Ian Selby has posted a new tutorial today looking at something that can be very handy in the right situations - dynamically adding new functions to an already defined PHP class.
I've gotten a lot of great suggestions for features [for PHP Thumbnailer], and have wanted to add them, but at the same time don't as I would prefer not to bloat the class with all sorts of functionality. So I started thinking about how I could provide certain functionality for people that want it, without either simply making it a part of the class (and making it more bloated as a result), or coming up with all sorts of extended classes to maintain and distribute.
His solution was to add functionality dynamically to the class as plugins. Each plugin is defined as its own class (to keep things standardized) and will be included/executed by a base controller class. He includes some sample code showing how to create a basic user object that can store the first and last names of the user in question.
Havard Eideshares a tool he originally created to do function lookups when in vim - phpm:
4 years ago I wrote a small program called phpm that I used for php function lookup when coding in vim. since then I've crossed over to ZendStudio and I'm now using that for my everyday work. But: every now and then I've had requests regarding phpm and if I can't digg up the sources, and I've said: "sorry, but those are lost". Until today: I went through a old HD, digging through backups and files: and suddenly phpm resurfaced!
He's included the links to the three things you'll need to get it working - the phpm file itself, XML required by it and an optional phpdocumentor template to create the output file.
Johannes Schluter has posted about another update to be included in PHP 5.3 - an improved getopt function:
So PHP 5.3 has lots of new stuff offer, so let's take a look at one change: Added long-option feature to getopt() and made getopt() available also on win32 systems by adding a common getopt implementation into core. (David Soria Parra, Jani)
This gives Windows users a function they haven't had before in both web-based applications and on the command line. You can get more information about the use of the function from its page in the manual.
Michael Kimsal has posted a few thoughts on one of the features of the upcoming PHP 5.3 - closures.
I first got acquainted with closures in Groovy last year, and love them. They make sense. The syntax is pretty easy, and feels natural in the language. Not so in PHP. Once again, inconsistencies are not just legacy issues in PHP - they are created anew for us to deal with for years to come.
He suggests that a different keyword (maybe, say "closure") to delineate between a normal function definitions and closures, especially when dealing with the Reflection API.
This series is not meant to be complete but some personal choice, these blog postings are also no replacement for documentation, but just pointers. My goal is that you try out 5.3 right now so we can fix bugs as soon as possible before releasing it The NEWS file has a quite short entry for my first subject: Added fileinfo extension as replacement for mime_magic extension. (Derick)
He looks at one situation where the extension could come in very handy - getting the content type of the file for a download push - as well as why its better than the older mime_content_type function.
IBM developerWorks has posted part two of their look at new features included in the upcoming PHP 5.3 release. This part looks specifically at closures and lambda functions.
Follow along in this "What's new in PHP V5.3" series of articles that covers the new and exciting features found in PHP V5.3, which will be released by the end of 2008. Part 1 looks at the changes made to the object-oriented programming and object handling in PHP V5.3. Here in Part 2, we look at closures and lambda functions. They are designed to make programming much easier by allowing you to easily define throwaway functions that can be used in many contexts.
Lambda functions (or as they describe them "throwaway functions") are ones created dynamically as the script runs, possibly as a callback to one of the many PHP functions that allow for one. It removes the need for a call to create_function. Closures let you assign a function to a variable/return value, including variables to use, and call it later.
They also look at closures and objects, using reflection on them and some reasoning on why you should use closures in your future applications.
On the SitePoint PHP blog today Troels Knak-Nielsen has posted about a lesser known feature of the popular XDebug debugging tool - function traces.
In case you haven't heard of it before, it "allows you to log all function calls, including parameters and return values to a file", to quote the manual. After playing around with it for a while, I realised that this information could be parsed and used to determine parameter types and return types of functions.
To illustrate one use for the trace results, he create a simple script that parsed them and reinjected them back into a source file as docblock comments. Included in the post is an example of its usage and the resulting comments for a simple class. It can be downloaded from github.
Martynas Jusevicius has a new post looking at method overloading in PHP5 - a workaround to make it possible at least.
Method overloading (a feature of object-oriented programing which allows having several class methods with the same name but different signatures) is not implemented in PHP, which is a drawback compared to Java. However, PHP 5 provides a way to imitate overloading by catching calls to "inaccessible methods" with magic method __call.
In his example he uses __call to route the request to the correct version of the constructor (__construct0 or __construct1) based on the number of arguments passed in
Shaun Oleson has posted his method (a chunk of code to do it) to connect to the Authorize.NET servers and make a request:
So I've had quite a bit of experience with authorize.NET and PHP and I've found it's difficult to find resources that provide textual examples for integrating the payment processor. I've put together a generic tutorial from documentation that is public. Of course, you will have to specify your Transaction ID and API Login ID. So here you are. If you need assistance or have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.
His example is a large get_auth() function that takes in the credit card information (including billing address) and makes a cURL connection to their servers for the request.
In this new post to his Oracle blog, Chris Jones shows how to set up DBMS_OUTPUT to work with the OCI8 extension available for PHP.
Immediately after OOW, Alison and I have got straight into updating the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual. We've had our heads right down. [...] When reviewing the DBMS_OUTPUT section I tried using a PIPELINED PL/SQL function and found a significant speed improvement over the basic method.
He shows a few different methods for getting it working and includes both the code, SQL to create the functions and a bit of stats at the end showing which method is the fastest (the pipelined version wins out by quite a bit every time).
