Some people love their automobiles. They can tell you all all about their technical specifications. They buy upgrades and after market parts. Its a lifestyle and a hobby. I am not one of those people. For me an automobile is purely a means to an end. I am here, [...]
Dagfinn has a post looking at using the new closure feature of PHP 5.3. He compares using foreach for iteration versus array_map. “Interesting,” he concludes, “but not necessarily better than conventional alternatives.”
I agree for that case. Consider instead, a more complicated operation that requires a setup and a tear down after.
setup();
operation();
teardown();
Now what happens [...]
I really enjoyed myself at this year’s php | tek. The conference seemed even better than last year. Here are the slides from my talks…
Exceptional PHP
Coding for Success: Writing Software You’ll Be Able To Understand Next Month
Here are some of the books I mentioned…
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
php|architect’s Guide to PHP [...]
Well, I’ve made it to PHP|tek in Chicago. I flew in last night, had a beer with Jason and then used the WiFi in the lobby to spin up an extra large EC2 instance (via RightScale) to do some benchmarks for one of my talks. I’m using the the XL instance because it [...]
Larry Garfield has an interesting set of benchmarks covering many of PHP’s magic methods. His results correspond pretty well to my own benchmarks in the area. The thing to take away is that its not necessarily the overhead of the magic methods, but rather what you do inside them. Its hard to [...]
A quote from Cal Henderson (via simonwillison) presents a “Web Application Scale of Stupidity:”
| OGF (One Giant Function) —- Sanity —- OOP (Object Oriented Programming) |
The scale that Cal is talking about is actually better known as modularity:
| Few large modules —- Sanity? —- Many Small Modules |
If you haven’t listened to Alan Kay [...]
Mac OS X is a great development platform for working with PHP. Leopard comes with Apache, PHP and many other development tools, such as subversion already installed. Leopard brings a much needed upgrade from Tiger’s tired PHP 4 to a very modern version of PHP 5.2.4. This is a guide for setting [...]
Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords. Perhaps that reflects Java’s [...]
Sometimes its the little things that make a difference. If you run the this test program in PHP 4 (tested on 4.4.7):
< ?php
function test($arg) { echo "talk like a pirate."; }
test();
?>
You get the following message:
Warning: Missing argument 1 for test() in /usr/bin/- on line 2
The error message here is reported at the position of [...]
Well, php|tek is over. It was a great conference and I’m really glad I went. This was my first PHP conference.
One of my main goals was to meet some of the folks at php|architect. I’ve been writing the Test Pattern column for them for over a year now. I was finally [...]
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