Ondřej Surý has released apt-get’table packages for PHP 5.4 on Ubuntu.  Instructions and installation are available from https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/php5 . Think I’ll keep custom building for now so I get total control but for the majority of people this is better than waiting until potentially October for it to hit the official channels.

Needed to use this recently to create a specificity parameter for an API at work, it gives you a key/value array from an ISO date string regardless of what is actually set in the string (e.g. if you give 2011-06-07 04 you’ll get an array back as array(‘year’=>2011, ‘month’ => 6, ‘day’ => 7, ‘hour’ => 4). If you enter 2011-06-07 04:43 you’ll get: array(‘year’=>2011, ‘month’ => 6, ‘day’ => 7, ‘hour’ => 4, ‘minute’ => 43), works from just a year all the way to seconds. /** * Gets the parts of a date that are set in an … Continue reading →

This weekend I’ve finished off my first public PHP extension using the (god awful) Zend PHP macro’s, function calls etc. There were 3 reasons for me doing this: 1) See how difficult it was 2) Create a true library for PHP projects to reduce code repetition across projects. 3) Add some speed to projects that crunch a lot of data in PHP. The extension I’ve released adds the following functions: /** * Given a multi line input, removes empty lines and whitespace at the ^ and $ of each line. * Remove duplicate lines by setting the second param to … Continue reading →

In my leedsphp talk last week I mentioned making a developer (and consumers) life easier by automatically implementing the allow methods functionality that your API may expose (e.g. you call PUT on a URL that only allows GET or POST). I did have an example slide there showing how to implement but I thought I’d posted a bare bones controller here that shows how it works. abstract class ApiController extends Zend_Rest_Controller { /** * Default head action. * * @internal * @return void */ public function headAction() { ob_start(); $this->getAction(); ob_get_clean(); } /** * Default get action. * * @internal … Continue reading →

Finally got around to uploading my slides (sorry for the delay!) for my talk at leedsphp on Monday 18th. They are now available online at http://www.slideshare.net/wadewomersley/building-a-horizontally-scalable-api-in-php

We use beanstalkd at work for our job queue’s due to its very low memory footprint and speed. However it was missing a few features we needed so I decided to fork it on github and start working on it and I’m pleased to announce it’s now available to download. You can grab it at https://github.com/wadewomersley/beanstalkd-ww. * Added the much needed clear-tube function – removes all but reserved jobs, yes, even buried! * Fixed bug in log load where group reload was attempted while not supported. * Added removal of group reference from job on group delete * Fixed add_job_to_group … Continue reading →