David Otton posted a short but thought-provoking post about stdClass, which many think is the "base class" all PHP classes automatically inherit from. I have to admit that I had this misconception as well. [...] This [difference in PHP from other OOP languages] presents some room for analysis in how things are handled in dynamic and static languages, and how those differences affect things...

Jani talks about dynamic and static typing in languages and how that effects the base types things are extended from as well as some of the benefits that having a standard base class affords developers.

Going to go through a quick walk through of how to use a hacked together version of my old jquery library with solar. You can find the class source files here.

He sets up a callback in the Base controller (that all other controllers extend) for the jQuery calls so that any of the "child" controllers can just call "/controller/jquery" to make jQuery requests.

In talking about the Firephp support:

There has been a flurry of work around Firebug recently including announcements that Zend Framework and Symfony both now have Firebug logging support through the use of the Firephp. As of this weekend Solar can be added to the list with its own support.

A quick example is included.

In the second post he looks at a simpler way to share information between all of your controllers without code duplication - adding it to the constructor of the Base controller your application is built on.

I stumbled across a blog post on how to implement Enums in PHP via userland code written by Jonathan Hohle. I liked the concept he had, but the implementation was a bit unappealing because it used eval() among other more minor issues. You shouldn't need to generate Enums at runtime, so I took that as a challenge to find a way to do it at compile time, thus making the code much more efficient.

His enums would support type hinting and would, ideally, be iterable. He gives the code he's worked up - a base class, another than extends it to make a basic enum structure and some handy changes to support comparisons. A few more changes (and a few other extended classes later) he has some pretty well functioning enums that can even bee iterated through.

The interesting thing about live publishing of a long tutorial series is that it's not flawless. In fact it's the opposite. [...] To cover all these I'll occasionally highlight the more important ones both in notes to new entries, or where they slip past me, in Addendum entries like this one.

There's four sections in this update - one dealing with the referencing of base URLs, another worrying about magic_quotes settings, an updated database schema for the project and the final about removing non-english characters in the title URLs.

Since PHP 5.2.3 has been published, over 9700 tests were sent to the Quality Assurance Team. In those tests reports, we can find the list of failed tests, and an anonymous PHPinfo(), that helps the PHP team to understand the origin of the errors. With such a number of phpinfo(), it is tempting to get some stats about compilation choices.

Damien has graphed out a few different data sets - the extensions included in most default installations, other popular extensions that may or may not be compiled in, the list of rare extensions (a long list) and how often they show up and, finally, the graphing of all extensions included in any PHP install anywhere. Links to more information about these extensions can be found immediately following the graph.

Today I stumbled upon a cool article that explains how one can control one's CSS colors via PHP to former relative shades. How is this done I hear you asking? Just look at the following code.

His example uses the tutorial's csscolor class and shows how to implement it with a base color and a highlight color and use it to generate variations of the same shades.

I was very pleased, that PHP 5 introduced type hints, although they are not available for primitives like string, int, boolean, etc. Still, I'd like to see the object type hint introduced in any future version of PHP that allows me to specify, that a method or function only accepts an object, regardless of the type of the object.

He gives the example of Java's handling of the functionality and what PHP does with the same type of code. He also mentions that, via the Reflection API extension, some of this is possible already, so why not just include it from here on out?

The community is also talking about the release:

• Greg Beaver's discussion of how this new version is "pushing the envelope".
• A release announcement from the International PHP Magazine website.

It's been a lot of hard work, so I'm quite excited that we've just released three great new Ning sites: Ning Videos, Ning Photos, and Ning Group.

Plus, all three sites have the juicy bits that every site on the Ning platform gets -- things such as cloneability, complete customization, and built-in REST APIs. I've been watching the feeds for clones of photos and videos -- I suppose seeing who's cloned sites you care about is the Web 2.0 version of ego surfing.

He also talks about some of the features of the Ning Photo cloneable site like the slideshow and, in Ning Video, the embeddable player. The Ning Group application also has parsing abilities to help with sharing documents/music/photos/etc with anyone.