PHPDeveloper.org

Debuggable Blog: Better array syntax for PHP: Here's your chance to weigh in

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:07:03 -0500

On the Debuggable blog, Nate Abele has posted a request for opinions on a topic that's been lighting up the PHP mailing lists (and other social media) lately - the alternative array syntax for PHP.

Well, there's a patch available, but 2/3 of the active PHP committers (who participated in the vote) voted against its inclusion. However, of the end-users participating in the discussion, 17 out of 20 voted in favor. Shortly before the voting was concluded, there was a call for some user-land input, so I decided to humbly submit my two pennies.

His comments support the idea, noting that arrays are "our bread and butter" for the language and should be updated to make them even easier to use (and more in line with the declarations of other variable types).

PHP 10.0 Blog: We are doomed! (and Ticks in PHP)

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:29:00 -0500

In this new post to the PHP 10.0 blog, Stas mentions the "impending doom" of PHP that's been going around the community, including in this post on the TechRepublic site.

He does, however, branch off into something much more interesting that seems to be somewhat ignored by developers - the use of ticks on their code:

This is something named "ticks" - I wonder how many of the PHP developers heard about it and of those how many actually used it. Could it be used for offloading long-running I/O-bound tasks or grouping them together (e.g. so we could wait for DB and HTTP in parallel and not sequentially)? Would there be any use at all for such functionality and if so - how it's supposed to work? I.e. how would you know it's done and how you would collect and use the results?

It's suggested in the comments that it could be used for any kind of application that might need the pseudo-multithreading it offers (including something like scripts needing multiple TCP connections).

Inside Open Source: Possible addition to array syntax in PHP

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 07:34:00 -0600

According to this new post on the Inside Open Source blog from APress, Andi Gutmas has made a for a new syntax to be added to the existing array functionality in PHP.

The suggestion involves the use of brackets ([ and ]) to declare the initial array, similar to the way other languages (even Javascript) work.

The current split among the big players in PHP development looks to be about 50/50. The general thought of the opposition is that it is an unnecessary change that will only lead to confusion in the future. Why create two ways of doing the same thing?

YoungCoders.com: The PHP Construct You've Never Used

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 07:38:14 -0500

As pointed out by the Zend Developer Zone today, there's a useful forum post over on the YoungCoders.com website that talks about very useful feature that some PHP developers just don't use - ticks.

You've probably never used it, never saw it, or never found a practical use for ticks, a underused and powerful feature of PHP that allows you to implement exceptions in PHP4, do intensive debugging and profiling, check database connections, turn PHP into an event driven language, or harness complex control over your code.

The post talks about what ticks are, how to enable them, and a few examples of how to use them. Check out more about them in this page on the PHP Manual.

Brian Moon's Blog: Initializing & typing variables with settype()

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 07:01:47 -0500

In his latest post, Brian Moon talks about a method to help you and your code fit into an E_STRICT style of coding - the settype function.

These days, the way to develop is to have E_ALL and maybe even throw in E_STRICT if you are really hard core. That of course means having all your variables initialized before they are used.

In his view, defining them is good, but it's more "elegant" to use the settype function to make it more clear where they are defined. He also includes a function, using settype, that ensures that the entered values are what they should be (i.e. and int is an int).