Finders assist you with often-used database queries so you don't have to write them over and over again. Out of the box, Lithium provides you with a bunch of them: all, first, count list and "magic finders like" findById or findFirstById. How these are constructed in the core is not relevant for now, but Lithium provides you with a mechanism to write your own finders easily.

He starts with a look at the bundled finder, showing how it uses a _findFilters method to create the default filter and pass it into your configuration. He covers the parameters you'll need to define and an example of making a Task to create a new one. His example sets a limit of five results on the response. He also mentions the ability to add a custom finder to your model, loaded in the _init() automatically.

I used the opendir, readdir, and closedir native PHP functions, and it did the job quite well. The PHP class was named sfFinder, and it can still be found in all symfony versions. Even if the class is bundled with symfony, I know that a few people use it for all kind of stuff, not necessarily related to symfony. But the code starts to show its age; first because I learned a lot since then about PHP, and also because there is a better way now. Enter iterators!

He shows an example of how to use Iterators to search through directories recursively (RecursiveDirectoryIterator) and locate a certain filename. He also looks at making it more OOP and including filtering to remove files from the search. He's packaged up some of this logic into a new Symfony component - the Finder component - that can be used to locate files in a path, be restricted to a depth for the search, match regular expressions file names, filter by file size and much more.

If you'd like to dig into the code, check out this page on github for this new component (PHP 5.3 only).

A dynamic finder method looks like a normal method invocation, but the method itself doesn't exist, instead, the method is generated dynamically and processed via another method at runtime. [...] A method expression is made up of the prefix such as "findBy" followed by an expression that combines one or more properties.

He includes a few examples of each, the finders and expressions, and talks about the class he's developed to handle the method expressions in PHP. It's based on a simple format defining the method, attribute, expression and operator. Code snippet examples are included for SQL statement generation and object parsing. The code for the class is included in the post.

Zipline Interactive has released the second version of their free PHP Function Finder Gadget for Windows Vista. The tool can be downloaded directly from the Zipline Interactive website at: http://www.gozipline.com/23,phpfunctionfindergadget. You can also download the latest version by going to the PHP.net website sidebar page located at: http://www.php.net/sidebars.

This new version is quite a bit smaller (physically) than its predecessors and is rectangular so it fits a bit better alongside other gadgets. They also fixed a bug that was causing a blink to happen when the search was performed.

Grab this latest download here.

Tim set a simple, but very much real-world challenge; write an app that determines the top 10 most popular blogs from his Apache access log. It should be fast and readable, with a subtext of illustrating how "language X" copes in terms of parallel processing and utilizing "wider" (many processor) systems.

Since PHP natively doesn't support multi-threading (well), Harry opted to go with an approach using curl_multi_exec instead. There's two pieces to the puzzle - the mapper to grab the information and extract the data and the reducer that makes the calls to grab the information from the log files.