posting from Dynamically Typed - More on rich web UIs - has a few interesting links to share, as well as Harry's search for a XmlHttpRequest method.
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Christian Wenz has pointed out an older post from Larry Wall talking about the line between scripting and programming languages (mentioning specifically PHP).  From the article "":  I think, to most people, scripting is a lot like obscenity. I can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it. [...] If I had to pick one metaphor, it'd be easy onramps. And a slow lane. Maybe even with some optional fast lanes.   Larry goes through tons of different older languages commenting on their viability in the online community including: Javascript, LISP, Pascal, Python, Ruby and PHP. He then looks at the present and what sorts of things are happening in languages these days. This list includes things like early binding/late binding, eager typology/lazy typology, limited structures/rich structures, class-based/prototype-based and transaction/reaction/dynamic scope.
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DevShed has posted the second and last part of a series of two articles based around the Composite design pattern - using it to work with strings in PHP5.   Are you a PHP developer who wants to improve your skills in pattern-based programming in PHP? If the answer to this question is a emphatic yes, then you should begin reading this article now! Welcome to the final part of the series "Implementing the composite pattern with PHP 5." Comprised of two instructive tutorials, this series walks you through the basic concepts of this important design pattern, and shows you how to apply it with some educational examples.   They start by defining a simple StringProcessor class as an abstract interface to build from. From there, they create two other classes - the SingleStringProcessor and the MultipleStringProcessor. Each of these takes in either a single file or multiple filenames and spits back out the value of the string and the length of the string.
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Corrects percentage change in first paragraph and headline to year-over-year figure, from sequential figure
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Harry Fuecks is back today on the SitePoint PHP Blog with part two of his "joy of regular expressions" series, continuing on from this previous entry.   He jumps right in, summarizing the first part in a small section before getting back into the examples:  Hunting for .jp(e)gs Escaping Meta-Characters Search and Replace preg_quote() preg_replace() Word Boundaries, Word Characters...and everything else Sub patterns Spot the XSS Hole eval() is evil! preg_replace_callback()  As you can see, it's crammed with just as much infromation as the first part and covers a wide range of topics to help you get more in tune with your inner regular expression guru.
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New from Dynamically Typed today, there's a new posting about a new(ish) site out there that's been turning a few heads in the PHP community - The PHP FTW.
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Over on Dynamically Typed there is a two posting series on efforts to get javascript to talk to PHP effectively.
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DevShed has posted the final installment of their series looking at the creation and use of the Abstract Factory pattern. In this new part, they focus on the creation of online forms and their handling as the pattern is applied.   In this last installment of the series, I'm going to show you how to use an abstract factory class to create distinct types of form objects, logically depending on the context where they will be utilized. The idea not only sounds interesting, but it can provide you with a better understanding of how this handy pattern can be used in a real situation.   They start by defining their abstract factory form class and extending it to create a required form element and a normal form element. They make input functions for each - required input box, required radio button, required check box - and their "Normal" counterparts. Finally, they tie these all together to create a simple form with sets of an input box, radio set, and checkboxes both required and normal.
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DevShed is wrapping up their look at the Strategy pattern with the last part of their series posted today - a look at validating a user's input via the pattern.   In the next few lines I'm going to demonstrate how to use the strategy pattern in a useful case, that is validating user-supplied input. Sound like an interesting experience, right?   They start by show how to build a "validation strategy selector" that uses a switch to hand off the request to the correct validation function. Naturally, this is followed by the creation of those validation classes and an example of their use. They wrap it all up with the complete code listing to make cut and paste coding easy.
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Lads from Lagos provoke grammatical carnage We're very much obliged to reader Robin Strong who has provided proof that just when we thought the Lads from Lagos had finally rustled up enough cash for a decent English grammar guide, someone from the MARIAM ABACHA 419er old school went and undid all that linguistic progress in one, magnificent missive. Read on in wonder:â¦
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There's a new tutorial posted on the PHP-GTK Community site today - a quick one showing how to use GtkSourceview to create a simple PHP editor with syntax highlighting.   This widget is nearly usable as a real php-gtk IDE. It extends GtkSourceView widget and internally manages both a text buffer and language object classes.   They provide the code, but not too much in the way of explanation for it. Thankfully, most of it is pretty straight-forward. There are a few things that the script has to manage to make the it work - a text buffer for the data, a viewer (window), and the syntax highlighting component. For the view, there are a few handy functions already built in so you won't have to create them - undos, the syntax highlighting, line numbering, markers, and bracket highlighting.
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HOUSTON -- That's one small word for astronaut Neil Armstrong, one giant revision for grammar sticklers everywhere.
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As Paul Jones mentions, there's a sort of force in the PHP community that seems to be pushing back at the Smarty templating system and calling it unnecessary.    He points out Hasin Hayder's post on the subject. Hasin (ironically author of a Smarty book) has recently come to the conclusion that there "is no need to use an external template engine like smarty".   Some nice guys over there developed smarty and it saved life of a lot of developers (i mean developers). But that time is over. Seriously why the hell I need to learn a new templating language when a "echo" does the thing much better.   Judging by the responses to both Hasin's post and Paul's post it seems like quite a bit of the PHP community agrees (including Michael Kimsal, Harry Fuecks and Brian Lozier).
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Great writeup from Tim Bray WRT Dynamic Java  ...  Here's the funny part.  Whats up with all the damn coffee in these pictures?  One can only come to the conclusion that caffeine makes you smart as hell!  caption: Coffee  caption: Coffee and Java  caption: Java and Coffee
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Launching off from this previous post on the Stubbles Blog, two more posts (from two other developers) have been posted on the same subject:  In this new post, Frank Kleine takes things a step further and talks about the same kind of type hinting but for more types - including arrays and objects. Examples of how he'd expect things to work followed. The other post is from Stephan Schmidt again and varies slightly off into the world of Namespaces to be included in PHP6 along with the use of annotations.  Be sure to check out the comments on each for some more interesting tidbits...