Category Archives: PHP

I had quite forgotten that PHP can fork a process just like in C! This might be a useful thing to know for doing background tasks, but to be honest the extra complexity required will probably put me off doing it. That’s where this Thread class comes in handy..

<?php
include ("threadClass.php");

class testThread extends Thread {

  function testThread($name) {
    $this->Thread($name); // calls the parent constructor and assign its name
  }

  function run() {
    while(true) {
      sleep(1);
      print time() ."-" . $this->getName() . " said ok...\n"; // every second we're going to print this line...
    }
  }
}
// Main program. Bring up two instances of the same class (testThread).
// They runs concurrently. It's a multi-thread app with a few lines of code!!!

$test1 = new testThread ("Thread-1");
$test2 = new testThread ("Thread-2");
$test1->start();
$test2->start();

print "This is the main process. Press [CTRL-CANC] to terminate.\n";
while(true) {sleep(1);}

?>

This is a good introduction which assumes you haven’t a notion what design patterns are. It also helpfully states,

… like everything else we use in software development / engineering. OO and Design Patterns have its place… [They’re] Not the Only Tool..

(via phppatterns)

John conducted benchmarks the other day and found that IIS/WinXP can be faster than Apache /Linux. His initial results show a huge difference, but later he found the difference was only 10%.
What difference would running a PHP accelerator make to the test? That may very well swing the results back in favour. In my own tests, adding a PHP accelerator makes an undeniable difference in speed tests. The acccelerator makers would have you believe the speed up is 10 times, but it’s at least 5-6 times.
How stable is IIS these days? I’ve heard it’s much better than it was, but is it more stable than Apache (1.3 or 2?) on Windows?

Maybe we’re missing an important point here though. Many managers want to use Microsoft in their shops. If they have IIS, this is one very good way of running PHP in that environment without being penalised by cgi performance. Bravo John for doing the tests, I’m certain your site will popup in a Google search when some MSCE is desperately trying to figure out what technology to use! We’re get them to use PHP first, and then when they’re comfortable with this open source lark, move their Win32 servers to Linux or some other Free Unix! *grin*

Moving a purely procedural program to an OO design is a mammoth task, especially when that program is several years old and had bits added on over the while.
I’ve pruned out a lot of the extra features that are not needed now, and some that are simply silly, but now I’m coming to a stumbling block.

Smarty can cache content. The beauty of that is I can avoid a whole load of expensive operations like database queries, information lookups from remote sources, code loops, etc. In an MVC application, where should the check for cache freshness be?

• Should it be in the controller class so it can call the functions of the model to create the view?
• Should it be in the model, so the controller doesn’t have to know about the model? The model is where the expensive operations are anyway.
• Should it be in the view, because that’s the locality of freshness information? Isn’t caching an element of the display procedure?

If it’s in the controller, then the controller has to know about caching, is that bad?
If it’s in the model, then the controller is ignorant, and therefore not a controller.
If it’s in the view, the controller is ignorant, and the view is now “controlling” if functions are called in the model.
You can see where my reasoning is going with this..
The controller should probably have access to the cache information. It shouldn’t talk directly to the Smarty instance in the view however. It should talk to a function that takes data from the model, checks the cached views against that data and any timeouts and returns true or false.
For example:

class exampleController
{
  function exampleController()
  {
    // skip unimportant bits.
    // create model and view
    if( $this->view->is_cached() == false )
    {
      // do some expensive operations in
      // the model to create the view.
    }
  }
}

Or should that is_cached() function be in the model? Please comment if you have any insights!

This is a nice looking weblog system! Nice ideas, and screenshots are attractive!

Here’s an interesting article, Template Engines from the author of bTemplate.

In short, the point of template engines should be to separate your business logic from your presentation logic, not separate your PHP code from your HTML code.

That’s the short definition of what a template should do. I think it should also:

1. Provide application and server security. It could be argued that PHP safe_mode provides a level of security against third-party code.
2. Make it simple to maintain the template.

In my experience, Smarty syntax is clearer in a html template. Mixing php and html grates on my brain but obviously it’s a subjective matter that many people are happy with.
Nevertheless, if you’re sitting on the fence about using templates, read the above article. See what the author does in his examples, and make up your own mind if they’re useful or not. You might find yourself using Smarty afterwards anyway!

Lots and lots of Smarty plugins here!

phpPatterns() has been updated with a wealth of articles! Stuff on Mozilla XUL, PHP5, PDF, APIs, PEAR::SOAP.
Excellent reading. The article on PHP5 is a bit of a rant aimed at PHP developers. PHP5 will make it more important than ever to be familiar with OOP and advanced programming techniques, as well as plain old procedural coding. We’re in for some interesting times ahead!

Here’s a good comment off a Zend Smarty tutorial on why you should use Smarty.

With smarty all I had to do was write the engine in PHP and then all the deigners had to do was come up with the new templates. Then for each customer, there was 1 universal engine, one that I
would keep up to date and free of bugs. AWESOME.

That’s sorta how this site works too 🙂

A short article introducing the workflow of a typical Smarty/PEAR::DB application. You’ll need to know a bit about both to get the most from the examples though, but the author has some good ideas.