peknet is Peter E Karman
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Unicode
PHP lacks proper and complete Unicode support.Come on people!
File under projects/php Thu Jun 18 21:25:30 CT 2009
Come on people!
Closures
PHP lacks closures. That is, they are new in 5.3.As with namespaces, PHP is Way Late to the Game.
File under projects/php Thu Jun 18 21:23:47 CT 2009
Get your degree now!
I get literally hundreds of spam messages urging me to buy a higher education degree. I realized today why these kinds of messages must appeal, because I've had more than one dream in which I realized I had never graduated from high school or college and was completely unprepared to meet fill in challenge here.These spam must be aimed at a kind of Jungian-level subconscious anxiety that manifests itself as the Unfinished Degree. Of course, there are plenty of folks who really do have unfinished degrees and are struggling in a competitive marketplace. But even a college-degreed person like myself still localizes my dream-time anxiety about life in not having finished school, and I suspect that is also at play.
The Unfinished Degree... <cue Jaws theme...>
File under spam hall of shame/ Thu Jun 18 20:48:57 CT 2009
PHP ORMs
Object-relational mappers are a nice way of simplifying data store interactions, by abstracting the data model into a OO class structure. Or put another way, don't write SQL, write code that is storage agnostic.
my $thing = Thing->new( id => 123 )->load;
$thing->foo('bar');
$thing->save;
#
# the above is mock code
# representing something like:
#
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
UPDATE table things
SET foo = 'bar'
WHERE ID = 123;
END TRANSACTION;
I've used a couple of different Perl ORMs over the last four years with great joy: DBIx::Class and (mostly) Rose::DB::Object. Now I'm looking for a suitable PHP project for my toolbelt.
Wikipedia has a good starting list.
Some contenders include:
- Xyster
- Looks nice but depends on Zend Framework so a bit heavy. Handles cascading actions on related objects.
- Doctrine
- The most popular (or at least most-mentioned). It has its own special query language (DQL), which is a philosophical turn-off. Isn't SQL+PHP good enough? But I see the DQL is optional.
- Rocks PHP Library
- Ambitious. The docs make it seem a little like the Rose framework in its goals: an ORM, a Form manager, a web framework. There's a DB abstraction layer that claims to support many different db flavors. It seems pretty young though.
- Propel
- Mature. But it uses this external XML definition file which just seems crazy. Again, isn't SQL+PHP enough?
- DABL
- Based on Propel but simpler. No external XML file (+1). Uses same PDO db abstraction layer as Propel.
- LightORM
- I was initially hopeful about this one but it appears abandoned.
- DataMapper
- My co-worker turned me on to this one (thanks Sean!). I really like the looks of it so far and will be spending some quality time testing it out.
File under projects/php Thu Jun 18 20:18:09 CT 2009
Past entries: 2004 . 2005 . 2006 . 2007 . 2008 . 2009 . 2010 . 2011 . 2012 .