Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
What's the most common pattern for error handling you see in beginner's PHP code? - That's right, do_X() or die('do_X failed);.
That's nice and all, as at least you have some sort of error handling, but I think this way of handling errors must go. There is no place for ...
Posted in Programming | 10 Comments »
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
You have created a nice, well written function, but you realize you forgot something: The failure case.
What should a function do when it fails? There are two schools for this - the "throw an exception" school and the "return an error value" school.
But which of these is the correct ...
Posted in Programming | 22 Comments »
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
You need to add some new functionality to your function or class. Let's say you need to remove all objects stored, but optionally also call a method on them.
It's pretty simple, isn't it? Let's just add a parameter to removeAllObjects! If you make it true, the additional method is called, ...
Posted in Programming | 13 Comments »
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
James Carr has written a well argumented post about comments. To sum it up shortly, he says comments are the lowest form of communication, and that commenting freshly written code is not a good idea. I tend to disagree, and here’s why.
Posted in Programming | 29 Comments »
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
Peer reviewing is the practice of looking at code written by others to find errors or ways to improve the code. Sometimes also called desktop reviewing, this approach can be useful for various reasons:
If you have a coworker who is more experienced than you, you can learn from him/her
It's often ...
Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »
Monday, January 5th, 2009
Nowadays it's a quite common approach to have models that essentially just represent database tables, and may support saving the model instance right to the database. While the ActiveRecord pattern and things like Doctrine are useful, you may sometimes want to decouple the actual storage mechanism from the rest of ...
Posted in Programming | 20 Comments »
Saturday, December 6th, 2008
"What is a model" and "Is Zend_Db_Table a model" seem to be asked once in a while on #zftalk. Frameworks say they have a full model available, thus they are MVC frameworks
ORM libraries say they generate models. It seems the ActiveRecord pattern has become somewhat synonymous with model.
Pádraic Brady ...
Posted in Programming | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
David Otton posted a short but thought-provoking post about stdClass, which many think is the "base class" all PHP classes automatically inherit from. I have to admit that I had this misconception as well.
On the other hand, "true" OOP languages such as C# and Java both have a base class ...
Posted in Programming | 6 Comments »
Saturday, September 20th, 2008
I think a good programmer should know at least three languages:
English
C or C++
A scripting language with dynamic typing
Why?
Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
When working on a project, I sometimes find myself stuck - thinking about some implementation detail, such as how to tell my admin-module which other modules are installed in my CMS (but that's another story) - and being stuck, unable to get anything done, just thinking of the problem at ...
Posted in Programming | 3 Comments »
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