This tutorial presents 3 different methods for debugging your code. DBE (Debug-By-Echo) is as simple as debugging methods come. All you are doing is spouting off information which, hopefully, is meaningful to the programmer. DBL (Debug-By-Logging) is basically the same thing as DBE, except that it writes to a file. DBT (Debug-By-errorTrap) is the most complicated of the three. It displays only relevant information based on checking the data we DO have versus the data that we SHOULD have. It can be the most useful, but takes more time and thought to implement.
One of the most common feature requests that PHP developers ask for is application variables. These are variables that are globally available to all PHP scripts on a web server. This work originated in the need to save the current working database connection in a primary and fallback database server configuration. This can be extended to saving other configuration information that rarely changes.
PHP is a very fast programming language, but there is more to optimizing PHP than just speed of code execution. This article explains why optimizing PHP involves many factors which are not code related, and why tuning PHP requires an understanding of how PHP performs in relation to all the other subsystems on your server, and then identifying bottlenecks caused by these subsystems and fixing them. It also covers how to tune and optimize your PHP scripts so they run even faster.
PHP was originally developed to run on the Unix/Linux operating system but was soon after ported to the Win32 platform. It supports a huge amount of Windows-only functionality, such as instantiating COM objects through code. This article looks at how to instantiate COM objects through PHP on a Win32 operating system. It also look at how to access the various methods and members that common Windows COM objects expose.
One of the big causes of errors in PHP scripts is the lack of a portable code standard. This article takes a look at a few little things that we can do to help make our PHP scripts more portable. When other developers comes to use them, they will have more of a chance of working successfully the first time, without the need to perform any kind of system configuration modifications, etc.
Using and manipulating variables in PHP is extremely easy because PHP includes several functions to help us compare and contrast them. This article introduces us to the range of PHP data types. It also teaches us how to work with and manipulate PHP data types. This article also presents several code examples that you can test and learn from.
For many years, arrays have been used to logically store and sequence data. They have also been the point of confusion for many developers. This article will talk about the structure of arrays and how you can create and manipulate arrays with the PHP scripting language.
This article is intended for the PHP programmer interested in creating a static HTML cache of dynamic PHP scripts. The article has been written specifically for an Apache server running PHP scripts, but the ideas described here are applicable to almost any Web environment. The article assumes that you have some experience with creating dynamic Web sites and that you are familiar with HTTP.
This article explains one of possible ways of developing PHP applications in a team. Discussion include: Single 'selector' file, Database abstraction layer, Embedding PHP, and Separation to files by functionality. To illustrate the ideas explained, the author wrote a small notebook application using a MySQL database, available for download.