DevShed is wrapping up their series looking at benchmarking your PHP applications with the third part - a look at comparing execution times of scripts that can either pull from a database or from a flat file.

This large, complex subject offers numerous possibilities for experimentation, which means that you'll surely have tons of fun creating timing systems with PHP. [...] his article, then, will be focused on evaluating different scripts that fetch sets of records, first from a database, and then from flat files.

They use the Timer class they defined in a previous part of the series and wrap it around both a database class (pulling user information from a MySQL database) and a fetch to a flat file for similar information. General exceptions are handled as a part of the resource connection class.

In a recent blog entry Stefan Priebsch shows how to take an error thrown by your script and turn it into an exception (to make things like catchable fatal errors).

While I would personally prefer an exception to be thrown in the first place, it is pretty easy to convert errors to exceptions in PHP.

His example is pretty simple - you set a custom error handler in your script that pulls in the error information and tosses an exception based on the error number the handler is given. Then you can use the try/catch method to see if your script has tossed an exception of the fatal error type. Nice simple solution to handle an interesting little problem.

On his blog today Martynas Jusevicius talks about a feature that was new in PHP5 - Exceptions:

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.

PHPBuilder.com has posted part two of a series they're working through introducing PHP developers to the world of exception handling in the Postgres database.

Last week we left off with an example where notice, exception and log levels are sent to the client. This week we present more POSTGRES exception examples, and continue with our article on Postgres exception handling.

They create a few examples:

• handling other error conditions with OTHERS
• using f_ex2
• returning NO_DATA_FOUND and TOO_MANY_ROWS
• handling exceptions like table constraints
• nested exceptions
• using f_ex5
• a RAISE EXCEPTION dilemma
• using f_ext1