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International PHP dates with intl
I wrote about localising dates (and other data) in a recent blog post, but unfortunately there were some shortcomings where time zones were concerned. As I alluded to in that post there is a way around this via the Intl extension that exposes a simple API to format DateTime instances. Thankfully this follow up post will be quite short as the setup is very simple for those of you on Ubuntu/Debian you can use the repositories. Read more ⇒
PHP date localisation with setlocale
Localising sites can be a chore, but PHP has the venerable setlocale() to use system locales. These are like templates or profiles that describe how various types of data should be displayed. Should a price have a comma or point to indicate the decimals? When printing a date should PHP output Monday or Montag? All of these considerations are locale specific and they map to a geographical area. Various cultures have their own standards for displaying this kind of information not to mention different languages to accommodate. Read more ⇒
Simultaneously benchmark many URLs with ApacheBench and GNU parallel
Once in a while you come across situations where someone wants to know what a server can do or how many requests it can handle under a realistic load scenario. It could simply be that you want to hit a large selection of sites or even that you want to simultaneously hit a number of different pages on the same site. In my case I am testing the performance of a Drupal multisite installation where one core set of code is shared by many sites on different URLs. Read more ⇒
A little known feature of PHP’s static keyword is that it allows for memoization or function caching. This is a process whereby a functions heavy lifting can be cached so that subsequent calls are faster. It is possible to store any value in a memoized way such as arrays or even objects. This is done without any external side effects - that is to say that the code calling the function will require no changes to support memoization. Read more ⇒
It is possible to treat a class instance as a function in PHP. Quite often this is referred to as a functor even though it should really be known as a function object. This is because functions actually serve a different role in languages that support their use. The convenience of having a reusable function that can be overloaded and carry a context is something to weigh up against using functions or closures. Read more ⇒
I was recently invited to speak about functional programming in PHP for both BrightonPHP and PHP Hampshire. The details of which are in a previous blog post. If you attended either talk and you’ve yet to leave feedback then please do on the respective Joind.in pages: Brighton PHP joind.in page PHP Hampshire joind.in page You can view the slides from the sessions on my website. I created the slides using reveal. Read more ⇒
Speaking about Functional PHP at BrightonPHP and PHP Hampshire
I have been invited to speak at both the upcoming meetings of BrightonPHP and PHP Hampshire about functional programming. This is off the back of the site I created for my (soon to be released) book tentatively entitled Functional Programming in PHP. To get a better idea of what the talk will include I have prepared an abstract: In the PHP world functions are generally sneered at due to their simplicity and perceived as an evil side effect of spaghetti code. Read more ⇒
Add a duration or interval to a date
In PHP you can easily add a duration to a DateTime instance in a number of ways. I will review the most common methods for completing the task starting with those available on the DateTime object itself. If you are running PHP 5.2 then the only way to achieve this is to call the modify method. This allows you to pass in a date format, but in this case we are most interested in the relative formats. Read more ⇒
Reverse a git pull request on GitHub the hard way
As you may know I am currently the maintainer of both Idiorm and Paris; well recently I merged in what looked to be an innocuous pull request from a contributor. Unfortunately this merge had unintended consequences and basically broke the backwards compatibility of the library. Shame on me! After waiting for a patch that would fix the problem and coming up short I decided enough was enough. So today I backed out the errant merges in both Idiorm and Paris. Read more ⇒
Convert UTC/GMT or any time zone to local time in PHP
Wrangling dates and times can be a somewhat arduous task for all programmers. One very common requirement is to convert a time from one time zone to another. In PHP this is greatly simplified with the DateTime standard library classes and especially DateTimeZone. For this example let us assume we have a UTC date and time string (2011-04-27 02:45) that we would like to convert to ACST (Australian Central Standard Time). Read more ⇒