In a response to a recent post on DZone.com about the "Open/Closed Principle" Josh Adell has posted an example of a " flexible and extendable command invocation solution" implementing this SOLID idea.

Let's overcome some of these issues [with only being able to extend the invoker class and that the invoker needs to know how to create commands], and also make the code even more extensible. I'll use a simplified command invoker to demonstrate.

His code is included - the creation of a "Command" interface and two comments that implement it: "HelloCommand" and "PwdCommand", each with "register" and "execute" methods. His "Invoker" class then only needs to be told how to map these commands and the "register" is called as they're needed. You can find the full example code for this invocation example in this gist.

In a new post to DZone.com Giorgio Sironi talks about the "open/closed principle" in software development and shows an example based on the design of the PHPUnit_Selenium project.

This article shows an example of how the application of the Open/Closed Principle improved the design of a real project, the open source library PHPUnit_Selenium. These design concepts apply to every object-oriented language, including Java, Ruby or even C++. The Open Closed Principle, part of SOLID set, states that software should be open for extension and at the same time closed for modification.

He starts with a little background on the project, pointing out that there's a Session object it uses for all of its testing with a magic "__call" method that handles any kind of method call to the object. This method has issues (dependencies, strict requirements for use) but can be refactored according to the Open/Closed idea to set up an array of anonymous functions that can be called as a "command". Examples of these types of classes are also included (one for the "click" action on a button and another for getting the current location).

Anna Filina, one of the organizers of the ConFoo Conference in Montreal (February 27th through March 2nd) has a new post to her blog about a new process they're trying out this year for the Call for Papers - a public voting feature that allows anyone to voice their opinion on the proposed sessions.

Some of you may have already heard that the ConFoo call for papers is already open. The great thing about it this year, is that it's public. This means that anyone can vote on the proposals. Besides being fun for the speakers and attendees, it opens up a whole lot of possibilities.

She talks about some of the reasons they decided to go this route such as wanting to give the attendees the most "bang for the buck" and the ability for speakers to see what their fellow speakers are proposing and is working. The committee, of course, will have the final say, but the votes will help quite a bit.

If you'd like to vote and are even considering making it to this year's event, go over an sign up to vote on the conference's Call for Papers section.

As was mentioned by Zend late yesterday, the registration for this year's Zend/PHP Conference have officially opened!

The 7th Annual Zend PHP Conference (ZendCon) will take place October 17-20, 2011, In Santa Clara, California. ZendCon is the largest gathering of the PHP Community and brings together PHP developers and IT managers from around the world to discuss PHP best practices and explore new technologies.

The Early Bird pricing will last until September 10th saving you about $200 USD off the price of the ticket. The full ZendCon experience (Tutorials & Conference) is $1,195 USD or you can opt for just the Tutorial for $445 USD or just the Conference for $945 USD. You're in luck if you're looking for discounts, though - they have lots o them including ones for ZendCon alumni, group discounts, ZCEs and students.

The schedule's not quite out yet, but as you can see by some of the comments from speakers on Twitter, it's shaping up to be a great schedule. Topics like CouchDb, component architecture, design patterns, Redis and dependency injection will all be there.

Freek Lijten has a recent post looking at some of the types of discussions that happen on the php-internals mailing list.

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.

As was mentioned by Kevin Schroeder, the Call for Papers for this year's Zend/PHP Conference has officially been announced!

We are happy to announce that planning is underway for the 2011 Zend/PHP Conference which will be held in Santa Clara, October 17-20. ZendCon 2011 will be the best conference yet and we would like to invite you to be a part of it! A conference is only as good as its speakers and we are looking for the best speakers to share their knowledge and expertise with the PHP community. Attendees will include developers, architects, development managers, decision makers, core PHP developers and community members.

The key themes they're looking for this year are cloud computing, mobile and user experience and enterprise/professional PHP topics. Within those themes there's several other sub-categories including:

• Architecture & Best Practices
• Zend Framework 1&2
• Rich Internet Apps and Mobile/Tablet - Flash /Flex/HTML 5/CSS3/Ajax
• Standards Compliance
• Real World Case Studies, Designs and Data Models

The Call for Papers will close on May 20th, 2011 and speakers will be given a hotel night for each of their sessions that are accepted. Submit your ideas at www.zendcon.com/input to see if you'll be selected!

UPDATE: for a bit more information on the categories, see this new post on Kevin Schroeder's blog.

Derick Rethans has shared a method he's created for making short, descriptive URLs with the help of his translit PHP extension that translates non-latin characters into latin ones.

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.

Richard Thomas has another Solar Framework Short posted today looking at how to integrate the jQuery Javascript library directly into your Solar application.

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.

Richard Thomas has posted a new "short" for users of the Solar Framework to delete cached data.

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.

In this new post to his blog Joshua Eichorn talks about a an automatic URL shortening service he has worked up, Su.pr, and how you can use their API to create shortened URLs for you own site.

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.