The internals list is the place to be to hear about the current state of PHP. It is one of PHP's many mailing lists, but this is the one where (core) developers discuss new features, current bugs and wild ideas. If you want to keep up with things it is a good idea to sign up, it is not an extremely high volume list and if you ignore the noise it is quite informative. In this article I would like to share examples of stuff typically discussed on the list.

He mentions feature requests in general and, more specifically things like traits support (multiple inheritance), array dereferencing, callable arrays and the debate over the short array syntax.

The URLs for my articles are automatically generated from the title. There is a little function that uses translit's transliterate() function to ASCII-ify the titles. [...] However, [this] is hardly a short URL. What we want is something short and descriptive. First of all, I thought it would work to generate short URLs automatically.

In hindsight, though, he decided it would just be better to come up with his own short URLs but he still wanted a way to use them. Registering a short domain helped and, along with some <link> tags, made it easier for the right information to be automatically found.

When it comes to Jquery integration you have 2 main uses. Calling a php function from a website or calling Jquery functions from php both are done through an XMLHttpRequest.

By extending a jQuery-related controller, you gain some special automatic abilities like automatic json-ification of output data and being able to push out transformations directly back to the browser from a standard javascript call. Check out the post for the complete source code for his example.

This one is simple but sweet, In your Models directory you define your Models and the basic rules they follow but do you know you can also make changes at the record level. Solar is smart and if it sees a Test/Record.php when creating records for the Test model it will load that class, this allows you to do all kinds of magic.

His example shows how the script can automatically check, on pre-save, to see if the data is different than that in the cache and remove it if so. This cached data is replaced the next time through with the latest information.

Last week we launched our API which lets you integrate shorten and post functionality into any site or application. Today we are adding the ability to use your own domain for shortening. This lets you have urls like http://joshuaeichorn.com/9OPL so your readers can know what domain they are going too before they click on the link.

Using the API lets you set up, via a mod_rewrite (or any other URL rewriting tool) to match requests on your domain for a shortening code and make the call back to get the original URL as stored on the Su.pr service. You can find more details at this page on the StumbleUpon site.

]]> Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:22:41 -0500 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/12661 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/12661 On his blog today Kevin van Zonneveld shows how to create short URLs for your content and store them in a MySQL database.

IDs are often numbers. Unfortunately there are only 10 digits to work with, so if you have a lot of records, IDs tend to get very large. For computers that's OK. But human beings like their IDs as short as possible. So how can we make IDs shorter? Well, we could borrow characters from the alphabet as have them pose as additional numbers.... Alphabet to the rescue!

He includes some sample code that takes the shortened code and converts it back down to the correct ID and returns it out of the function. The trick compresses values down into shorter alpha-numeric strings that can make for simpler links (and smaller messages for things like twitter).

With all the talk of URL shortening services, I decided to add a quick service into Snook.ca, which is run on CakePHP, to redirect a short URL to a post. Because my static content already has short URLs and all I have are posts, creating a short URL handler for it was very easy.

His shortener is used on his posts for his blog to redirect the smaller URLs back to the post they reference. The result is a route that connects something like "/s/id_number" over to the correct post (as seen here). He also offers a suggestion for a "super-compressed" URL tat converts it down to a three-character shortened version that can then be easily converted back down to the decimal equivalent.

So, I was asked in IRC today about the proposed short array syntax for PHP. For those that don't know, I mean the same syntax that other languages (javascript, perl, python, ruby) all have. [...] It just feels like a good addition to the language. It is common among web languages and therefore users coming into PHP from other languages may find it more comfortable.

He compares it with other data type creation in PHP (you don't call int() to make an integer, so why call array() to make an array). However, according to a post from the internals mailing list, we might not be seeing this any time soon.

His list so far is:

• Turning "register globals" on
• using shot open tags
• using the ASP style of tagging
• single-line condition statements (without the curly braces)
• improper use of exit()
• assuming settings on a remote server

For each of the above options, he briefly covers his opinion as to why they're wrong and can cause some serious headaches down the line. Most advanced programmers out there know about most of these issues, and have learned to work without them.]]> Mon, 10 Apr 2006 06:57:17 -0500 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4900 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4900 his latest blog entry, Chris Shiflett and the Pro::PHP podcast are again collaborating to bring the listening community more "Ask Chris" shows.

It's been a few months since Episode One, but thanks to Marcus, Ask Chris is back on the air. The format is a bit different - instead of doing separate shows, we'll be doing a short segment at the end of each interview.

This interview is with David Sklar of Ning. He and Marcus discuss Ning, of course, but David also provides some good perspective on the state of technology and how the definition of a programmer is becoming more and more inclusive.

This episode of Ask Chris is about email injection, a topic of growing concern for PHP developers.

You can find out more about this addition to the Pro::PHP lineup and how to subscribe to the podcast over on their site.]]> Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:20:25 -0600