PHP

Here the notes I took during the Dutch PHP conference 2010 (#dpc10). They're not a representative summary of the event's highlights cause I could only attend 1 of 4 talks at any given time. I also filtered out things that didn't interest me personally.

I still got sites running Apache, but all new projects are launched with Nginx. I don't need many of the features that Apache offers, and the speed gain of Nginx is just tremendous. Once you've experienced it, I doubt you'll want to go back.

At our company we have a lot of uses for a solid API. We can use it to distribute config files, have servers report in, let customers edit DNS records using their own interface, etc.

Hi. Have you met KvzHTML? It's a standalone PHP Class for generating HTML. It's been hiding deep inside the caverns of my secret GitHub repo: kvzlib - a collection of code snippets too small or unfinished to deserve their own repository. But I find working with this class so pleasant, I thought I'd share the fun.

PHP 5.3 is a big leap forward for PHP and brings of a lot of neat features. However, big leaps can also mean big changes and potentially big breakage when it comes to backwards compatibiltiy.

Looking back at a great CakeFest in Berlin, I learned a lot about CakePHP and met many nice and inspiring people. Here are some conference notes I took that where particularly useful or new to me.

Everyone knows PHP can be used to create websites. But it can also be used to create desktop applications and commandline tools. And now with a class called System_Daemon, you can even create daemons using nothing but PHP. And did I mention it was easy?

Working with trees When working with tree data structures you often need to craft them in different ways. PHP offers a lot of functions to change the shape of arrays, but often they only go 1 level deep. Trees can count an almost infinite number of levels. Hence we need recursive replacements for our beloved array & string functions.

Working with trees When working with tree data structures you often need to craft them in different ways. PHP offers a lot of functions to change the shape of arrays, but often they only go 1 level deep. Trees can count an almost infinite number of levels. Hence we need recursive replacements for our beloved array functions.

I recently faced a programming challenge that almost broke my brain. I needed to create a function that could explode any single-dimensional array into a full blown tree structure, based on the delimiters found in it's keys. Tricky part was size of the tree could be infinite. I called the function: explodeTree. And maybe it's best to first look at an example.

Not everyone knows about PHP's capabilities of making SSH connections and executing remote commands, but it can be very useful. I've been using it a lot in PHP CLI applications that I run from cronjobs, but initially it was a pain to get it to work. The PHP manual on Secure Shell2 Functions is not very practicle or thorough for that matter, so I would like to share my knowledge in this how to, to make it a little less time consuming setting this up.