Summer Hiatus
| July 1, 2012 | Posted by Greg Bulmash under PHP |
Between my kids having a later bedtime during the summer and a medical issue in the family, I don't have time to study PHP and blog about it right now. Both the summer bedtimes and the medical issue should be resolved by early September, and I should have a bunch of new stuff to write…
PHP Tutorial: King Floyd and the Seventeen Princes - A Tale of the Observer Pattern
| June 22, 2012 | PHP |
Since I've been getting positive feedback on design patterns as stories, here's another: Back before horses were invented, the tiny kingdom of Schadenfreude was ruled by good King Floyd and Queen Tillie, who were worried that their son Prince Roscoe would never find a wife. In the neighboring kingdom of Punim, King Marvin had a…
PHP Tutorial: Pear DB, Microsoft SQL Server, and the nvarchar Data Type
| June 21, 2012 | PHP |
Sorry I've been absent a few days. Stuff got hectic. Before I start, I want to give a shout out to Ian Maddox (a.k.a. @isnoop) for a great presentation to kick off the "Summer of OOP" at the Seattle PHP Meetup last week. And I wanted to let you know that I'll be running another…
PHP Tutorial: Raw Encoding
| June 14, 2012 | PHP |
Today's tip is quick and dirty. I spent my time mulling over the Observer pattern and a story about a royal wedding, but it just wouldn't come together before bedtime. So today's tip is about rawurlencode(). Encoding is useful when you need to compose a GET URL that has parameters in it containing characters that…
PHP Tutorial: The Legend of the Singleton
| June 13, 2012 | PHP |
I'm enjoying this experiment in explaining design patterns through storytelling, so today's is the Singleton Pattern. Long, long ago and far, far away, a king commissioned all his wizards to create a single repository of all the kingdom's knowledge. In the kingdom's language, their word for knowledge was "data" and this repository was supposed to…
PHP Tutorial: The Allegory of The Factory Pattern
| June 12, 2012 | Posted by Greg Bulmash under PHP |
If you've read the About This Site page, you'll know that instead of pursuing my passion for computers, I got sidetracked into the arts in college. So when it came time for me to learn and explain the Factory Pattern, I thought it might be fun to express it as an allegory... Henry had a…
PHP Tutorial: Simulating SOAP Part II
| June 11, 2012 | Posted by Greg Bulmash under PHP |
If you read last Thursday's post, you'd know that I was facing an interesting dilemma at work. We have to shut down a server for a day that provides a SOAP-based API that we'd normally send hundreds of requests to in that period. Since simply shutting down the portion of the site that uses that…
PHP Tutorial: London __call(ing)
| June 8, 2012 | Posted by Greg Bulmash under PHP |
I'm going to talk about my solution to faking SOAP on Monday. First, there's an element of that solution I wanted give its own spotlight dance... __call. There are a selection of function names in OOP PHP called called magic methods. I'm no expert in them and only know about a third, but I'll do…
Idea: Faking A SOAP Client
| June 7, 2012 | Posted by Greg Bulmash under PHP |
Part of the refactoring I'm working on at work is not just a speed improvement. We're going to have a series of outages where a third party server that provides services to us will not be available. During that time, we don't want to simply turn off all the services it's associated with. So we…
Under The Weather
| June 5, 2012 | Posted by Greg Bulmash under PHP |
Went to the Everett Software Developers meet-up to discuss What's in a Language, and I'm feeling a little under the weather. Antihistamines are making me feel a little drunk. I have a big refactoring project at work I'll talk about tomorrow. What I'll leave with is this... PHP is the first girlfriend for many of…
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