Archive for September 28th, 2006
Dev Shed - September 28th, 2006
Last week we began our overview of the object-oriented features of PHP 5. This week we will start discussing design patterns. This article the second of several parts is excerpted from chapter two of the book em Advanced PHP Programming em written by George Schlossnagle Sams ISBN 672325616 ….
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PHP Developer - September 28th, 2006
Every developer (PHP or not) out there has sat back in their favorite chair and thought about what else is out there. Well, Cal Evans is no different and he shares a tool he was linked to (by Terry Chay) that could help you find that “what’s next” in your career.
I love Nashville, TN. Well, ok, I really like it. It’s a great town but I’m getting a bit restless. The problem I face is that I never know what the environment for programmers will be in a given city before moving there. So when Terry Chay briefly mentioned indeed.com’s salary search tool, it sparked my interest. If I, a PHP programmer, wanted to move to another city in the US, how would I fare salary wise? Since I don’t want to list every city in the US, I’ve selected CNN/Money’s Best Places to Live in America as my list of cities to compare.
Looking specifically for PHP-related jobs, he made the query, found the cities, ranked them and listed the average salary for the area. He also grabbed the cost of living for each location based on the closest large city and matched them up.
The result?
So it’s agreed then, we’ll all meet in Columbia, MD.
Check out the post and the lovely graph Cal has put together for more cities and their stats.
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PHP Developer - September 28th, 2006
Devshed is continuing their look at OOP and design patterns (started here) with the second part of the series - a look at the Adapter and Template Patterns. It’s another excerpt from Advanced PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle.
You have likely heard of design patterns, but you might not know what they are. Design patterns are generalized solutions to classes of problems that software developers encounter frequently.
To claim that a single chapter on design patterns is in any way complete would be ridiculous. The following sections explore a few patterns, mainly as a vehicle for showcasing some of the advanced OO techniques available in PHP.
They cover the Adapter pattern first, showing how it can be used to create an alternative to an API object (a database layer, in their case). They follow this up with a quick look at the Template pattern, handy to create a set of “hidden” values inside of a extended class.
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PHP Developer - September 28th, 2006
On his blog today, Lorenzo Alberton Talks about DBMS and the character sets they support and issues a call for help for anyone interested to help them (on the PEAR::MDB2 project) set up proper character set support for each database.
We’re working on PEAR::MDB2 charset and collation support. That means that we’re in the process of figuring out what’s the best way to set the charset in each DBMS, and how to make it portable and consistent through all of them.
I’ll try to explain how the various DBMS implement charset settings first, then describe the MDB2 status-quo regarding charset support. Finally, we’d like to get some feedback to implement a better charset support in MDB2.
He lists out the types of character sets - client, connection, database/table/field, and result - explaining each of their roles in the average connection. He then breaks out the different databases into the different settings they support for the different character set types.
The call for help comes in with him asking anyone out there with experience and skill in these areas to get in touch and help out if they can. Contact information is in the post. You can also check out some of Lukas Smith’s comments over on his blog too.
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PHP Developer - September 28th, 2006
David Sklar points out some of the new base sites that are being offered on the PHP-based mashup site, Ning.
It’s been a lot of hard work, so I’m quite excited that we’ve just released three great new Ning sites: Ning Videos, Ning Photos, and Ning Group.
Plus, all three sites have the juicy bits that every site on the Ning platform gets — things such as cloneability, complete customization, and built-in REST APIs. I’ve been watching the feeds for clones of photos and videos — I suppose seeing who’s cloned sites you care about is the Web 2.0 version of ego surfing.
He also talks about some of the features of the Ning Photo cloneable site like the slideshow and, in Ning Video, the embeddable player. The Ning Group application also has parsing abilities to help with sharing documents/music/photos/etc with anyone.
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