The PHP Grind

Christopher Kunz’s Blog: Thoughts on ext/filter et al.

Christopher Kunz wonders in this new post about the filter extension that’s been getting so much press in the PHP community lately - specifically about it being active despite not being finished.

Basically, what he [Ben Ramsey] conveyed to me (and his blog entry supports this) was not to use ext/filter or Zend_Filter at all. Nearly every second slide regarding functions of the ZF component or the extension contained remarks like “This doesn’t work yet, it’s a TODO”, “this won’t validate XY properly”.

Of course, other community members (Pierre-Alain Joye and Ilia Alshanetsky) come back in the comments to refute Christopher’s claims. They note that it’s not the filter extension that has the problems, rather that some of the features are missing outside of the core filtering functionality.

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DevShed: Managing Email

If you want to write PHP scripts that handle email, there are a few things you need to understand first. This article, the first of two parts, introduces you to these concepts.

The article is an excerpt from the Zend PHP Certification Guide and focuses on some of the basics of handling email with PHP. There’s some knowledge that you’ll need to have before you get started, but the rest is pretty simple stuff. It’s walked through at a good pace, making it easy to follow and a good beginner’s resource.

Topics they discuss include working with MX records, preparing your PHP installation to handle emails, and sending an email from your script (including instructions for both Unix and Windows based systems).

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Managing Email

If you want to write PHP scripts that handle email there are a few things you need to understand first. This article the first of two parts introduces you to these concepts. It is excerpted from chapter 8 of the em Zend PHP Certification Study Guide em written by Zend Technologies Sams ISBN 672327 9 ….

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Joshua Thompson’s Blog: Prototype-based programming in PHP

Exploration in a language is always a good thing and, in this new post to his blog, Joshua Thompson approaches a method of programming familiar to Javascript users - Prototype-based programming.

The basic idea is that functions can be added to classes dynamically. In Javascript functions can be added to a static class (using prototype) and it will be added to all instances of the class, or they can be added to a specific instance and only be added to that instance.

The rest of the post is all about the code - a Prototype class that sets up the __get, __call, __set magic functions and a prototype() method and isCallable method (to check if a function exists). In his example, he creates three test classes that he adds functions to, including one that inherits from one of the other test classes (and not just the Prototype class).

In the end, he uses it to call his custom “fun” methods, outputting various results based on the contents passed in.

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Pierre-Alain Joye’s Blog: Prominent PHP Users (developers), do your homework or be humble/keep quiet

A bit fed up with some of the developers out there, Pierre has posted some symptoms and suggestions for those who don’t “do their homework” before opening their mouth (or keyboards).

It becomes more than annoying to read slides or blog posts from some prominent member of the PHP Community about things they do not know. It is for a warning. It is not aimed to be diplomatic or to target any particular person or group of persons (even if some are obvious . But one thing is sure, we have to worry about what we say about other projects or other developers work.

He asks questions of these sorts of people (like “why do you talk about something but has little/no clue about it?” or “why do you wait the day of the release to talk about possible issues?”) and some solutions to these sorts of problems:

• learn what you are talking about and keep your knowledge up to date (especially for new features, they change a lot during the first year)
• Your talks or blogs are no bug report, mail php-internal, report a bug or ping the devs on IRC (idle is also not productive)
• Don’t wait the release day to make your own promotion on our backs. All PHP releases may introduce new issues, that’s why we have RC.

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