My RSS » Planet PHP » April 6, 2010

Planet PHP

Trait-like Functionality for PHP

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 1:55pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

Eliminating repetition and encouraging code reuse are central tenets of software development. PHP’s lack of multiple inheritance means sometimes there are tough design choices to be made when similar functionality is required in separate branches of the class heirarchy. As proposed in the Horizontal Reuse for PHP RFC, traits offer a means of duplicating functionality in independent classes. In this post, I’ll be detailing an approach that offers trait-like functionality to your objects in an intuitive and straightforward way.
Updated and upgraded

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 11:23am MDT by Maggie Nelson
Small but nice changes to the blog:
- all code for the blog is now in svn.
- made updates to wordpress much easier
- using a lighter theme, which is nicer for code snippets
I’m still annoyed by how infrequently RSS widgets update, solution forthcoming.
Flex and Zend Framework - Part 1

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 9:46am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

It would be a fair statement to say that I have not paid attention to Flash for several years. Obviously I know that those awesome interfaces for movie web sites are made in flash, as are those annoying video ads that start screaming at you as soon as you load up a page, competing with Megadeth on Rhapsody, cranked out on the 700 watts of power I have in my office. But the last time I really looked seriously at Flash was almost a decade ago and I was thrilled at tweening widgets from one place to another. Unfortunately, there's not really any benefit to tweening a text box. Cool? Yes. Practical? No. So I never really picked it up. Plus I was cheap. That is the reason why I had not really been paying attention to Flash for the past several years. I generally don't look into something if it's cool. I look into something if it is practical. Flash, generally, is meant to be, well, flashy. And it is. But for someone such as myself, I didn't think I had much of a reason to pay attention. Until now...
A Primer for PHP 5.3's New Language Features

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 9:10am MDT by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

For the past month, I've been immersed in PHP 5.3 as I and my team have started work on Zend Framework 2.0. PHP 5.3 offers a slew of new language features, many of which were developed to assist framework and library developers. Most of the time, these features are straight-forward, and you can simply use them; in other cases, however, we've run into behaviors that were unexpected. This post will detail several of these, so you either don't run into the same issues -- or can capitalize on some of our discoveries.

Continue reading "A Primer for PHP 5.3's New Language Features"
Caching for dummies

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 9:00am MDT by till
Caching is one of the things recommended whenever something is slow — "Your [database, website, server]? Well, duh! You need a cache!".

All things aside, it's not always easy to cache stuff. I find myself often in situations where I can't cache at all or where a caching solution is complex as hell to implement. All of the sudden you need to dissect your page and lazy load half of it with Ajax — bah. And that's just because those users never want to wait for a cache to expire or invalidate. They just expect the most recent ever! :-)

Sometimes however, caching can be so trivial, it even hurts.
Bypass the application server
There are lots of different techniques and strategies to employ when you start to think about caching. The fastest albeit not always available method is to bypass your app server stack completely. And here's how. :-)
An example
My example is a pet project of mine where I display screenshots of different news outlets which are taken every 3 (three) hours — 0:00, 3:00 AM, 6:00 AM, 9:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 3:00 PM, 6:00 PM, 9:00 PM and so on. In between those fixed dates, the page basically never changes and why would I need PHP to render a page if it didn't change since the last request?

Correct, I don't! :)

And here's what I did to setup my cache:
- Apache 1.3.x (!) and mod_php5
- my homepage: docroot/home.php
- httpd.conf: DirectoryIndex index.html home.php
- a cronjob: */10 * * * * fetch -q -o docroot/index.html [example.org]
In greater detail Homepage
The home.php does all the PHP funkyness whenever I need a fresh rendered version of my website to track an error, or adjust something.
DirectoryIndex
If I ever delete my cache (index.html), my website will still be available. The DirectoryIndex will use home.php next and the request will be a little slower and also more expensive on my side, but the website will continue to work.
Cronjob
The cronjob will issue a HTTP request (GET) using fetch against my homepage and save the result to my index.html. It's really so simple, it hurts. Currently, this cronjob is executed every 10 minutes so I can fiddle with the design and deploy a change more easily, but I could run that cronjob every hour or every few hours as well.

If you don't have fetch, try the following wget command:
```
wget -q -O docroot/index.html [example.org] 
```
Fin
That's all, a really simple cache which bypasses your application server. Enjoy!

If you're in for another nifty solution, I suggest you read Brandon Savage's article on caching with the Zend Framework and/or take a look at nginx+Memcached">[HttpMemcachedModule">nginx+Memcached] .
Xdebug 2.1.0 RC1 released

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 7:41am MDT by Derick Rethans

Xdebug 2.1.0 RC1 released Schiphol, Netherlands Tuesday, April 6th 2010, 15:41 CEST
As earlier announced in my April Fools' announcement and on Xdebug's twitter feed, I'm now releasing Xdebug 2.1.0RC1. This is the first Release Candidate and it addresses a number of issues found in the latest beta. As I usually do in release announcements, I will also be introducing a new feature in Xdebug 2.1 in this one.

In an article that I wrote a few months ago, I illustrated a few different reasons on why the shut-op operator (@) should be avoided. Although there are a few cases where it simple can not be avoided if you want to write notice-free code, the main reason why this operator should be avoided, is because it makes debugging quite a bit more difficult if errors are hidden.

Xdebug is a debugging aid to make debugging easier. So from version 2.1.0 there is a new configuration setting — xdebug.scream — that simply disables the effects of the @ operator. That means that all errors will be shown, of course, still listening to the error_reporting and display_errors settings. This functionality is not a novel thing, and the idea was lifted from the PECL scream package. However, I think this functionality fits in very well with all the other things that Xdebug has to offer.

Just to mention it once more, I have no intention of making Xdebug closed source. I spend a considerable amount of time in adding new features and addressing issues, so I would appreciate it that if consider a donation in case Xdebug has saved you time and effort in debugging your application. If you have comments or suggestions to improve Xdebug, please write to the mailinglist.
First release of the D-Bus extension

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 3:33am MDT by Derick Rethans

First release of the D-Bus extension London, UK Tuesday, April 6th 2010, 10:33 BST
A few days ago I made the first beta release of the D-Bus extension that I have been working on for a while. D-Bus is a message bus system, a simple way for applications to talk to one another. I started working on this because my cellphone, an OpenMoko FreeRunner. This cellphone (or rather, a mobile Linux computing device) implements freesmartphone.org APIs to talk to all the hardware that is available on the device. This includes GSM and SIM card interfaces, but also GPS, Audio and PIM services.

However, many other applications on the Linux desktop speak D-Bus. This includes system services such as the notification daemon, the screen saver and hardware plug-in detection as well as desktop applications such as Pidgin and Empathy.

I've given a presentation on the extension at the PHP London conference earlier this year, and will also be speaking on this subject as part of the "PHP Inside" and "PHP on the D-Bus" talks at Tek-X (Chicago, May 18-21), International PHP Conference Spring (Berlin, May 30-June 2) and the Dutch PHP Conference (June 10-12).
OOP Articles on Think Vitamin

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 2:04am MDT by Lorna Mitchell
I've been working on a series of articles for Think Vitamin, the Carsonified blog, about OOP in PHP5. In fact I'm wildly excited about this, partly because I love to write and partly because its such a cool site to write for! The first two installments are now live:
- Getting Started with OOP PHP5 - which is a very gentle overview of why OOP is such a buzz word, and shows off some very simple examples on how to begin and what the terms mean
- Getting Started with OOP PHP5: Part 2 - a follow on post showing constructors, static properties and methods, and also looks at how PHP handles objects.
None of it is rocket science but these are important topics often skated over by writers wanting to get to the complicated bits! Hopefully these posts bridge the gap between the very dated introductory PHP content that is still lying around on the web and the tutorials about shiny new stuff that are more typically found elsewhere. The community over on Think Vitamin is great, the comments and retweets have been very constructive and I'm very excited to be involved.

Publications

I find I'm writing for a few outlets other than just my blog these days and often want to refer people to that content as well, so I've added a "Publications" page, linked from the left hand sidebar. This will keep up with the articles I'm posting elsewhere, interviews, and anything else along those lines, all in one place.

← April 5 (4 items) April 7 (3 items) →

My RSS » Planet PHP » April 6, 2010

Feeds

Planet PHP

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 1:55pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 11:23am MDT by Maggie Nelson

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 9:46am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 9:10am MDT by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 9:00am MDT by till

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 7:41am MDT by Derick Rethans

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 3:33am MDT by Derick Rethans

Posted: April 6th, 2010, 2:04am MDT by Lorna Mitchell