On Templating

I’ve been playing around with tempting engines a lot lately. For a recent project, I needed the ability to re-use the same template set in both JS and PHP (coupled with the History API, providing seamless dynamic behavior, yet still having raw content pages). Realistically today, there’s only one choice for that sort of requirement: Mustache. I’ve learned a lot while playing with Mustache, and it’s really changed my entire viewpoint on presentation layer construction.

Programming With Anthony - Paradigm Soup

So, for the past few days I’ve been talking about a secret project that I’ve been working on. Well, today I’m pleased to announce the project. I’ve been working on starting a series of YouTube videos about programming. The first of these videos is about Paradigms (Procedural, OOP, Functional). Plenty of future ones are planned, but the topics, order and even if they happen is completely up to you! I want your feedback on the concept. Is it something worth pursuing? Any topics you’d like to see? Any other comments about the concept? You can reply to this post, or to the video itself. So, without further adue, here’s the video:

Designing An API: Simplified Password Hashing

The other day, PHP 5.5 Alpha 1 was released to the public for the first round of testing the new features that are coming out. One of those new features is the Simplified Password Hashing API that I proposed (and was accepted). I have received a lot of feedback and criticism of the new API in the months since it’s been committed. I figured now that Alpha 1 is out and people can play with it, I should respond to some of those items, and give a little bit more insight into why it was built the way it was…

Object Scoping: A Triste Against Service Containers

Yesterday, I got in an interesting conversation on twitter about object scopes and what constitutes a global scope. The discussion started around a piece of code that I stumbled upon from Fuel 2.0. I am a firm believer that service containers are not a form of Dependency Injection, and are only slightly better than global variables. That led me to make a few comments that elicited a reply from two Fuel developers. That led to a rather interesting debate that just couldn’t fit into 140 characters… So I’m going to go into topics that are tightly related: variable scoping and service locators.

Framework Fixation - An Anti Pattern

In this day in age, it seems that the community trend is completely and unequivocally trending towards the use of web application frameworks. So much so that the defacto first comment to someone asking how to do something seems to be “Just use a framework, and it’ll solve the problem for you.” While I completely understand why this is the case, I can’t say that I agree with it. And while I do believe that frameworks serve a purpose, I think that they are vastly over-used. Let me explain why…

DAOs and MySQL - A Response

In response to last week’s ask for questions, I received a number of questions that I’d like to address. Since it would only do the question justice to have a dedicated post for each question. So I’m going to try to do one post per week on a user-submitted question (probably on Wednesday, but no promises). This week’s question is a rather abstract one:

I’ve been learning a lot about service layers and managers and domain objects and one thing really confuses me. Why is MySQL being turned into a non-relational database? It has so much power, so much flexibility, but it seems like many programmers want to abstract it to the point of near uselessness.

Now, there are so many facets to that question that it’s hard to find a starting point. But let’s try:

What Generators Can Do For You

The concept of generators was recently proposed for addition in PHP’s core (Possibly for 5.5.0). While I believe that this is a great tool, it appears that many PHP developers aren’t familiar with the concept of generators. So I thought I would take a little time and explain some of how it works, and how it can be used to greatly simplify code.

Is Autoloading A Good Solution?

One of the most powerful changes that PHP5 brought to the table was the ability to autoload classes. It’s such a useful tool that it was the first standard the FIG group put forth. Almost every single major PHP framework and library uses an autoloader to include its classes. It always felt somewhat wrong to me to autoload in production at runtime. So I decided to give it a bit more exporation…