In his latest tutorial, Alexander Netkachev shows how to, with some of the simple PHP functions, create an event system for your script, complete with callbacks.

The way how events are raised and how listeners are attached on the events is a part of a core in many modern applications. It plays an important role in some enterprise design patterns (MVC, for example).

He starts with the basics of event handling - some of the terms and descriptions of basic functionality that any good event handler would have. He describes the most common setup of an event-interaction relationship. Then, it's on to the code, showing first three different ways to call functions (by name, by variable, and by callback).

He finishes it off with a functional example that responds to a a call to fireEvent (five times) and handles each by calling the function in the callback information (myFunction).

DevShed continues its look at the DirectoryIterator functionality in PHP5 with the second part of the series today - "Finding Paths, Timestamps and More with the DirectoryIterator Class in PHP".

Are you interested in having at your disposal a quick reference for working with the "DirectoryIterator" class that comes with PHP 5? Then this might be the article that you've been waiting for! Welcome to the second tutorial of the series "A Close Look at the DirectoryIterator Class in PHP 5." Over the course of this set of installments, you'll find complete coverage of the most important methods bundled with this class, and learn how to take advantage of their excellent functionality.

They cover even more functions in this part:

• rewind, current, valid
• getFileName, isFile
• getMTime, getATime, getCTime
• getPath, getPathName

Each set is supported by code and explaination to help introduce their concepts in a useful way.

Continuing on in their "PHP functions" series today, DevShed has posted this next step up the ladder, getting more advanced with the functions they're working with. This time, there's a focus on functions inside classes and creating the classes around them (a sort of introduction to object-oriented programming).

Continuing our PHP functions article, we move on to creating classes. Let me say right at the start that you can write perfectly effective and useful PHP code without creating classes or going into object oriented programming. Object oriented programming can be very powerful and PHP programmers are increasingly taking advantage of these capabilities, which have been greatly expanded since PHP4.

They start with the creation of a simple class - a human class with two $legs and two $arms. They show a simple display of this data and add another attribute to the class, one for hair color. They then capture the output they've been creating inside a function, report, and show how to execute it. Finally, they show how to use the special function that runs when the object is created - the constructor.

DevShed has posted part three of their popular "using mysqli in PHP5" series today, this time, they focus on increasing the functionality of the code they started last time with other mysqli methods.

I must say that the "mysqli" extension offers an impressive set of features, which can be implemented right from the very beginning. However, and speaking of its cool features, in the next few lines, I'm going to show you a few more. Over the course of this last tutorial, I'll be covering some other methods and properties, mainly aimed at finding the IDs after inserting new rows, and obtaining information about specific table fields.

They touch on the fetch_array, data_seek, fetch_assoc, fetch_field, and fetch_seek functions, giving examples and other assicated properties along the way.

In this new post on Ben Ramsey's blog today, he shares his experiences with SimpleXML, mentioning specifically some of the undocumented functions that he's noticed.

I was very excited today while glancing through the code in ext/simplexml/simplexml.c to find some, as of yet, undocumented methods in PHP's SimpleXMLElement class. This discovery came after I've spent several hours over the last couple of nights banging my head against the desk to figure out a way to create a class that extends SimpleXMLElement and adds a new method for adding a child, which would have to use DOM in order to work-or so I thought.

Of course, it's wasn't as easy as it seemed, and Ben soon found some of the limitations of the SimpleXML library. Of course, he did manage to find a way to add new children to the document you're working with (something that normally would have required the intervention of the DOM functionality). Check out the post for a code example.