Category: PHP

I was having a discussion on IRC about use statements and whether they improved code readability or not. The choices Consider this hypothetical code: $cache = new \User\Service\Cache(); $mapper = new \User\Mapper\User($cache) $form = new \User\Form\Registration($mapper); $form->process($request->getPost()); vs use User\Service\Cache; use User\Mapper\User; use User\Form\Registration; // other code $cache = new Cache(); $db = new User($cache) $form = new Registration($mapper); $form->process($request->getPost()); The first snippet is completely unambiguous at the expense of verbosity. Those longer class names… continue reading.

Posted on 17 March 2014 in PHP

I recently had a requirement to create a zip file from a number of files created within my application. As it has been years since I last had this problem, I had a look around and discovered that PHP 5.2 has the ZipArchive class that makes this easy.

Posted on 15 January 2014 in PHP

The Composer package manager along with the Packagist repository site is quickly becoming the defacto PHP package management system. One feature I found out about recently is that you can install packages globally rather than locally into your project. I think that this is most useful for development tools, such as PHPUnit which are then available everywhere.

Posted on 23 December 2013 in PHP

I've been using number_format() for a very long time, but recently discovered that within the intl extension there's a NumberFormatter class available too. This is quite a clever class as it is Locale aware and handles formatting currency, including the correct symbol. You can check if you have the intl extension installed using php -m | grep intl and if you don't then you can install it with apt-get install php5-intl or yum install php-intl… continue reading.

Posted on 29 July 2013 in PHP

I previously talked about the terms I use for objects in the model layer and now it's time to put some code on those bones. Note that,as always, all code here is example code and not production-ready. An entity My entities are plain old PHP objects: namespace Book; class Entity { protected $id; protected $author; protected $title; protected $isbn; public function __construct($data = array()) { $this->populate($data); } // Data transfer methods public function populate($data) {… continue reading.

Posted on 1 April 2013 in PHP

I recently updated to OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) which has PHP 5.3.13 installed by default. When testing something today, I discovered that a very very large form wasn't submitting all fields. It seemed that $_POST was being truncated. After a little bit of searching around I discovered the max_input_vars php.ini setting. This is new since PHP 5.3.9 and defaults to 1000. As OS X also comes with suhosin installed, if you want to increase… continue reading.

Posted on 22 August 2012 in PHP

I know that there are a lot of posts now about namespaces in PHP 5.3. This is mine which is how I learnt how they work. What are namespaces? From the PHP manual: namespaces are a way of encapsulating items Hardly the most useful of definitions, but it's a starting point! A namespace is a way of grouping code that exists across multiple files without having a naming collision. That is, you can have the… continue reading.

Posted on 16 February 2012 in PHP

With OS X 10.7, Apple continues to ship PHP 5.3 with PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL out of the box. This is how to set it up from a clean install of 10.7. /usr/local Ensure that the following directories exist: sudo mkdir /usr/local/include sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/man/man1 MySQL Download the 64bit DMG version of MySQL 5.1.x (or 5.5.x) for OS X 10.6 from mysql.com and install the pkg, the startup… continue reading.

Posted on 25 July 2011 in PHP

Update: This position has now been filled. So… we seem to be in the same position as everyone else and are looking to hire a new, great, PHP developer! From the spec: Big Room Internet are looking for a great PHP software engineer to bring depth to the team and spearhead our future development. You will be working across a range of projects, ideally with experience in seeing through a project from start to finish.… continue reading.

Posted on 23 March 2011 in PHP

My wife decided that she wanted to display a list of her latest AudioBoos in the sidebar of her blog. She looked at the AudioBoo JavaScript widget but decided it wasn't subtle enough and so she enlisted me to solve her problem. It turns out that AudioBoo has an RSS feed, so a simple plugin was required. I had a quick look on the extension site, but most are now "widgets" which her theme isn't… continue reading.

Posted on 3 January 2011 in PHP