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Alternating Row Colors Made Simple
How many times does this happen in your app? You want to style a nice looking table and alternate the row colors for readability. There have to be a million examples on this out there, and I am going...
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One of the most common operations in data driven applications is the retrieval (you know the “R” in CRUD) of records from your database for display and/or manipulation. If you are like me, and you...
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Trying to Catch it: Exception Handling
One of the constructs I like about PHP5 is exception handling. For those who are not familiar with the concept, exception handling is a nice, clean way to keep your application from breaking when it...
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For the Newer Developers: Classes – a Primer
Someone asked me the other day: “What would be the number one tip you would give to a new developer trying to learn PHP?” That one for me was pretty easy to answer: ”Embrace and adopt an...
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Making Classes Practical
Last time, we discussed object oriented programming and introduced the concept of a class. We ended up with an example class for a bicycle. (As it turns out, it looks like nearly every article ever...
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Classes…Extended Version
The main focus of programming in a object oriented style is to reuse as much code as humanly possible. In other words, you do not want to write the same code more than one time. Why? Well first off,...
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Visbility…What You Can See and When You Can See It
Nothing says visibility like a bright orange construction worker’s vest. I know the pictures keep getting cheesier, but I bet the next time you make a function protected or private, this image will...
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Using Final to Prevent Overrides and Extension
In a previous post about inheritance, I showed you how to extend a class. One aspect of extending classes that wasn’t fully covered was the idea of overriding a method in a class. You can override a...
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Abstract Classes
Since interfaces were covered in a previous article, I thought a quick review of abstract classes would also make a good blog post. You will recall that an interface is like a contract or a blueprint...
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What is a Static Method and Why Should I Care?
This week, we are going to have a quick overview of the concept of a static method. Since I am using the term “method”, I am sure you have pretty much figured out that we are talking about classes and...
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PHP Apps and Platform as a Service
Recently, I saw a tweet from @JuanTremino about moving a website out to AppFog. So first things first, thanks to Juan for the inspiration for this post. I have been meaning spend a little time...
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Lithium: Getting Stuff From Your Database
In my last post about the Lithium framework, I remarked that I found the user guide to be a little bit difficult to use. I don’t like being one of those people that complains and then runs off to go...
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Intro to PHP Comments and Docblocks
This week’s post could be titled: ”things I wish I would have done right on day one” . The subject is how to properly document code with PHP comments and docblocks. This one took a while for me to...
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Closures, Lambdas, and Anonymous Functions
Beginning with PHP 5.3, the anonymous function, became available to developers as a means of improving flexibility and increasing the number of tools at our fingertips to build powerful PHP...
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Overloading: Create PHP Class Methods on the Fly
What is overloading and what would I need it for? Well, how many times have you built an application and needed to retrieve data from the database in a multitude of different ways. Sometimes you will...
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Book Review: The Grumpy Programmer’s PHPUnit Cookbook
Recently, I picked up a copy of “The Grumpy Programmer’s Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications” by Chris Hartjes (@grmpyprogrammer) because I really wanted to get deeper into understanding the...
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