Nefarious Designs: Object-Oriented PHP Part 4: PHP5's Improved Features
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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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DevShed continues their series covering SQLite in PHP5 today with the final tutorial - "Additional Methods for Using SQLite with PHP 5":   The list of additional features offered by SQLite is really impressive. Therefore, in this last article of the series, I'll be taking an in-depth look at them. This will complete our analysis of this excellent RDBMS integrated with PHP 5.   First up is a look at the usage of the seek and lastInsertRowid functions followed by the changes and queryExec methods. They show how to use the createFunction method and show one of the more advanced features of SQLite - creating a database that only exists in the server's memory.
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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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From Dotvoid.com, there's a new posting talking about the continued use of PHP4 by developers and hosting companies and how it's effecting the community as a whole.    It is true that the PHP 5 uptake has been slow. Many internet service providers as well as many developers are reluctant to switch. This is probably, as others have stated, a circular dependency.   As ISP:s are reluctant to upgrade the popular open source projects are hesitant to upgrade. I still think the wrong people are worried. Still PHP 5 is increasing it's share and finally the day will come when version 4 will be considered legacy. Hopefully before PHP 6 is here but not necessarily.    He continues on, talking about what PHP5 is really about (it's not just the objects!) and things that can help make it an easier sell to those still lagging in a PHP4 world - like the Zend Framework.
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A little while back Matthew Turland posted about something that some developers moving over to PHP from more strict languages have an issue with - variable typing - and how its evolved in languages over time.   Without a little background in programming languages or computer science in general, it's entirely possible that typing systems are not something that have crossed your mind. I thought I'd take a blog entry to share some of my thoughts on how itÃ¢ÂÂs affecting the creation and evolution of languages.   He walks through history a bit, mentioning C, Java, Python and PHP and how they differ in their default type handling. He especially focuses on the "blurred line" between strong and weak typing and how some if offers special features to the language that uses the method.
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Matthew O'Phinney has two new posts that talk about something object-oriented developers seem to shy away from - globals in their classes and how they can make things more difficult to make "embeddable applications" a reality.   In my previous entry, I ranted about the use of globals in popular PHP applications, and how they make embedding said applications difficult. I develop using object-oriented practices, and can honestly say I can't recall ever having slung a global variable around in my own code. Globals seem hackish to me, and as a result, trying to get applications that use them to behave correctly has been a challenge.   In the first part, he notes an interesting find about the $GLOBALS value and illustrates with a code example how he was able to get around it in his instance (wrapping a Serendipity instance in a Zend Framework app).   In part two, though, and uses another code example to show what kind of issues he was seeing with the $GLOBALS - a script that sets some globals in different instances and echoes the results back out.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP-Coding-Practices.com: How I Turned A Slow Array Sort Into A Quick One Using Quicksort AlgorithmZend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 4: Planning ProgrammingWeb Development Blog: Save bandwidth with PHProxy and ip2nationJob Posting: Assembleron Ltd Seeks PHP 5/MySQL/Ajax Developers (Reading, UK)PÃ¡draic Brady's Blog: Complex Views with the Zend Framework - Part 6: Setting The TerminologyThe Bakery: Four New Articles - Load Balancing, Request Info, UUID Behavior & Upload ThumbnailsCommunity News: PEAR Installer version 1.6.0 releasedChristopher Kunz's Blog: Building PHP with cURL and libmysqlclient5DevShed: Working with Prepared Queries with PDO Objects in PHP 5Secunia.com: rPath update for gd, php, php-mysql, and php-pgsql
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In a new post to his blog, Jacob Santos talks about why object oriented programming just "isn't easy" - including a few of his dislikes about OOP in PHP.   Functional developers have it easy. Damn straight and I wonder why so many developers choose to write functions, when they can opt for more beautiful classes instead. [...] It is easy to get functions right, all you have to do is prefix them and name them properly and you're done.   He notes that most people get OOP up to a certain point - that being the "has-a" and "is-a" relationships - where things start flying over their heads. He expresses his dislike of the way that Singletons are used (or not used) and places some of the blame on the tutorial and book authors out there trying to teach novice programmers with analogies that don't make sense in a codign situation.
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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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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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Josh Sharp has posted a new article to his blog advocating something that there's still a lot of controversy around in the PHP community - frameworks (when to use them and when to not).   PHP's ease of use is also its downfall. Because there are less restrictions on the structure of the code you write, it's much easier to write bad code. But there is a solution: use a framework. [...] Of course, if you're not taken with any of the packages above you can also write your own framework, which I've done and will talk about in the next few posts. But for now, let's have a look at the common benefits of a framework.   He's broken it out to talk about the usual framework structure, MVC and how a framework can enforce good code standards. He also mentions some happy side benefits of their use including making for "pretty URLs" and the helpers that most of the frameworks come with.
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Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:aFilesSmiley GeneratorlangMerge PicturesKeyword SuggestFuseBox ManagerSite Guide
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:PHP-Tools Blog: New releases of patTemplate and patFormsPrism-Perfect.net: PHP Tag Cloud TutorialPHPit.net: Building a simple MVC system with PHP5Alan Knowles' Blog: Code Reviewing.Nefarious Designs: Object-Oriented PHP Part 1: DefinitionWaxJelly Blog: Using PHP to make a MySQL "abstraction layer"php|architect: Introduction to PHPUnitNefarious Designs: Object-Oriented PHP Part 2: RelationshipsJohn Mertic's Blog: PHP Windows Installer updated for PHP 5.2.0RC2 and moreDevShed: Reading, Writing and Creating Files in PHPPHPKitchen: Seagull 0.6.0 ReleasedThinkPHP Blog: Make the download of large files with PHP (and lighty) very easyPeter Goodman's Blog: Observers and DispatchersRyan Malesevich's Blog: WP Plugins: WP-ChunkPHP.net: PHP 5.1.6 Released
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Krystian Hoffman has posted to his blog today a few reasons (10 to be exact) that he likes and uses PHP. Fortunately, most of them are some of the best reasons for anyone to use the language.   ended up with ten points on why I use PHP and I guess this would be a good post here on my blog, as it seems people like lists in general and maybe I could get some people out there that aren't really sure about whether PHP is good or bad, to get some insight at least.  Here's some of his list:   The PHP Community The (language's) Performance Its Portability It has strong Object-oriented support   Other things got a mention as well - the low learning curve, low cost, included libraries - but the above few seemed the strongest.
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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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Knut Urdalen shares a note about the latest issue of the International PHP Magazine - the December 2007 issue - that he has an article in.   The December issue of International PHP Magazine includes my latest article "Seamless AJAX with PRADO - An introduction to ActiveControls". In this article I discuss some AJAX design patterns and show you how to make use of them in AJAX enabled components that ships with the PRADO framework.   More information about this issue (and subscribing to the International PHP Magazine) can be found on this page of their site and details on the PRADO framework are over on the project's website.
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An introduction to using refactoring, unit testing and ZenTest on existing code.