Felix Geisendorfer is taking an interesting approach to defining programming in this new post to the Debuggable blog - he's coming at it more from the level of the perception the programmer has about writing good code.

I believe understanding the patterns in your own thinking will by far make the biggest impact on how good you will get as a programmer. Forget design patterns, forget unit testing, forget all those functions you know. Important is to question why they exist and how they could be improved.

He illustrates through a few examples what he means. He describes one such thought method, the "return home early" process - basically, if something looks too complex for its own good, it probably is. He offers a different way of thinking about it too, a more visual way that can help simplify things even more by laying out the pieces and seeing where they all fit.

On the Developer Tutorials site today, Akash Mehta has posted his look at having search functionality on your website.

Today's websites have a lot of content. [...] Needless to say, effectively searching all that data can be a real challenge, and chances are at the end of the day you'll still be stuck with a slow and ineffective search system. [...] Implementing effective search doesn't have to be hard. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to build a basic site-specific web search in just five lines of code, using the Yahoo! APIs.

He includes a (very) brief look at the search API Yahoo! offers followed by examples of queries and then on to the real deal, a search system that takes in a user query and asks the Yahoo! API for results matching it. The results are outputted below the box.

On the Developer Tutorials blog today, Hasin Hayder has pointed out a handy PHP function that can make your debugging a bit less of a headache - debug_backtrace.

Most of the PHP developers debug php code in their local machine just by trial and error using "print_r","var_dump" and "echo". They don't write unit tests or follow any advanced debugger like xdebug. But the problem of using these methods is you cannot fool proof your code and their might be some bugs still present in your code.

He includes a simple example to show how it works and what kind of output it will give - a nested function call. Personally, I use this in some of my classes (like a database abstraction later) to track and see which functions my calls are coming from and what data they're sending me - easier to debug in one place than trying to guess.

David Coallier has posted about a database abstraction layer that he's been developing for PHP 5.2.x only systems and wants some opinions on his methods:

I made a very light DBAL that uses PHP5.2.x only (Since many people seem to want that) and it has the exact same DSN syntax as MDB2 for now and the query method are also called the same (No API Changes). [...] The main goal of the DBAL is to have a very effective and light way of switching RDBMS but also the possibility to change your DBAL to something more "0feature complete" as such as MDB2.

He includes the list of query method names and the types of databases that he wants it to support (as well as mentioning the fact that it would be unit tested for reliability).