A Path Less Taken

In a recent post by David Walsh I noticed an interesting and helpful description of the PHP “Magic Method” __call. In his post Create PHP Classes with Dynamic Functions David outlines how to use __call to act as a generic get method. Since I have seen these before I jumped to the PHP 5 documentation on Magic Methods to refresh my memory. I realized that I have never used the __get and __set methods in my development. I know many will argue that these are dangerous methods, but I think there could be some situations where they could be properly implemented to ease your coding practices. Have a look and let me know what you think about them.

I recently became interested in tree algorithms and was doing research in books and on the web. I came across this post by Julienne Walker where he describes his implementation of a Red Black tree. It was interesting to read so I thought I would share. Enjoy!

I have not posted in a while because I dropped into another science project. I was working on a little one off PHP app to use at work and I needed a small amount of data storage. I didn’t want to use MySQL because it’s not on my work computer and I wanted to make sure the data files were accessible to other applications by making them XML. I looked at several Text DB options (see the previous post), but none of them used XML to store their data. So, as I’m sure you guessed by now, I decided to roll my own. SCIENCE PROJECT!

I’m a quiet advocate that Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) are overkill for some applications. A great example of this is small, web based utility programs that we write for ourselves and for others. Assume you need a small single user program with a limited amount of data. You can use a web server like lighttpd and a script engine like PHP to create a highly portable solution that will cross multiple OS’s. This is far from the only approach, nor is it necessarily the best, but it is viable, particularly for a developer whose core strength is in web based development and UI design.

This past weekend I attended CodeWorks 2009 in Dallas, TX and it was great. I got to meet some notable people in the PHP community and hear some interesting topics. I thought it would be good to share the high points of the experience.