PHP Developer - December 28th, 2007
The Zend Developer Zone has posted a review of Packt Publishing’s “Learning PHP Data Objects” book writen up by Akash Mehta.
In Learning PHP Data Objects, the author Dennis Popel examines this new [database access] system and explains how to begin using PDO in development as a replacement for typical database drivers. The book is an excellent introduction to the data abstraction layer and also provides essential insight into the inner workings of database interaction with PHP.
Akash talks briefly about the history of PDO and what it can be used for first, then gets into the contents of the book (things like the intro chapters and the quality of the writing). The thing he thinks makes the bok stand out, though, is the examples and sample code that reflect both simple methods and more complex issues PDO developers might run into.
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PHP Developer - December 27th, 2007
The Bakery (the CakePHP repository) has posted a few new things recently with topics ranging from Javascript helpers to new behaviors. Here’s the latest:
As always, you can find these and lots more great CakePHP-related content over on The Bakery.
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PHP Developer - December 27th, 2007
On the Stubbles blog, Frank Kleine has posted about the release of a new wrapper class he’s developed to go around a virtual file system.
Some minutes ago I released the first version of vfsStream. vfsStream is a stream wrapper for a virtual file system that may be helpful in unit tests to mock the real file system. It can be used with any unit test framework, like PHPUnit or SimpleTest.
The idea for the class came about when he thought about the use of real databases vs test databases and applied it to file systems. You can grab the latest version from their trac website as well as get more information about known issues and a brief example of its use.
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PHP Developer - December 27th, 2007
Michael Kimsal has posted some more thoughts on what he calls the “sad state of PHP development” pointing out some of the practices of the PHP group surrounding the development of the language.
Every few months there’s a release, whether large or small, which introduces new features and bug fixes. However, with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason other than someone with commit access decided they liked the ‘new’ way better than the old way.
He points out a specific example, get_object_vars and how its return values were changed in an earlier release as well as the update to glob made recently to change its return types.
In his opinion:
No changes should be made to the PHP core without an issue being opened, either in the ‘bug’ tracker or some other issues tracker.
Be sure to check out the comments for other great opinions on the topic.
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