Digital Sandwich

Saturday, April 12. 2008

Las Vegas PHP Group: It's Alive

As promised, a couple of days ago the LV PHP User Group had its first meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to see what kind of interest there was and to gather some ideas for future meetings. We had a pretty good turnout for our first meeting. I think around 20 or so people attended and we mingled and talked amongst ourselves for around 2 hours.

We are going to be having another meeting in mid to late may. The current plan is that two of us will be doing a couple of short talks, I will be talking about testing and quality assurance. We also talked about getting involved in the PHP TestFest project. The last thing we decided is that the next meeting will be in a 'quieter' environment. PT's Pub worked well for a meet and greet type of meeting but would be a tad loud for any kind of presenting. It also forcluded some people from attending due to the atmosphere.

When I hear more info about dates I will post it. For those of you that live nowhere near Vegas, maybe you can use us as a way to writeoff a vacation as a business expense?

Posted by Mike Lively in PHP at 09:57 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, April 10. 2008

Las Vegas PHP User Group

I am pleased to announce that Las Vegas finally has a PHP User Group and our first meeting is...tomorrow. I am pretty excited as I know there is a fairly decent size PHP programmer community in LV, it just hasn't been organized yet. One of my co-workers Ray Lopez is organizing the group and it looks like we'll have a fairly decent size group at our first meeting. If you are from Las Vegas I would encourage you to attend if at all possible! If you are unable to attend then I would highly recommend you still sign up at meetup.com so you can keep informed of future meetings.

Time: Friday, Apr 11, 2008, 4:00 PM

Place:
PT's PUB
310 E. Warm Springs Rd.
Las Vegas, NV 89119
Directions

Posted by Mike Lively in PHP at 21:18 | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, April 7. 2008

Late Static Binding (LSB) forward_static_call()

I finally freed up some time to finish some quick tests for some of the late static binding patches I made and one of them finally made it into head.

The original post I had bringing up this issue was lovingly title Late Static Binding...Sorta. Basically the original patch alone did not provide a means to override a method, forward execution to the parent method and still preserve the ability for static:: to be anything meaningful. It would be turned into the syntactic equivelant of self::. I came up with a few patches to address this. After several rounds of back and forth about the patches the conversation died out with no decision. I finally resurrected the topic and was able to find concensus for the third patch (forward_static_call()).

This weekend I wrapped up a few small tests and sent the patch in and it was subsequently pushed to php 5.3 and php 6.0. Now, this is not at all the way I wanted things to work, in all honesty I think the patch is pretty hokey but unfortunately nobody really spoke up in support of the changes I wanted to make to parent:: in regards to LSB. So I thought it far more important to make sure there was a way to make sure static methods could be overridden while ensuring that access to parent methods would be unabated.

So now, if you want to override a static method and forward execution to the parent class, the safe way (in regards to static inheritance) is shown in Table2 while the (unfortunately) not so safe way is shown in Table1:

<?php

class ActiveRecord
{
public static funtion loadById($id, PDO $db)
{
$table = get_called_class();
$statement = $db->prepare("
SELECT * FROM {$table}
WHERE {$table}_id = ?
");

$statement->execute(array($id));
$column_values = $$statement->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

if ($column_values)
{
$ar = new static($db);
$ar->column_values = $statement->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
return $ar;
}
else
{
return FALSE;
}
}
}

class Table1 extends ActiveRecord
{
public static function loadById($id, PDO $db)
{
/**
   * DANGER! the table name will resolve to ActiveRecord
   */
$ar = parent::loadById($id, $db);

if ($ar === FALSE)
{
return new static($db);
}
}
}

class Table2 extends ActiveRecord
{
public static function loadById($id, PDO $db)
{
/**
   * SAFE WAY! the table name will correctly resolve to Table2
   */
$ar = forward_static_call(array('parent', 'loadById'), $id, $db);

if ($ar === FALSE)
{
return new static($db);
}
}
}

?>

This shows an example of the differences between using parent:: and forward_static_call. I really do wish that the behavior of parent:: would just be modified to work like forward_static_call does. It would be alot less awkward and imo closer to what the average oo programmer would expect. I suppose the issue is up for debate if anyone feels like bringing it up on internals, we aren't stuck with it until php 5.3 rolls . The patch is even available it just needs some more vocal supporters.

In either case at least there is a way around it now...

Posted by Mike Lively in PHP at 20:19 | Comments (13) | Trackbacks (0)

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