Imagine this - you develop an application on your machine and then, when you come to deploy it to the production server, all of a sudden, you encounter various errors and failures. Or maybe, when you decide to switch your hosting provider, your application stops behaving the way it should. How about this -... one day, out of the blue (well, out of your IT manager's whim) your application just misbehaves. Sounds familiar?

Times like can never be completely avoided (yes, there'll always be bugs) but you can take some steps to help prevent most of the major failing points. He points out some of the key configuration directives to watch out for, differences in some functions' responses based on the OS, and the differences in character sets between a unix-based and Windows based environment (like rn versus just n).

Checking up on it again, he was happily surprised with some of the results:

I asked him again today via private mail and his response was swift. The whois entries for phpshield.com now point to his person and we can expect additional information on the web site itself soon. I like it when things can be resolved like that and I actually think this is a chance for his product rather than a possible competition issue.

This helps to more clearly define the difference between the PHPShield and SourceGuarian products. You can find out more information about each product from their sites - PHPShield and SourceGuarian. Both are encoding packages to help protect and distribute your code.

This function is production ready and you can use it in any of your application which mainly works with these date difference. I have found it somewhere in web, just forgot the source. Thanks to the unknown author of this excellent function.

The rest of the post is the function itself that takes in the interval string (formatting), the start date, end date and whether to use timestamps or not.

If you are a PHP developer chances are you have heard some of the buzz on Ruby on Rails, an open source web framework for rapid application development. [...] These are similarities and differences of Ruby compared to PHP. If you know PHP, this should give you a good and quick insight in what Ruby is all about and how it compares to PHP.

Some of the similarities include the dynamic typing, class scoping, heredoc abilities and current object references. Differences include syntax differences, method calling, naming conditions and Ruby's lack of interface/abstract classes.

There are rather significant syntactical differences between PHP and Ruby. For example PHP requires semicolons at the end of lines and generally requires curly brackets to enclose blocks of code. Ruby, on the other hand, uses newline characters to denote the end of a line of code...

The post goes through other differences like: value return methods, function/method naming, similarities between them, frameworks, namespaces, documentation and hosting options.

I found it incredibly difficult to find any form of time_since function in php so to save anyone else the trouble to hunting through hundreds of useless websites here is the function you may want to use, written by Natalie Downe (you don't want to know how long it took to hunt it down).

The function takes in the value, subtracts the two timestamps and loops through an array of "time chunks" to each other to show nicely formatted output of how long the difference it.

Posting in the full realization of the futility of doing so, there's some PHP bashing (as usual) happening on reddit at the moment: PHP vs Python - the real difference, brought on by this mildly amusing image. While I can accept the points - technically it's actually much harder in handle errors uniformly in PHP and the community is less rich in computer scientists than Python - the corresponding flame war on reddit manages to miss a different point, which is easiest expressed in code.

He gives two sample scripts and asks what the real differences are. He answers his own question by way of saying that what matters between the two is how they're deployed (when it comes to error reporting):

Because PHP "resets" after each request ( see here or for much more detail here ) it's actually not always necessary to handle errors explicitly'"assuming there's not something fundamentally "broke" about your code and it's some kind of runtime error (e.g. db is down), it's often enough to just ignore the problem and wait for the system to "right itself" - nothing is going to leave PHP in a state it can't recover from.

PHP comes with an extensive catalog of date and time functions, all designed to let you easily retrieve temporal information, massage it into a format you require, and either use it in a calculation or display it to the user. However, if you'd like to do something more complicated, things get much, much hairier

To make things easier, they enlist the service of the PEAR Date package to help bridge the gap between the time zones faster. They give some of the basics of using the package before actually getting into the time zone conversion. The code is pretty straight-forward and they even include other simple tips like how to calculate the GMT offset and how to add and subtract timespans.

A long-standing feature request for PHPUnit has been the generation of a real diff between strings that span multiple lines.

Ideally this would be done by implementing the diff algorithm in PHP. But since Derick needed a working solution quickly, the two of us came up with a "hack": we just use GNU diff and invoke the diff command via shell_exec().

He gives an example, showing how to judge the difference between two strings of HTML in a test. The result catches the differences (inside the body tags) easily.

Recently, some code in the PEAR installer was discovered to be invalid in PHP 4. After a bit of investigation, I realized that the significant difference in the way objects are represented internally in PHP 5 was the culprit.

In PHP 5, this displays as bool(true), but in PHP 4, it displays bool(false). The reason is that in PHP 4, objects are simply glorified associative arrays, and so PHP treats the above [example] code exactly the same.

He strongly suggests that, to help with this issue, you always check to ensure (with is_object) that what you're passing is a true object.

He's made an update to the post since it was originally released, mentioning how some classes will also define their own cast handlers.]]> Mon, 27 Mar 2006 07:05:53 -0600