I'm working on a project at the moment (a PHP library for CouchDB, if you must know) that is designed to make HTTP calls and therefore holds a Guzzle HTTPClient object as an object property. This is great except when I need to debug something and the output of my call to var_dump() is several screens high ... Continue reading
I'm very excited to announce that some of my content is featured in the PHP Learning Path from O'Reilly. The Learning Paths are a good way to buy a bundle of content from different people on related topics, and the introductory pricing is always a good deal! Their newest offering is the PHP Learning Path, which has a video course on PHP and MySQL, my intermediate PHP Video course (they wouldn't let me call it "all the things Lorna thinks PHP developers need to know" unfortunately!) and also my video course Git for Web Developers which has a bunch of PHP in it as well as my best git tips and tricks.
I think it's a pretty well-rounded collection and it's only $99 for a couple of weeks, so get the PHP Learning Path here and let me know what you think?
PHP and frameworks built from it have many great tools to assist with debugging (I particularly like XDebug) but sometimes you can find yourself in a situation where the "helper" features aren't all that much help ... in my case this was a framework totally determined to output HTML from my commandline script and to only show me 5 lines of stack trace, which wasn't enough for my complex application. I had to look up how to generate a nice stack trace inside an exception handler so here it is in case I want it again some time (future me, you're welcome!) Continue reading
I've been thinking a lot about the state of hosting in PHP lately, mostly as a result of working with a few different clients on their setups (including one that bought brand new hosting a month ago and got a PHP 5.3.3 platform), and also being at DrupalCon and meeting a community who is about to make a big change to their minimum requirements. With that in mind, here are my thoughts and tips on choosing hosting. Continue reading
There are lots of reasons why you might like to compile your own PHP extensions. For me those reasons are usually:
Related: If you followed my previous post on compiling PHP, be aware that in the php/bin/ folder there is a pecl binary that will install extensions correctly for whichever version of PHP it belongs to, so you may not need to read the rest of this post. However if you do, the paths follow on from the examples in that post.
I haven't seen a really approachable guide anywhere, we tend to speak of extensions in hushed tones, and actually it isn't particularly tricky so here is my quick how-to guide. Continue reading
When I advise people about upgrading their PHP version, I say things like "just run your test suite with the new version" "just grab the new version and try your site with the built-in webserver". A couple of people recently have asked for more detail on how to actually achieve these things so here's a quick primer on getting new PHP without touching anything to do with your existing PHP installation. Continue reading
I am delighted to announce that I have new video titles available! I'm delighted for two reasons: selfishly, because these things take a lot of prep and I am pleased they are done; but also because I think it is very good news that a key industry player such as O'Reilly recognises PHP's place in the world and works hard to publish new content in this area.
There are two videos available: PHP Web Services and Intermediate PHP
(subtitle: a bunch of things Lorna thinks will make developers' lives and applications better!), you can click through (disclaimer: affiliate links!) to get more information and a detailed chapter outline for each course. I hope that either or both of them will be useful to you. Continue reading
I have just introduced Beanstalkd into my current PHP project; it was super-easy so I thought I'd share some examples and my thoughts on how a job queue fits in with a PHP web application.
I have an API backend and a web frontend on this project (there may be apps later. It's a startup, there could be anything later). Both front and back ends are PHP Slim Framework applications, and there's a sort of JSON-RPC going on in between the two.
The job queue will handle a few things we don't want to do in real time on the application, such as:
I've had a little flurry of enquiries about training lately, so I thought I'd mention the courses I have coming up, as especially the PHP ones are topics that I don't run public classes on all that often. At the time of writing I have some space on all of these classes: Continue reading
Yesterday I updated my previous ZCE certificate to the Zend Certified PHP Developer qualification (the new ZCE for PHP 5.5 also got a new name). Since the ZCE 5.3 exam is no longer available and I work with various clients to prepare their teams for these certifications, it was important to me that I keep my own certification up to date. Now I've done that, I'd like to share some resources for others doing the same thing.
One really important step in preparing for this exam is to get an idea of what kind of questions you might be asked - in terms of the format of the questions and the topics. I have a pack of 70 questions which I use when delivering ZCE preparation courses, but I also sell it separately and it is now updated for PHP 5.5
This pack is now available from https://leanpub.com/zce
As well as questions, this includes answers with detailed explanations of how those are reached and links to further reading. There is also some advice about the format of the exam and what to expect on the day itself.
The PHP Manual is fabulous, but sometimes you need a more conceptual explanation. I maintain a bundle of links to blog posts or other tutorials on the various topics involved in ZCE, which you may find helpful to dip into for your own study:
http://lornajane.net/zce-links-collection
If you find any broken links, or have any resources you think should be included, just let me know. I intend for this to be a living document that we can share.
My advice for cramming for ZCE is always the same: you need to recap all areas of the manual but focus especially on strings and arrays, because while there will be an average number of questions on these topics, it's common to see strings and arrays used in questions that are really about function scope, or inheritance, etc.
For my own revision, I created flashcards by taking the PHP manual and making them into double-sided PDFs that I could cut up and use (you could do this with a single-sided printer, print the odd pages first and then put the paper through again - for duplex printers beware that you need to choose "short side").
Here are the String and Array flashcards that I used for myself (they're not perfect, but I found them useful so if you want to download them, you can. The main omission is that I stripped < and > characters which makes for interesting string comparison documentation).
Hopefully some of these resources will help you prepare for your own professional certification - good luck :)