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Felix Geisendorfer has a great functionality note that CakePHP users might want to check out. It’s related to the Set class and how it handles nested arrays.

So far this has been a little dark spot for me in the core and from my previous quick looks at the class I’ve never been quite able to figure out what it’s exact purpose was. Until now all I knew was “well it’s probably some fancy array manipulation code that is somewhat obfuscated and undocumented”. Oh boy, I wish I had spent more time on this earlier. It’s probably one of coolest new features in 1.2 and nobody realizes it.

He starts with a simple example of how the class works with a nested array of user information. Normally, you’d loop through the array and append the values you’d need to another array (like the user’s name), but with Set, it’s as simple as calling the static “extract” method with the “path” to what you want out of the array. A simple one-line replacement for a (normally) three to four line bit of code.

He gives a few other examples using this same user information, grabbing various results and includes one at the end that is very nice indeed - pulling in an XML document, running it through a simple xmltoArray function and pulling out the titles in a few easy lines.

Pierre-Alain Joye has a little reminder posted to his blog today about two posts from planet-debian and Apache that refer to clones/references in PHP4 and PHP5 and some of the misconceptions presented there.

Reading planet-debian and Apache (from Sven and David), I catched two posts about clones and references in php4 and php5. I do not think it is worth to explain again everything here as Sara wrote a very good post already, check it out here.

He mentions his annoyance with articles/posts like these and the impact that it has on PHP as well as the person posting.

I wonder when the OS community in general will be mature enough to stop bitching at each other. And that’s valid for PHP developers, gnome-kde and other well established wars.

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In a new post Paul Jones points out some of the new behaviors that the extension is showing in the latest of the PHP 5 seres (version 5.2).

He starts with a code example that would work with a previous version of PHP/PDO that would allow for the binding of a single value to multiple places in the SQL statement. But:

Sadly, this is no longer the case in PHP 5.2.1. For valid reasons of security and stability in memory handling, as noted to me by Wez Furlong, the above behavior is no longer supported. That is, you cannot bind a single parameter or value to multiple identical placeholders in a statement. If you try it, PDO will throw an exception or raise an error, and will not execute the query. In short, you now need to match exactly the number of bound parameters or values with the number of placeholders.

Unfortunately, this is used quite often in Paul’s Solar framework, so an update to the Solar_Sql_Adapter::query() method has had to been made to allow for the binding of multiple items automatically. It works by incrementing the bind location (like “:foo”) with numbers at the end - simple and effective - and you can still pass an array to it and have it automagically work.

On the Inside Open Source blog today, there’s a “quick hit” post from Jason Gilmore for WordPress users out there using the WP-Cache and being frustrated by it’s functionality during the development process.

I’m using WordPress to build out a blog for a new endeavor, and couldn’t figure out why I had to go through a rather unwieldy refresh process (disabling a template and then enabling it anew) every time I changed it from within the WordPress administration interface.

It was the WP-Caching mechanism that WordPress comes with that was causing the issue, so he tracked down where to disable it for the duration of the development time. (Options -> WP-Cache -> Disable It).

Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:

• Node
• ezMySQL
• List content of directory
• Pablosky MySQL
• RImageManipulator
• MySQL Pagination
• HTTP Locale
• MySQL DB Class with Data Manipulation Class
• TimeTaMeR
• Easy PHP Validation
• Filtreatment
• Image to ASCII text
• KDoubleMetaphone
• Geo Conversion

DevShed is taking a look at another design pattern today in part one of their look at the Strategy Pattern:

That’s exactly the case with the subject of this article, the strategy pattern. To put things more clearly, I’m sure that you always validate adequately all the forms included in your web sites. First off, you create a few validation functions (or classes), then use these functions to check the validity of the data supplied by users, and finally determine the course of action to be taken accordingly.

To make the concept clearer, they Create a simple example - a file handling class that can read and write data to the file of the developer’s choosing. This base class is then used inside their StrategySelector class to make saving both HTML and XML data as simple as a basic string.

Frank and Stehpan has posted two more items in their “PHP6 wishlist” series” today - both mentioning annotations.

In Stephan’s post:

Porting JavaDoc comments to PHP was one of the best things, that ever happened to to PHP4. But like in Java 4, the DocBlocks in PHP evolved from plain documentation to a feature that adds meta information to classes, methods, properties and variables. IDEs, like Zend Studio, use the @var tag to enable type hinting for method return values, which would not possible without the DocBlock, as PHP is a dynamic languages.

And from Frank:

In part three of his wishlist for PHP 6 Stephan wrote that he would like to see annotations built into PHP 6 directly. I disagree with him about that. Annotations can be done in userland, without any problems. He already gave some examples of projects that accomplished this task. But if you look at them you see that every project has a different solution on how to implement annotations for PHP which leads to the problem that if you use different projects in your own application you have to handle all their ways of treating annotations. Annoying, isn’t it?

On the Zend Developer Zone, there’s a new post pointing to the second part of their look at the Manning Publishing book “PHP in Action”.

If you’ve been anxiously awaiting part two of this series then your wait is over. Here’s a short introduction to the section part of this series written by the author of the book, Dagfinn Reiersol. I had the privilege of meeting Dagfinn at phpuk last week. Below the introduction is the link I know you’ve been waiting for.

The new PDF they link to focus on two different patterns - the Decorator (a wrapper class) pattern and the Null Object (an object that works like the others but does nothing behind the scenes) pattern.

Francois Zaninotto has posted about two upcoming instances where the Symfony Framework’s presence can be seen - a conference about it in Paris and at the PHP Quebec Conference.

Two upcoming events may be of great interest for symfony fans. The French PHP User association (AFUP) organizes a conference about symfony 1.0 in Paris. […] Also, the PHP Quebec Conference features two sessions about symfony, one in English and one in French.

The Paris confernece is happening on March 6th and the PHP Quebec Conference March 14th through the 16th in Montreal.