As a new contributor to the SitePoint blogs, I’ll be covering PHP web development, JavaScript and general web tech. When it comes to optimizing PHP for performance, there’s no end of resources available, and no end of conflicting opinions either. Everyone seems to have their own approach to writing “fast” PHP code; using...

As a new contributor to the SitePoint blogs, I’ll be covering PHP web development, JavaScript and general web tech. When it comes to optimizing PHP for performance, there’s no end of resources available, and no end of conflicting opinions either. Everyone seems to have their own approach to writing “fast” PHP code; using...

I just checked in a little project, I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. It really begun at the last Copenhagen php-meetup; Joakim Nygård and Jacob Oettinger made a presentation of their project, WebCacheGrind. I casually mentioned something about having played with the dbgp-protocol (The debugging part of Xdebug) and that...

I just checked in a little project, I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. It really begun at the last Copenhagen php-meetup; Joakim Nygård and Jacob Oettinger made a presentation of their project, WebCacheGrind. I casually mentioned something about having played with the dbgp-protocol (The debugging part of Xdebug) and that...

While debuggers exists, there isn’t much of a tradition for using them in PHP. People have largely come to rely on injecting debugging code directly into the program, for inspecting program scope. The infamous var_dump have served for this purpose and version 4.3.0 of PHP brought us another equally useful function — debug_backtrace...

While debuggers exists, there isn’t much of a tradition for using them in PHP. People have largely come to rely on injecting debugging code directly into the program, for inspecting program scope. The infamous var_dump have served for this purpose and version 4.3.0 of PHP brought us another equally useful function — debug_backtrace...

Against all odds, I found myself with a little spare time this week. Rather than do something sensible like clean the garage or get some exercise, I took the opportunity to learn a new programming language: Python. Like may SitePoint readers, I cut my teeth on PHP. I’ve become very comfortable with it over the years, [...]

Against all odds, I found myself with a little spare time this week. Rather than do something sensible like clean the garage or get some exercise, I took the opportunity to learn a new programming language: Python. Like may SitePoint readers, I cut my teeth on PHP. I’ve become very comfortable with it over the years, [...]

The Drupal development team surprised everyone when they released version 6.0 last week, ahead of schedule. After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident [...]

The Drupal development team surprised everyone when they released version 6.0 last week, ahead of schedule. After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident [...]

I keep running into people who caution against using Singleton and recommend to avoid it like a plague. What is so scary about it? — Kailash Badu It’s a good question, for it is true that global variables are often demonised and more recently the Singleton has befallen the same fate. Perhaps a bit surprising, it [...]

I keep running into people who caution against using Singleton and recommend to avoid it like a plague. What is so scary about it? — Kailash Badu It’s a good question, for it is true that global variables are often demonised and more recently the Singleton has befallen the same fate. Perhaps a bit surprising, it [...]

Compositional programming style In the object oriented programming style, it’s preferable to split functionality out to multiple objects, that can work together to solve a single task. Taken to the extreme, this results in more, but smaller, classes and generally relies less on inheritance and more on composition. In lack of better words,...

Compositional programming style In the object oriented programming style, it’s preferable to split functionality out to multiple objects, that can work together to solve a single task. Taken to the extreme, this results in more, but smaller, classes and generally relies less on inheritance and more on composition. In lack of better words,...

A while back was writing some stuff on this blog about regular expressoins. While that remains unfinished, a mini regex example - nothing earth shattering but a useful technique if you hadn’t already seen it. Promtped by a real world example, one often-overlooked feature of most regular expressions engines is how subpatterns can useful to...