Automated Tests with PHPUnit2
Revving Your Productivity, Improving Your Coding Style

By Stefan Priebsch

In a perfect world, software would always work as expected. In the real world, however, software has errors. And even if a piece of software works today, unexpected problems might throw up tomorrow when the underlying operating system, web server, PHP installation, or even a PEAR library changes. To ensure our software works as desired, we test it. But testing software only once is not sufficient, since the environment and the software itself can change rapidly. The key to success lies in test automation.[Read More]

Organized PHP Development
It Takes More Than Programming

By Dirk A. Hemelings

Programming is more than just writing code. It also requires some organization talent. This article will show you how to organize your project’s folder structure and present you a set of coding guidelines. You can take these guidelines and make them your own or build your own set of guidelines based on the ones in this article. It doesn’t matter if you follow these guidelines or others, the lesson you should learn from this article is, make sure you have guidelines and stick to them! Without guidelines code can become very difficult to read and the maintainability of your project will seriously decrease if not become impossible.[Read More]

MySQL’s Falcon OLTP Storage Engine
An Introduction to the Transactional Storage Engine

By Arjen Lentz

As technology moves on, engineers gain new insights. MySQL now has its own transactional storage engines, code named Falcon. It is a transactional storage engine, based on Netfrastructure database engine, extended and integrated into MySQL. The main goals of Falcon are to exploit large memory for more than just a bigger cache, to use threads and processors for data migration. It has been designed for "scale out" configurations, where several, relatively low-priced servers, rather than a few, more powerful machines power an application. This article introduces the Falcon OLTP storage engine. [Read More]

Freelancer's Corner
Staying Motivated to Stay Successful

By Elizabeth Naramore

Probably the biggest challenge in freelancing is staying motivated, especially since you don't have a direct boss breathing down your neck. It's easy for us to get bored, distracted, overwhelmed, stumped, and just plain burned out. We procrastinate by nature and are prone to just stick our head in the sand and hope that it "just goes away." Unfortunately as a freelancer, this can be deadly for your business. No outgoing work means no incoming paychecks and very unhappy clients. With this article I give you help in slaying those unmotivational dragons and keeping you on track and productive.[Read More]

The PHP OO Candy Store – Part II
PHP 5 Object Orientation and SPL in Practice

By Tobias Schlitt and Kore Nordmann

The first part of this article, in Issue 10.2006 of International PHP Magazine, showcased practical examples of some of the cutting-edge object-oriented technologies in PHP 5, such as property overloading, extended object comparison and objects pretending to be an array by implementing ArrayAccess, Countable and Iterator. In the second and final part of the PHP OO Candy Store, Tobias Schlitt and Kore Nordmann dig deeper into the SPL iterators and show you how to implement fluent interfaces with PHP.[Read More]

Beginner's Guide to PHP
All About Strings and Arrays

By Marc Isikoff

In this issue I will continue to introduce PHP as it would be taught in a formal educational setting. While strings are easy to learn and understand, arrays are slightly more difficult and more important, because a lot of information that you will use and that is native to web programming will be stored and accessed in an array. I'll also show you how strings and arrays are also complimentary to each other.[Read More]