For some time now I've been working on an administrative backend system. I quickly found the need to extend DB Table with more stuff than needed when I extended the Zend Framework, it's mostly convenience functions designed to reduce repetitive code snippets.

He illustrates with some of the custom override functions he's made including versions of updateOne, exists, fetchOne and fetchSomething.

A useful new feature in PHP 5 is exception handling via the try/throw/catch paradigm. An exception may be thrown and caught. If an exception is thrown in code surrounded by try, the following statements will not be executed, and the exception will be handled by the first matching catch block.

He gives a high-level overview of how Exceptions in PHP5 work and includes a simple example from his work with his DIY Framework.

PHP has a function serialize, which can create a hash from any type of variable, scalars, array, but objects as well. Using the unserialize function, PHP can recreate the variable from the serialized hashed. If we look at how an object is serialized, we see only the properties and the class name are stored.

His method allows for class manipulation via changes to the serialized class information (like changing the value of the name parameter). His "casttoclass()" function makes changing this value simple.

I originally intended to rewrite my Zend Search Lucene tutorial, but Peter Van Garderen covered the bulk of what’s changed and I was too busy developing search functionality for lyro.com (not to mention finding inconsistencies with the Zend Search Lucene port and Lucene) to finish the tutorial. So I broke it up into smaller pieces.

I packaged Zend Framework into a symfony plugin. symfony is easily extended using plugins.

He includes the method he used to get the plugin up and working (downloading his custom ZF plugin) and how to use the Zend Framework Bridge to get it and symfony cooperating.