With the introduction of PHP 5, the PHP Data Object was introduced as core functionality. PHP 5.1 turned on a minimum level of support for SQLite, by default, and PDO supports most of the major database engines. PDO offers a number of enhancements and improvements over the various database libraries (e.g. mysql_*, mysqli_*, pg_*), the [...]

This entry is part of an ongoing series involving the review of a code sample and it’s refactoring. For the original code sample, see here. The topics discussed in this entry may be fairly advanced. Please feel free to ask questions, and discuss best practices. If you’ve been following this series from the beginning, take [...]

One of the decisions that has to be made each time an application is written for distribution is how best to set up the configuration files. There are a number of different approaches taken to this: some opt to use the define() function and define constants, while others use large arrays. The purpose of this [...]

This entry is part of an ongoing series involving the review of a code sample and it’s refactoring. For the original code sample, see here. Now that we’ve worked out the abstraction issues and the logic questions, we should take a moment to focus our attention on a few of the issues relating to the [...]

This entry is part of an ongoing series involving the review of a code sample and it’s refactoring. For the original code sample, see here. So far, we’ve done quite a bit of work on our Twitter class, making it better. There’s still work to be done, though, especially improving the logic. The Twitter class [...]