Chicago – May 24-27 php|tek in Chicago was fun as always. It is the best PHP conference I have ever been to, which makes sense, given that it is focused solely on PHP and surrounding technologies. The best thing about the conference is the community feeling in general. You get a real sense that everyone [...]
Protected vs Private Scope: Arrogance, Fear, and Handcuffs
The age old private vs protected debate has been re-ignited in the PHP community recently following the decision of Doctrine2 and Symfony2 to make all class methods private until there is a very clear and proven reason to change them to protected or public. The intention is a good one – to ensure they are [...]
Practical Uses for PHP 5.3 Closures
Closures are a new language-level feature that has been added to php 5.3, along with namespaces, late static binding, and a slew of other new features, patches, and updates. If you’re like me, you might be wondering what the practical uses for these new features are before you can rightly justify diving in and using them [...]
Get Only Public Class Properties for the Current Class in PHP
PHP provides two built-in functions to retrieve properties of a given class – get_object_vars and get_class_vars. Both these functions behave the same exact way, one taking an object as a variable and the other taking a string class name. The tricky thing about the two functions is that they behave differently depending on the call [...]
Why WordPress Should Not Have Won the Open Source CMS Award
Packt Publishing announced the winners for their annual Open Source CMS Award in November, and since then I have been a bit disturbed that the 2009 winner was WordPress. My first reaction was this: “… So a blogging platform won the content management system award? How sad is that?” My knee-jerk “how sad is that?” [...]
CodeWorks 2009 Dallas
I was fortunate enough to be selected as the regional speaker for the Dallas CodeWorks 2009 stop by the Dallas PHP User Group through a community voting and selection process. My talk was entitled Object Oriented Apologetics, and was essentially about letting people know what good object-oriented code is, when to use it, how to [...]
The One Character Block Comment
When debugging, I often find that I have to comment and un-comment a block of code several times during the process of trying to find out what’s going on. That used to mean typing and deleting comment block characters repetitively, but not anymore. Here’s a simple solution to that problem: Comment or un-comment an entire [...]
OKC PHP User Group Reboot
The local Oklahoma City PHP User Group is re-starting with the okcCoCo as the new venue. The new meetings will be on the second Tuesday of each month, starting with Tuesday, June 09, 2009 at 6:30pm as the first official meeting. Visit the official OKC PHP User Group website to register for meeting reminders and [...]
Introducing… PHP DataMapper!
PHP DataMapper is an open-source project I’ve been building and working on for a little while now. It’s a lightweight Object-Relational Mapper based on the Data Mapper design pattern, setup using one mapper per table. The primary goal is to make database access one of the easiest parts of building your application instead of the [...]
Early Performance Benchmarking is a Disease
Benchmarking and performance concerns should be one of the last things you address while building your application, but it seems as though, in the PHP community especially, it’s often one of the first things novice developers think about. Any PHP developer who’s been in the community for a while has heard preposterous claims like “use [...]
