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PHP

Building Hip-Hop, first steps

In case you somehow managed to miss today's announcement, Facebook's Hip-Hop is now available, along with a wiki to show how to build it, and an issue tracker, all on Github.

Debug vanilla

Most of the time, when working on some piece of code, I'll resort to the configured debugger in my current Zend Studio configuration. And you probably do too :-)

However, I often have to access debug-type information on live sites where installing a debugger is out of the question, and I find myself often resorting to parameter dumps like the following:

<?php
// lazy version for simple cases
function foo_bar($x, $y, $z) {
 
dsm(func_get_args());
 
// [...]

// less lazy version for more hairy cases
function foo_baz($x, $y, $z) {
 
dsm(array('in foo_baz, x' => $x, 'y' => $y, 'z' => $z));
 
// ...
?>

You've probably being using it too and, of course, after the first few dozen times, it becomes a bit used. So here's a tiny snippet that makes such dumps simpler to type and use :

A Gray code generator in PHP

For a recent case, I had to define the behaviour of a system with a lot of independent conditions to check, which could trigger any number of a set of messages and actions on data, and all of this based on a plain english (i.e. non algorithmic) description of the data, which only covered the most commons scenarios for these conditions, leaving lots of undefined combinations of inputs. What's one to do in such cases ?

Spaces in PHP variable names

I just found out a very strange PHP feature by browsing the PHP-GTK2 API with the Reflection classes : spaces can be used in some alien places, like variable names.

But the doc says you can't !

Well, try this in PHP 5.2.5, for instance:

Formatting PHP code in Eclipse PDT and Zend Neon

By default, the current Eclipse-based PHP IDE (PDT) uses an indenting style based on One True Brace, and the upcoming Zend Neon version happens to be also Eclipse-based. For developers working with OSInet Drupal modules or PHP-GTK code, or anyone wishing to apply the OSInet coding style, or another form of Whitesmiths / Symbian PHP formatting, Eclipse allows for customizing the bracing/commenting style by hand-tuning, o

Referrals update

Browsing the referers leading to my blog, I just noticed one of my recent posts about PHP-GTK2 Console encoding had been noticed by PHPDeveloper, where the reviewers apparently take time to actually read feed to which they point to, instead of merely aggregating them, which allows them to sum up content for their own readers. Now that's what one can call a press review.

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