General

Happy 9th birthday

The XP Framework's initial checkin was nine years ago:

 $ svn log -r5 devel/xp.public/trunk/
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
  r5 | friebe | 2002-02-21 12:58:17 +0100 (Thu, 21 Feb 2002) | 2 lines
  
  Initial revision

Happy birthday

How to find the PHP binary's filename

In some situations, it can be necessary to find out the filename of the PHP interpreter running the current script from inside this script. Although PHP provides a getmypid() function, it doesn't provide a possibility to query the executable name directly. Continue reading to find out how to get this done for multiple environments.

XP on Windows Vista

XP going mobile

Mobile computing has become a major topic in the last years, especially for programming languages and their applications.

XP taken the initial step on Jens' Nokia 770:

Fix for the fix - bug #1 revisited

While searching for the origins of an SQLException which was occuring in our corporate Intranet, we discovered it had been caused by the numval() method introduced into the rdbms.StatementFormatter class a couple of weeks ago.

The problem was that numval() was being passed an empty string and was producing an empty string in return, causing "select ... from news where parent_id= %d" to be formatted to "select ... from news where parent_id= ", resulting in the afforementioned exception with the message "Incorrect syntax near ...".

The problem was that sscanf() returns -1 for empty input values and has been fixed now (see http://bugs.xp-framework.net/show_bug.cgi?id=1#c7 for details).

Numeric arrays revisited

In Numeric arrays Timm has compared various array access methods in regard to their speed for quite a common task.

While that was really interesting and certainly will have affect on the different connectors we have to other languages (SOAP, xmlrpc, ...), I missed one special method: the fastest

Numeric arrays

PHP's handling of arrays is superb: It's easy to create them. It's easy to manipulate them (there's about a gazillion functions over here). It's easy to access them. Their hashing algorithm is fast as a lightning. Aah: Hashing. Hashes and arrays are indistinguishable in PHP. And that's where the problem lies when communicating with languages where this is not the case. Hrm, you may think: $a= array(1, 2, 3); is numeric and $a= array("key" => "val"); is a hash, for sure. But how do we find out programmatically?

strtok() considered evil

While experimenting with tokenizing of strings today, Christian Lang and me came to one point where code using strtok() silently failed: reason to this was the nested use of strtok() in different places on different strings.

Getters and setters evil?

Via "PHP is not Python is not Java":

They are a waste of CPU time, but more important, they are a waste of programmer time. Not just for the people writing the code and tests, but for the people who have to read and understand them as well.

• It is fairly easy to understand getters and setters: They follow the naming rule of getSomething, setSomething (and maybe isSomething, hasSomething and addSomething) for accessing the property something.
• It is easy to write getters and setters: In the .nedit-configuration file we have in our CVS here, for instance, we have a shortcut that generates them from member variables
• On: They waste CPU time: Agreed - function (and method) calls are expensive in PHP - but CPU time is not the only factor to be considered when developing an application: Readability (which the verbosity adds) and maintainability (the behaviour of a setter can be changed easily without breaking the API) are the non-plus-ultra in importance when it comes to keeping an application running. And getters and setters are readable
• Design by contract: Getters and setters can be part of an interface whereas members cannot.

XP framework news site

The XP framework's site network has grown: this is the opening for the XP framework news site. This site will offer recent updated and annoucements around the XP framework, on topic is almost anything that has to do with the framework:

• conclusions of discussions of our mailing list(s)
• information about recent development
• essays from the developers about the framework, cool programming techniques or other cool frameworks
• headsup-notices for developers (before bc-breaking changes)
• announcements of site-updates or changes
• release information
• and much more

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