In a new post to his site Bob Majdak looks at using SQL in PHP and some of the challenges he's come across (some of them with his own tools). He talks about things line inline SQL, loading SQL by unique key or creating a "build object".

There is no right or wrong way, but no matter what there is no *pretty* way to do SQL inside of a PHP application. I have been having a personal debate with myself all week about how to make SQL statements nicer in an application without going to a huge DBAL package like Doctrine.

He looks at each idea and provides some of the pros and cons about each of them, noting that he hasn't quite decided on which is the best method. Some sample code is included to help clarify the points, showing the "find by unique key" version and how a more complex query might be created with the "builder object."

On PHPMaster.com today there's an article with some good suggestions about ways to deprecate parts of an API safely.

Deprecation can happen for various reasons - perhaps an API is no longer useful and has reached its end-of-life, or the refactoring of code to improve its reusability and testability obsoletes particular methods. In this article I'll share with you some key points that you should follow when deprecating APIs so you can continue to grow your code and provide fair warning to those who depend on it.

They break it up into a few different steps:

• Prepare for Refactoring
• Employ the Single Responsibility Principle
• Communicate with your Users
• Remove the Old Code

On NetTuts.com there's a new tutorial about what they think is the one thing every web developer should understand - the HTTP protocol and how its used in web-based communications.

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It's a stateless, application-layer protocol for communicating between distributed systems, and is the foundation of the modern web. As a web developer, we all must have a strong understanding of this protocol. Let's review this powerful protocol through the lens of a web developer. We'll tackle the topic in two parts. In this first entry, we'll cover the basics and outline the various request and response headers.

They cover some of the basics of the protocol first including its statelessness, the concept of URLs and the HTTP "verbs" (like GET, POST and DELETE). They also briefly cover the HTTP response codes (ex. 200, 304) and the flow of the request and response to and from the web server. They also look at some of the basic HTTP headers and the actual low-level text formats of the requests/responses.

There's a section at the end of the post that links you to a few tools that you can use to view the HTTP messaging happening in your requests, some of which you might already have. They also briefly cover the use of HTTP in a few libraries - ExpressJS, Ruby on Rails and jQuery's Ajax handling.

Juan Treminio has posted the latest part of his unit testing series to his site today - the fifth part that looks at using mock methods on mock objects and overriding constructors.

Previously in my PHPUnit tutorial series, you learned about the very powerful concept of mock objects and stub methods. This concept is central to successful unit testing, and once it fully 'clicks' in your head you will start to realize how useful and simple testing can be. There is also another thing I want to make clear: creating tests is basically a puzzle - you simply have to go step by step, making sure all the pieces fit together correctly so you can get your green. I hope to make clear what I mean by the end of this tutorial.

He assumes you already know about mock objects and introduces the concept of "stub methods" and "mock methods", noting the difference between them. He then gets into what he calls the "four pathways of getMockBuilder" and talks about the rationale behind mocking methods in the first place. He then gets into constructors and how you can work around the "bad" ones with help from mock object functionality.

If you're interested in reading the rest of the series, you can find links to them here.

Igor Wiedler has a recent post to his site about creating stateless services, specifically in the context of using a dependency injection container to manage the objects your application uses.

As more frameworks and libraries, particularly in the PHP world, move towards adopting the Dependency Injection pattern they are all faced with the problem of bootstrapping their application and constructing the object graph. In many cases this is solved by a Dependency Injection Container (DIC). Such a container manages the creation of all the things. The things it manages are services. Or are they?

He notes that, according to some of the principles of domain-driven design, "services" should be stateless - the results of calls to the service shouldn't alter it, it should only depend on the values passed in. He goes on to put this into the context of a DIC and gives an example of the "request service" (and how it violates the DDD principles of statelessness). He talks some about scopes (dependencies) and mutable services. He talks about methods to get around these issues with the "request" instance, ultimately coming to the conclusion that event listeners might be the way to go.

In this post to his site Brandon Savage talks about "always returning something" from your methods and functions back to the calling script. He also suggests that null is not an option.

A few weeks ago, there was a discussion on Twitter about whether or not a method should always return a value, or whether or not null was a valid value to return. The answer to this question is a resounding no, a null value should never be returned. [...] For example, you check that a file you opened exists, or that a resource performed correctly before using it. But if you receive a null response, how do you test for this The answer is you can't

He notes that a "null" response is not only difficult to test but can lead to ambiguous handling as you're not sure where the error might be. He also includes a snippet of code showing how a null response could break a fluent interface if an instance of "$this" is not returned.

Andrew Podner has a new post today looking at dynamic class method creation in PHP - aka "overloading" with the __call magic method.

What is overloading and what would I need it for? [...] In most languages, overloading just means you can have multiple methods with the same name, but they just had a different number/type of arguments. In PHP, it is a little different. Overloading in PHP means that you can actually create dynamic function names and the behavior will be dependent upon the function name that is used.

He gives an example through a sample application, first stating the requirements the business has for it then showing how to use the "__call" method to handle "getBy" requests made to a database class. It searches the database based on the field (ex. "getByusername" searches on "username") and he includes two examples of it in use. He also briefly touches on the use of the "__callStatic" magic method for handling static method calls similarly.

In his latest post Andrew Podnet looks at a common situation for developers during one project or another. It's the struggle whether to "rock on" and keep developing a project as it's planned, refactor what's already there into something new or re-roll the whole thing completely, scrapping it for a possibly better structure.

I went to my standard code library, developed on my own over a period of 3 or 4 years and starting piecing together a core application that I could start building on. I worked on this application diligently from June to September, and I would say in that time I had made it 70% of the way through the app. I was being relatively careful about doing manual functional tests, and I felt good about what I was doing with the application where security practices were concerned. Then 2 things happened almost simultaneously that really put a wrench in the works.

He was working on a project for several months, but due to other circumstances, he had to set it aside for a while. When he came back, he had a new perspective on things and saw lots of places in the code that things could have been done different/better. The post goes through some of his thought process and how it relates to the three "roll on", "refactor" or "re-roll" the current state of the application. He does have a reminder for developers facing the same situation, though:

The whole reason I am writing this post, other than to just get my thoughts down and help make the call, is to illustrate the importance of remembering that as developers, one of our key objectives for the client is to deliver value. This is a fact that can sometimes get away from us.

On his blog today Hari KT has an Aura Framework-related post about one of its components, the Aura.Http component, and its handling of HTTP requests and responses.

The Aura.Http package provide you the tool to build and send request and response. [...] Probably you may not have bothered too much on building the http response either the framework does it for you, or until you need to send the correct response.

The post shows you how to use the component to send and receive HTTP requests. Code is included showing how to make Response objects and set headers, content, cookies and HTTP response code. He also shows how to output the response and a more complete example of the entire flow. The post finishes up with an example of using Aura.Http to make a request to another site - in this case back to GitHub to get the users on a repository.

On the Segment.io blog there's a new post by Calvin talking about making asyncronous requests in PHP and three different approaches you could use, depending on your situation.

When designing client libraries to send data to our API, one of our top priorities is to make sure that none of our code affects the performance of your core application. That is tricky when you have a single-threaded, "shared-nothing" language like PHP. [...] Ideally, we like to keep the setup process minimal and address a wide variety of use cases. As long as it runs with PHP (and possibly a common script or two), you should be ready to dive right in. We ended up experimenting with three main approaches to make requests in PHP. Here's what we learned.

Their three suggestions don't involve external dependencies (like a queue server) and can operate pretty quickly:

• Opening a socket and closing it before waiting for a response
• Write to a log file (a pseudo-queue)
• Fork a curl process (through something like exec)

They each have small code examples included with them and explanations as to their plusses and minuses. For their needs, the "forked curl" solution worked out the best, but check out the other options too - you might have different needs.