Elizabeth Smith has a new post to her blog today covering some of the fun she's been having with compiling things like Gtk+ and PHP-Gtk2.

So I've been using microsoft visual studio (actually it's Visual C++ Express, but uses the same stuff behind the scenes) to work on getting things compiled on windows. PHP-Gtk2 allows for some nifty extensions, well at least on linux. So I've been working to get versions of libglade, scintilla, gtksourceview and mozembed working on windows. It's a long, slow process. Here's the deal so far.

She talks about her current situation (what's compiling and what's not) and the software that she's trying to get up and running. She also mentions a problem she's been having with an error message talking about "unresolved external symbols" she'll need to track down (or get some help on - anyone out there seen it?)

Harry Fuecks brings the next part of his "Joy of Regular Expressions" series to the SitePoint PHP Blog today with part four, building on the previous how-tos: part one, part two, and part three.

He looks at a few different topics this time - date checking, making dates more user-friendly, exploding with patterns, and capturing split delimiters. Just like in the previous articles in the series, he explains in what kind of situation the expression would be used and the sample code showing how to use it (oh, and the output too).

In his latest blog post today, Ivo Jansch takes a look a t a situation where a little "defensive programming" would have helped.

A few weeks ago, we had a major problem with software we'd written for a client. It was software for sending mailings to the client's customers. Suddenly there were many reports of clients receiving multiple mailings instead of just one.

The problem appeared to be in our test code. The software had a 'test' mode for testing the mailing by sending it only to the author and a small test team. It appeared that for some reason, all test mails were being mailed to the customers as well.

This problem would not have appeared if we had applied what I would like to call 'defensive programming'.

He shows code examples from this situation, pointing out where the issue lies - a bad check in an if() statement.

On Paul Jones' blog today, he talks about something that's coming up more and more (and has especially been mentioned in PHp with all of the new frameworks popping up) - fluent interfaces.

My friend and coworker Mike Naberezny wrote recently of fluent interfaces (a.k.a. object chaining). The idea is that the fluent interface makes it very easy to read the resulting code in a way that flows naturally. This is cool, but I want to add a caveat to his examples.

I think, for a fluent interface to be effective, you need situations where you actually have all that information at one time so that you can chain the methods in a fluid way.

Paul continues, talking about that "something more" that might be needed to get this kind of thing working in PHP - the need to have all of the information that's going to be chained at once.