Zend PHP 5 Goodies

Zend have quietly released a veritable treasure trove of PHP 5 tutorials via their PHP5 InfoCenter:

XML in PHP 5—What’s New? by Christian Stocker
PHP SOAP Extension by Dmitry Stogov
SQLite Introduction by Ilia Alshanetsky
Tidying up your HTML with PHP 5 by John Coggeshall
Com_dotnet by Wez Furlong
Using ext/mysqli: Part I—Overview and Prepared Statements by Zak Greant and Georg Richter

The Tidy functions look particularly useful, especially if you are interested in maintaining clean markup within your PHP applications.

One thing that I would like to see addressed with the full release of PHP 5 is the increasing fragmentation of the PHP manual. The single online manual now covers every version of PHP from 3 upwards, making it increasingly difficult to use effectively if you are targetting older versions of PHP. The Python site maintains archived versions of previous documentation snapshots, making it easy to refer to the documentation of the version of the language you are using. With the major changes between versions 4 and 5 of PHP a similar approach could be highly beneficial.

Posted 21st March 2004 at 9:34 pm

3 comments

On the documentation front, I agree that this will rapidly become a big issue. PHP.net is one of PHP's big strong points and the project needs to protect its usefulness. I'd favour a system that simply filtered the content and comments based on my choice of version. Ask me once, set a cookie and then filter the view and searches based on that preference. A small set of checkboxes on the page would make it easy to change options from project to project.
Drew McLellan - 22nd March 2004 14:13 - #
Did they sort out the 'finally' block? I know there were many people calling for it but Zend's answer seemed to indicate that they thought it was just for anal java developers.
```
----sitepoint article extract----
```
Note for Java developers expecting a finally{} block, PHP5 (at least for the foreseeable future) won"t provide one. Arguably, you can get by most of the time without it, as I"ve done in this example:
```
php
echo ( 'Start execution
' );
try {
   echo ( 'In try block
' );
   throw new Exception('Some error');
} catch ( Exception $e ) {
   echo ( 'In catch block
' );
}
echo ( 'Finally execution continues...
' );
?>

Script: exception7.php
```
That said, if you have nested blocks and you"re re-throwing errors, or have un-caught errors, you"ll experience problems.
```
----sitepoint article extract----
```
ps.. my blog is now here after a redesign.
Tim Parkin - 28th March 2004 19:24 - #
Here's a link to additional (a lot of) PHP 5 Resources.
philip - 17th June 2004 20:34 - #

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Zend PHP 5 Goodies

3 comments