Archive for August 25th, 2006

Dan Scott’s Blog: File_MARC and Structure_Linked_List: new alpha releases

While working on the MARC support for PHP, Dan Scott asked for suggestions and feedback. Since it was few and far between, he spent the time on another task - working on the error handling for the package.

I’ve figured out (with Lukas and Pierre’s assistance, merci beaucoup) how to make use of PEAR::ErrorStack for error handling. I’ve also decided to split my linked-list-in-PHP implementation into a separate package; first, because it might be useful for someone else; second, because as a separate package the PHP gurus that care deeply about things like returning references can go over it with a fine-toothed comb without having to worry about all of the MARC stuff.

In light of these new developments, he’as asking for comments once again on two different packages - Structure_Linked_List and File_MARC.

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Edin Kadribasic’s Blog: PHP 4.4.4-win32 with MySQL 5.0.22

Edin Kadribasic has posted a quick note about the release of the latest version hof his library package for PHP 4.4.4 and including the drivers for MySQL 5.0.22.

The new releases are coming fast these days. PHP 4.4.4 is released and so is the version with updated MySQL libs.

The archive contains two files. Both of these files should be dropped in your existing php-4.4.4 install folder overwritting php4ts.dll and adding libmysql.dll.

The libraries can be downloaded here.

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Peter Goodman’s Blog: Observers and Dispatchers

As pointed out by Cal Evans on the Zend Developer Zone, there’s a new look at Observers and Dispatchers over on Peter Goodman’s blog.

Maybe you’ve used a framework that uses Observers and Dispatchers, or you’ve heard of them but don’t know how they work. Well, I’m going to explain them and tell you why they’re so useful.

He starts with a table defining the parts of this dynamic duo before jumping into the code examples and explainations. His first example is just a basic use of the pattern, while the second involves using a MySQL table for the notification events.

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Symfony Project: Heading towards symfony 1.0

The Symfony Project has posted an update on this blog about the progress they’re making towards version 1.0 of their framework, including a detailed list of new additions.

If you watch the timeline, you probably noticed the important number of updates of these last days. If you opened a ticket, you also probably noticed that more than 160 tickets were fixed since 0.6.3. There are a lot of changes in symfony lately (see the changelog for the full list), and here is a brief overview of the important stuff.

Included in the list are things like:

  • Many-to-many relationships
  • New CLI tasks
  • AJAX actions have no layout by default
  • my* Classes
  • Validators

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Brian Moon’s Blog: PDO Turbo Button

On the “Ramblings of a web guy” blog by Brian Moon, there’s a good look at some benchmarks run with PDO, normally versus with the “turbo button” as talked about by Wez.

So, a while back, I did some tests with the mysql, mysqli and PDO extensions. In those tests, I found PDO to be much slower for selects than mysql and mysqli. Half as slow in fact.

So, I decided to try Wez’s trick of emulating prepared statements to see how PDO did. The results were interesting. Not sure if these are the “fair comparisons” that Wez wants to see, but I gave it my best shot.

His first set of stats was pretty close to his originals back when he first tested, and the second set of tests (with the “button” on) seem to be a bit hit and miss on the performance upgrade using this method.

I ran this several times. Maybe Wez or someone that works on PDO can shed some light on this. Seems like it would be tough to keep track of when to use this flag and when not to.

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