Pragmatism in today's world
One of the changes between Slim Framework 2 and 3 is that the application singleton has gone. In Slim 2, you could do this: $app = \Slim\Slim::getInstance(); // do something with $app In general, you didn't need access to $app itself, but rather you wanted access to something that the app knows about, such as a database adapter, or the router for access to the urlFor method to create a URL to a route. With… continue reading.
Zend Framework 1 is still actively maintained and we fully intend to ensure that ZF1 works with no problems on PHP 7 when its released. Now that PHP 7.0.0 Alpha 1 has been released, it's time to find out if your Zend Framework 1 app works with it. The easiest way to do this is to use a virtual machine. My preference is Vagrant with Rasmus' PHP7dev box. A simple VM I wanted to test… continue reading.
Brent Simmons has recently posted How Not to Crash #9: Mindset: I used to think that means I should write code that’s about 80% as clever as I am. Save a little bit for debugging. But over the years I’ve come to think that I should write code that’s about 10% as clever as I am. And I’ve come to believe that true cleverness is in making code so clear and obvious that it looks… continue reading.
Today marks 20 years since PHP was released by Rasmus Lerdorf and Ben has been asking for how we started our PHP journey. My first use of PHP was to write a website for an online computer gaming guild for EverQuest, back in 1999. A friend recommended it when I asked him how people programmed webpages in something other the C! That first website is still going and I'm not proud of the code. I'm… continue reading.
With the release of Xdebug 2.3, I have updated my xdebug php.ini settings, so it seems sensible to write them down where I won't lose them! The new-for-2.3 features which prompted this are xdebug.overload_var_dump, which Derick has written about and xdebug.halt_level which I have previously written about. I find both of these very useful. This is my current php.ini configuration: ; Xdebug settings ; var_dump() displays everything, including filename and line number xdebug.overload_var_dump = 2… continue reading.
As I keep looking this up in other projects that I've written, I'm putting it here so I can find it more easily. There are a number of built-in PHP functions that generate a notice or warning that you can't turn off when something goes wrong, such as parse_ini_file and file_get_contents. One common solution to this is to suppress using the @ operator: $result = @file_get_contents($url); if (false === $result) { // inspect error_get_last() to… continue reading.
Warning Slim 3 is currently under active development. Expect BC breaks! I'm creating a number of projects in Slim 3 (which is currently under development) at the moment in order test things out and found that I was setting them up in essentially the same way. To save me having to do this each time, I've now created a skeleton project that is set up with the directory structure that I like and also includes… continue reading.
Wikipedia defines a role model like this: A role model is a person whose behavior, example, or success is or can be emulated by others All my life, I have identified people that I perceive to be a little better than I am in some facet of life that I want to get better at and I emulate them. I've been doing this all my life. They have been my role models. My first recollection… continue reading.
I currently use rst2pdf to create presentations slide decks from reStructured Text files. I like rST a lot as it's more expressive than Markdown and allows for extension. Tables in rST are marked up like this: +———–+———–+———–+ | Heading 1 | Heading 2 | Heading 3 | +===========+===========+===========+ | a | b | c | | | | | | aa | | | +———–+———–+———–+ | d | e | f | +———–+———–+———–+ | g… continue reading.
In Zend Framework 2, if you define your input filter via configuration, then you can override validation messages using a format along the lines of: <validators> <notEmpty> <messages> <isEmpty>Please provide your telephone number</isEmpty> </messages> </notEmpty> </validators> Setting the message is easy enough, once you have the correct key name. This is a list of all the keys for the standard validators: Validator Key name Default message Alnum alnumInvalid Invalid type given. String, integer or float… continue reading.
