Tag Archives : book

With the book out and released I now reach the final chapter excerpt that I will have. As I said in one of my previous chapter excerpts, I did not write this book to cover a wide range of topics. I wrote it to cover a narrow range of topics, more fully. But the topics I chose were based off of my experiences as a Zend Consultant for several years. If you are someone with 2-5 years of experience (the typical requirement for a PHP job) you need this book. This book was born out of my experience dealing with code written by people with 2-5 years of experience, sometimes more.

There is a bunch I could say to introduce this chapter. However, I think that by reading the first few paragraphs you will know what I’m talking about. For those who are experienced developers some of these items might seem a little basic, but there are reams and reams of PHP developers who do not follow several of these rules.

In other news, “You want to do WHAT with PHP?” is now available for purchase in the Amazon store.

PHP is a langauge generally not suited for running daemons. That said, PHP can do it, and in certain circumstances does it sufficiently for the job. In this chapter we look at some of the things you need to know about to build a PHP-based daemon. This excerpt doesn’t feature any code, but it does set the foundation for why I think PHP is fine for daemons in some circumstances. Later in the chapter we get into the code.

Most PHP developers are used to dealing with files. Files that are uploaded, downloaded, etc. If we work with data files it is usually in the form of XML or CSV or something like that. But what if the files that users were uploaded and downloading had information in them that you wanted to get. Say that you were hosting MP3 files on your website that people could upload. You might want to get the ID3 information that states who has the copyright. Or if people were uploading Word documents and you wanted to get author information. There are often libraries available to read certain file formats in PHP, but more often than not, there isn’t. The purpose of this chapter is to get you started in being able to read and understand binary files. Even if you aren’t using them directly in your application, knowing how to read them is a good exercise since there is a good chance that at some point you will need to be able to work with them. Even if it’s something that you would be writing a one-off script for to do some basic data transormation, knowing how to access binary files is a good thing and, as I said earlier, a lot of PHP developers don’t do this.

One of the things that I think PHP developers do not do well is asynchronous processing. PHP developers have written reams of applications that do all their calculations up front and over-and-over again for multiple requests. Or they will just write their code to work linearly, regardless of the scalability implications. In this chapter I wrote a simple example showing how you can do some asynchronous processing. It is a basic example that I use and there is a LOT more I could have talked about, and perhaps I should have. But this example will get you started thinking about how to architect your application so that you can greatly increase the scalability of your application.

Quick! Raise your hand if you know the most underutilized feature in PHP? If you’re thinking type-juggling you’re wrong (that’s probably the most over-utilized feature). It is, in my mind, SPL. If you are doing any data processing whatsoever you are using arrays. And most likely you are doing database queries, iterating over the results and doing your algorithm-ing. But what if you have additional functionality that you need to have integrated with your data. You could go the traditional route and copy and paste half your application around or you could build, what we like to call structured applications. SPL allows you to do that. How? Well, that’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book “You want to do WHAT with PHP?”. Here’s your excerpt…