The first place I recall encountering the observer pattern was not in PHP, but in JavaScript. If you've ever set a listener to fire when an event happened, you've used the observer pattern. Functions or methods are registered with an object so that when it experiences a specific event, it "notifies" the registered functions or methods by calling them.

His story tells about a royal family, a pregnancy and magic mirrors that allows for instant communication between the family and outlying locations. He relates it to the objects and "watchers" that make up the Observer pattern and gives a brief code example (in Javascript) of a HTML button and a jQuery event observer that fires when it's clicked.

The Singleton pattern provides an interface to let your application always pull out the same object (or make a new one if it needs to).

His legend talks about kings, mythological data sources and the overloading of multiple "hoses" (connections) to it. Also included is a code example showing a simple database class that includes a "getInstance" method acting as the Singleton to return either a new or the (same) current instance.

abcphp.com is a social news website made for people to discover and share PHP related content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

The site lets you vote (with a registered account) on the PHP-related articles they've posted ala Digg.com and breaks them up into categories like "New Releases", "PHP Dev Tools", "Database" and "Security". You can even create groups of people that share the same interests. Check it out and maybe submit a story while you're there.

PHPUnit_Extensions_Story_TestCase is a new extension for PHPUnit that has been contributed by Xait, a company that I visited last fall. It adds a story framework with a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD).

He includes an example of the new extension in action - creating a Story, adding Steps to it and the output that would result from the execution (reading?) of the example.

He walks through his thoughts and needs at different stages of the development process - a database abstraction library here, version control there - and ending up with the framework choice that faced him. Among his options were offerings by Prado, Seagull, Symfony, CakePHP and his pick - CodeIgniter.

Suddenly I got codeigniter and I was able to run a whole lot of controllers, templates and models in minutes (well not in minutes, but much less time than previous ones). A rich , pleasing to read, friendly set of documentation, a bunch of in built libraries and less autonomous control gives me full freedom over my application. It was easy to integrate my old friend smarty with it, in case it comes with it's own active record, but it gives me chance to add adoDB with it. I fall in love with code igniter soon after i realize that it comes with almost zero learning time (or i better say learning on demand)

He also mentions that, had the post been a bit more technical in nature, other factors would have been included. As it is, though, it flows a bit better this way.

The new issue of International PHP Magazine is out, with the cover story I wrote on building Ning apps.

The article provides an overview of working in the Ning playground -- in addition to all the regular PHP you know and love, it covers using the Ning Content Store, simplifying file uploads, and using our Ajax components.

Ning is "the easiest way to create your own social web apps on the Internet today". ]]> Wed, 08 Feb 2006 06:55:07 -0600