Valitron is a simple, minimal and elegant stand-alone PHP validation library with NO dependencies. Valitron uses simple, straightforward validation methods with a focus on readable and concise syntax. Why Another Validation Library? Valitron was created out of frustration with other validation libraries that have dependencies on large components from other frameworks unrelated to validation like [...]
Introducing Bullet: The Functional PHP Micro-Framework
Bullet is a new PHP micro-framework with a unique functional approach to URL routing that allows for more flexibility and requires less verbosity than the more typical full route+callback approach found in other micro-frameworks. The Problem with Independent Scope The main problem with most micro-frameworks and even full-stack MVC frameworks that leads to code duplication is [...]
Handling Exceptions in Gearman Tasks (Even Background Ones)
I recently had some issues with Gearman tasks throwing exceptions and killing the whole Gearman daemon. This made it nearly impossible to trace errors back to their origin, because the logged exception stack trace didn’t provide much useful information, because it just logged where it failed in Gearman – not the actual file and line [...]
Nginx + PHP-FPM Blank Pages with PHAR Packages
Ran into this issue when setting up a new VPS for AutoRidge. This happens when using Nginx and PHP-FPM with PHP 5.3+ and the Suhosin patch when trying to run a PHP script using a PHAR package. From what I can gather, the Suhosin patch basically blocks PHP include/require functions from executing files ending with [...]
php|tek 2011
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 [...]
