The PHP Grind

DevShed: Displaying Meaningful Error Messages when Auto Loading Classes in PHP 5

DevShed has posted the next part of their series looking at handling errors thrown by the __autoload functionality of PHP. This time they enhance their previous method and allow for custom error messaging.

In this last article of the series I’m going to introduce some additional modifications to the current signature of the “__autoload()” function to make it throw exceptions that display more useful error messages.

They start by setting up the application to have something to build from (a series of PHP scripts). They add on the exception handling to throw the custom error (the “class not found” they mentioned).

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Chris Shiflett’s Blog: PHP Advent Calendar 2007

Now that it’s all wrapped up, Chris Shiflett has posted his own look back at the PHP Advent calendar he coordinated.

Coordinating this turned out to be a lot of work, but I hope to do it again next year. […] With a little bit of prodding, we all hopefully learned a little more than we would have otherwise, and the people who were gracious enough to share something deserve our thanks.

You can check out his post (and, of course, our own) for a complete list of all twenty-four days.

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Richard Heyes’ Blog: An epiphany… (using cron)

Richard Heyes has shared an epiphany he’s come up with - a method for running scripts in a web-based environment using lynx.

OK maybe not to you, but it has just occurred to me, and things don’t come to me all that fast these days. Cron jobs. […] You can have a directory inside your webroot called “cron” (imaginative eh?) with scripts in there that are run via cron.

His method uses the cron daemon on the machine to invoke lynx and call the web page through its url. Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages of the method (including having the script open to the world - scary). Be sure to check out the comments for other suggestions from fellow developers.

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Mike Willbanks’ Blog: Using PHP Accelerators

Mike Willbanks has made a series of posts covering the acceleration tools available for you the PHP developer and some of the benchmarks of using them in an application.

Here’s the list:

• PHP Accelerators : APC vs Zend vs XCache with Zend Framework - a comparison of three tools - APC, the Zend Framework components and the XCache tool
• Zend Framework Performance Zend_Loader - a specific look at benchmarks on the Zend_Loader component
• PHP Accelerators: The Missing Details - benchmark results (and code) showing results from testing on the Zend_Loader component
• Accelerators Revisited - a revisit to some of the benchmarks made previously (to change things based on user contributed comments)

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Displaying Meaningful Error Messages when Auto Loading Classes in PHP 5

If you re a PHP developer who wants to learn how to load automatically into client code all of the source classes required by your object-oriented applications keep reading. In this series of articles you ll learn how to implement the magic __autoload function that comes integrated with PHP 5. With this function you ll be able to build scripts that can include automatically all of the classes needed by a given application without using multiple require require_once PHP statements….

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