The PHP Grind

Building Interpreter Classes with PHP 5

If you have ever written an application that primarily parses commands — and who hasn t — keep reading. As is often the case pattern-based programming makes this task easier. In this first part of a three-part article series you ll learn the basic concepts surrounding the Interpreter pattern with plenty of hands-on examples….

Search Site Optimized for Developers and IT Pros Fast and relevant. Find technical documents, podcasts, whitepapers, research and blog posts.

Continue Reading · Add comment

The Bakery: Cruise Holidays Website

On the CakePHP Bakery site, there’s another case study posted (from Neil Crookes) about a company that used the framework to develop a “Cruise Holidays” website: islandcruises.com.

I was lead programmer on the project and all my experience prior to it has been in writing procedural code, not OO and not MVC, however, after spending a few days looking through the manual and checking out the wiki, we decided to give CakePHP a try.

We also found the contributions from the community on the wiki/bakery and in the snippets, an incredibly valuable resource and in fact made use of articles and code from othAuth, Pagination, Improved Advance Validation with Parameters, Sending Email With PHPMailer.

He also mentions baking his own controllers, models, and views for the CRUD functionality, making for a half-day bake time.

Continue Reading · Add comment

Zend Developer Zone: PHP Security Tip #20 (Resources)

The Zend Developer Zone has posted yet another in their running series of security tips to help you safeguard your applications - Tip #20 concerning security resources to check into.

To paraphrase an American Patriot “The price of security is eternal vigilance”. You have to keep watch over your system but you also have to keep learning. Today’s security tip is a list of resources to help you keep your security knowledge up to date. I’ve gathered together several resources for you to consider when looking for PHP Security information.

Resources Cal recommends include Chris Shiflett’s book “Essential PHP Security”, the APress “Pro PHP Security” from Chris Snyder, and more. Of course, he also recommends their own Security Tips series for helpful hints as well.

Continue Reading · Add comment

Tobias Schlitt’s Blog: Randomized Pi calculation

Since there is no “magic variable” to get a value for Pi in an application, Tobias Schlitt offers up the next best thing - his homegrown solution for creating the value (using a randomized variation).

I don’t know which is the most common way to calculate Pi in computer programs, but from the stochastics book a read for my recent stochastics exam, I have a randomized variation, which is quite cool I think.

The code example is included along with a bit of explanation for those not familiar with the concepts behind it. It uses two of PHP functions, pow() and mt_rand(), to run through a series of iterations and, using a preset precision value, find the “hits” to finally calculate the value at the end.

Continue Reading · Add comment

Laura Thomson’s Blog: It had to happen.

Laura Thomson, a trued and true PHP and self-proclaimed as the “only person in the PHP blogosphere who hasn’t said something about Ruby On Rails” has tried the language out and has posted about some of her thoughts today.

We’ve been working for a while on a RoR project. Originally it came in as a really high concept idea - the spec was more like a film treatment than a functional spec. […] So we set out to build a prototype in six weeks. We are known as a PHP shop, although of our web dev, about half is in PHP and the other half in Perl. At the time we had working for us a very talented Rails guru, so we thought we’d give it a try.

Unfortunately, their “Rails Guru” moved on to more Ruby pastures so they’ve been left with maintaining the application. Laura, being one of the team, has learned a few things about the language that’s caused an internet craze:

• It makes getting started easy. This is what it’s famous for.
• As things get more complicated, the ideal of convention over configuration starts to get in your way.
• The documentation sucks. This is however, improving.
• The community support is really immature.
• Learning to debug apps is really really hard to begin with.

Of course, other things were learned and several books purchased - a learning experience to say the least (including working with a bit of UI design).

Continue Reading · Add comment