This Week’s Link List (December 24, 2010)

Things are definitely not slowing down in December. This week, everything from news about a stable Doctrine 2 release (and how to use its DBAL to create DB schemas) to blog posts about bugs/features in PHP 5.3 (and a couple of just-for-fun links thrown in for good measure). Enjoy reading…

• Matthias Willerich examines what appears to be a bug in parent:: (in PHP 5.3): http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/content/behaviour-of-parent-in-php-533

• I didn't know it was so easy to install Xdebug: http://xdebug.org/find-binary.php

• Ilia Alshanetsky publishes the domain resolution data that is part of an ongoing project of aggregating PHP usage data: http://ilia.ws/archives/234-Domain-Location-Statistics.html

• Rob Allen shows how to handle errors in a Zend Framework Front Controller plugin: http://akrabat.com/zend-framework/handling-exceptions-in-a-front-controller-plugin/

• A wish list for PHP developers...what features would you like to see added to PHP? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/27564/what-features-would-you-like-to-have-in-php/27898

• Doctrine 2 has its first stable release: http://www.doctrine-project.org/blog/doctrine2-released

• A 1-minute video of JumpIn! Camp highlights: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS3FuR6sE6Q

• Octavia Andreea Anghel provides an overview of new PHP 5 features for constructors and destructors: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/PHP5-constructors-destructors/Octavia_Anghel122110.php3

• If you don't have time to watch this 50-minute recording of Lorenzo Alberton talking about improving PHP application performance, then check out the slides from his presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/quipo/profile-your-php-application-and-make-it-fly http://css.dzone.com/books/practical-php-testing/practical-php-testing-patterns-15

• Some notes about using PHP_CodeSniffer to upgrade applications to a newer version of PHP: http://techblog.wimgodden.be/2010/06/24/automated-php-5-3-compatibility-testing-for-your-old-code/

• As a math geek, I found this article interesting (but I wonder about it's utility): http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2010/12/21/counting-with-an-arbitrary-character-set/

• Yet another comparison of SQL and NoSQL: http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/12/21/sql-nosql-yes.html

• How to create DB schemas with Doctrine 2 (for which a stable release is available): http://www.codediesel.com/mysql/creating-sql-schemas-with-doctrine-dbal/

Have a great weekend.

-Brian