This new tutorial on the PHPro.org website shows how to implement a common database feature, ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, in a SQLite database with PHP.

SQLite is an ultra lite database replacement that comes bundled with PHP. Because of its light weight it lacks many of the features found in more robust applications such as MySQL, PostgresQL and others. One of the features that is lacking is the ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE that is often used to automatically UPDATE a record, should a duplicate field be found. Here a demonstration is provided to duplicate this behaviour using PHP Exceptions.

Their example creates a table of animals and inserts several to act as a base. They show insert method, how to get the information back out and what happens when you try add a duplicate value to the table. Normally this just results in an exception being displayed but, when caught with exception handling, it can be redirected into an update statement to change that animal's current information.

DevShed has posted the final part of their series on handling exceptions in PHP5 applications. In this part they wrap up the creation of their modular exceptions class.

By means of a hands-on approach, this series walks you through using inheritance to build finely-tuned exception subclasses. These subclasses can be used to handle, via multiple "try-catch" blocks, several failures that might occur during the execution of a given web application.

They show how to handle MySQL exceptions with two different subclasses - one for the MySQL connection itself and another for problems with the results. They then merge these two classes into one and show how to use the new hybrid creation in a sample SQL connection and query.

DevShed continues their look at custom exception handling in PHP5 application with this third part of their series, a look at handling exceptions from MySQL calls.

Having already introduced you to the main subject of this article series, it's time to summarize the topics that were discussed in the last article, in case you haven't read it yet. In that particular tutorial I explained how to implement a fully-functional customized exception system with PHP 5, which came in handy for handling a number of specific exceptions thrown by a basic MySQL abstraction class.

They create a custom MySQL exception class that sits on top of their MySQL abstraction layer (and Result handling class) and catches exceptions thrown from sample queries.

DevShed continues their series looking at exceptions in PHP with this second part focusing on throwing and handling customized exceptions in your PHP5 application.

While the built-in exception system that comes bundled natively with PHP 5 is usually good enough to handle errors and other critical conditions during the execution of a given web application, it's worthwhile to mention that there are a number of additional cases where it is necessary to implement an exceptions system that can handle different failures in a more specific way.

They show how to trigger some basic custom exceptions and detail the creation of a class to handle catching these exceptions in a bit more OOP kind of way.

DevShed has start up a new series today with the first part in a four-part series looking at exception handling in PHP5.

If you do any serious programming, whether it's in PHP 5 or some other language, you've needed to know how to handle run time errors and other "exceptional" conditions. You can do this by making your program throw generic exceptions. Or you can unlock the potential of PHP 5 and learn how to create custom exceptions, which is the subject of this four-part series.

In this first part they get you started with exceptions, showing how to throw them and catch them correctly (try/catch). They put it to good use in an example catching exceptions thrown from a MySQL connection and select.

Michelangelo van Dam has written up a quick introductory post on his blog about the process around throwing and catching exceptions in your apps.

One thing that I noticed was that although the code was well written [in the Zend Framework], implementing coding standards and best practices on many of the classes, I did notice a wrong usage of throwing exceptions (the try - catch statements).

He gives a few examples - catching a "divide by zero" the right and wrong way, how to grab/handle the message that comes along with the exception and how to define your own custom exception handler to help your code do more useful things with the errors it might throw.

Lorna Mitchell has posted the second part of her series detailing her REST server development project (part one is here).

This is part 2 of my rest service writing article. In part 1 we saw the library which holds the functionality we will be using, and we also handled the incoming request and captured all the data we'll be using.

In this second part she gets into the details behind the handle() method of the class. It splits the URL into its parts and, based on the action requested, hands it off to the right method and calls the output() method to return to the user. Some error handling is also included (with custom exceptions).

In a new post to his blog, Paul Jones anout a small issue when working with the PHP 5.2.5 command line functionality - a segfault if you extend the Exception class.

When executing code at the command line using php -r and PHP 5.2.5, be sure not to extend the Exception class. It will cause a segmentation fault.

He includes examples of the issue that would cause the problem and the bug he's filed in an effort to get it fixed.

A new entry has been posted to the PEAR blog with the latest minutes for the group's July 13th meeting.

Some highlights from the meeting include new/upcoming RFCs for package naming schemes, exception handling in PHP 5.3, and a vote on extending the current PEAR2 Policies. Heavy stuff, check it out!

You can check out the full notes here on the PEAR portion of the PHP.net wiki.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney recently posted about a method he's come up with for migrating your object-oriented libraries (including frameworks) over to the upcoming PHP 5.3 version of the language.

With PHP 5.3 coming up on the horizon, I'm of course looking forward to using namespaces.

He gives an example of how useful these namespaces can be for you and your code, but points out one failing point - trying to define classes in a namespace that are named the same as a built-in keyword for PHP. There's already been a suggestion to add a captial "I" in front of the class name to prevent this collision.

There's also the problem of throwing custom exceptions - unless you use the namespace properly your script will just throw a default exception.