All entries of my technical and business blog

PHP’s heredoc - good or bad? All silly titles aside, let’s check out some points.

At superdev, we have a distribution of a gentoo image made with vmware workstation. This works fine in vmware player - but not the free vmware server - and I wanted to have vmware server running so I could have more than one server running on my windows laptop. Well, there are two small simple edits I had to do - and it was all good.

If you’ve ever worked with a customer’s CMS pages and heard the term “Oh but I want some images underneath the links” - you need this script. Whether your using old style tables or the coolest CSS tricks, filling in space to the bottom of the page can be useful.

Unfortunately, at #superdev, there are times when the include_path in PHP is calculated. It is not always clear where to find a file. Other times there are just too many places to find the file. Because of this - and Eclipse PDT’s inability to find a file from an include or include_once statement when you ctrl click it, I needed to find a tool to find files fast.

There are many interpretations of MVC - there are less definitions but more implementations. I want to cover what I personally do when using PHP for MVC. I call it MVCFDH.

A useful reminder: you can make use of returning the results of comparisons for is*() functions. Let me explain that further…

Constants can be great. They can stand for things like web services keys, integers, flags, etc. Basically, anything that you aren’t going to be changing in your script - and most likely things that don’t change much outside of the script either. However, I’ve seen people use them in the global name space far too many times. A great alternative is the class constant. Let’s check out some examples:

Are you a huge fan of Eclipse PDT as I am?

One of the biggest pet peeves I have is when errors are generated on PHP files between redirects using the header() function. Especially if they’re not a fatal error, you never get to see them! Also, missing files that hit the apache logs usually are not found later until you review the logs as well. I thought: wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that would watch these log files for me? (yes, a while ago, I talked about the perl “tail” script that I used in my eclipse to watch these… but… this is even better). Well there is a solution! My first Adobe Air application: Log File Watcher!

Well, my boss at #superdev - who can only be compared to a more energetic version of the squirrel from hoodwinked asked me to start putting together some thoughts here and there on some proper PHP coding. I thought I’d start out the series with this article, Programming without E_NOTICE.