Some Thoughts on PHP's DateTime, Object Mutability and an Alternative Implementation

I'm beginning think that while the introduction of PHP's newish DateTime object is very welcome, its implementation is one of the big missed opportunities in the language. This is because the decision was taken to make it mutable. In essence, DateTime has been implemented as an Entity rather than a Value Object.

MongoDB Support for Tera-WURFL

This is just a quick heads up to point out that Tera-WURFL now has support for using MongoDB as its data store. This is particularly exciting for me, since I contributed the original code. I've been benefiting from Tera-WURFL for years now, so it's pleasing that our ongoing migration to MongoDB at work provided an opportunity to give something back.

Successful Microsoft SQL Server Support for PHP on Linux

I recently had a requirement to enable a PHP application on Linux servers to connect to a remote Microsoft SQL Server database. Despite initial concerns that this was impossible or at least very difficult, compounded by numerous confused forum/blog posts suggesting it to be so, it turns out to be eminently achievable.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of misinformation out there, so at the risk of adding to it, here's my writeup of getting PHP on Linux to talk to an MS SQL Server database, using both the mssql_* functions and the Zend_Db component of Zend Framework.

Making Phone Calls and Sending SMS with HTML

Okay, so you can't really make phone calls and send SMS messages using only HTML; that would be silly. However, if you are developing web sites and web applications for mobile handsets, you can take advantage of some features in XHTML Mobile Profile which make it easy for a user to call a number without typing that number in. You can also use the same mechanism to trigger - on the user's handset - an SMS or MMS dialog with the intended recipient's number and the message content prepopulated.

That this can all be done by creating a specially-formatted HTML link on a web page is one of the most convenient, if occasionally misunderstood features of XHTML-MP. This post will tell you everything you need to know in order to take advantage of this feature.

HTTP in PHP, Part 1: The Request

When I wrote about HTTP for php|architect magazine, one of the topics that I ended up having to skim over for wordcount reasons was that of how to work with HTTP from within PHP.

So here's a quick overview of how to make and manipulate HTTP requests using PHP. I'll hopefully follow this up in due course with a counterpart post dealing with HTTP responses.

The Year Ahead in PHP

It's that time of year when thoughts, and indeed blog posts, inevitably turn to pondering the twelve months that have gone before. For my part, I thought it might be nicer to have a look forward into 2010 and think about some of the challenges and developments I might expect to come up against in my PHP work over the course of the year.

"HTTP For Developers" Published

If it's November already, that must mean that the October issue of php|architect magazine is out today, and with it comes the publication of another article by yours truly.

It's called "HTTP For Developers", which I hope should be fairly self-explanatory. I wanted to write about HTTP, because while it's really very important indeed, it tends not to be particularly well understood by developers.

So the article is kind of a whirlwind tour of how HTTP, and by extension the web itself, works, with what I hope is a particular focus on how this is relevant to developers. Hence the title.

There's plenty of other good stuff in this issue too, of course, including a couple of articles on image manipulation using PHP, and something I was particularly interested in: Brian DeShong's experiences using the original WURFL API for PHP to tailor content to mobile handsets.

How Do You Zend_View? I'll Show You Mine...

An interesting design decision made by the Zend Framework team was, well, not to make too many decisions about how the View portion of a Zend Framework MVC application should be implemented. You can use plain PHP to generate markup, use a templating library such as Smarty or Savant, or go your own way entirely. At work we've used both Wall4PHP, and subsequently a custom component-based solution, for example.

The flexibility is great then, but with freedom comes responsibility. Perhaps coincidentally, view scripts tend to be the part of a ZF app that attract the most cruft, the most untestable code, and the most mingling of concerns (though controllers certainly give them a run for their money).

Since someone recently asked, I'll show how I've implemented views on pointbeing.net. I don't claim that the approach is awesome, or even suitable for every case, but it seems to work for me. In return I'd very much like to hear or see how others implement their Zend_Views.

Lightweight Continuous Integration for PHP

This post describes a simple, lightweight strategy for implementing Continuous Integration on PHP-based software projects. This approach happens to use Subversion for version control, PHPUnit for unit testing, and Phing to automate the processes involved, but hopefully the principles are generally applicable.

The post won't strive to be exhaustive or encyclopaedic, rather it will present a simple proof-of-concept and a brief overview of the tools that are available to PHP developers. But first some background...

Zend_Session Overrides php.ini Settings

This post concerns some curious behaviour in Zend_Session. We spent about a day of developer time tracking this down, and I'm still a bit puzzled about it. It doesn't appear anywhere obvious in the documentation, and I haven't found a great deal on the web about it, so maybe this will save somebody some time, if nothing else.