Were I writing this as an article for a newspaper, the subhead would be “Design Patterns Don’t Cause Application Slowness.” The point of this piece isn’t to defend Active Record per se; it’s to discuss the fact that design patterns aren’t to blame for your application’s problems, and more to the point, design patterns aren’t [...]

Over time, the PHP DateTime object has become one of the best objects available to PHP developers. This object has grown since early PHP 5 into a robust class that has the ability to do lots of great things.

As Benjamin Franklin once famously said, “the only two things that are certain in life are death and taxes.” His point, while political, has a good perspective on one of life’s ever-persistent truths: the fact that governments exist in every country, and, largely, they have some of the same benefits and drawbacks everywhere.

In the last two entries we have talked about the concept of layer abstraction: that is, that exceptions should not be allowed to pass out of one layer and into another. So, when an exception is raised in the database layer it should be caught in the controller. But how do we go about making [...]

On Monday, we talked about the basics of exceptions and how they are used in PHP (as well as in other object-oriented programming languages). As promised, today we are going to talk about extending the base exception class in PHP.