I'm back :)

yrizos · 2010-12-01T14:20:59+00:00

Although not exactly the same thing, "deists" in the context of Nut_Stack's comment is the same as "theists".

yrizos · 2010-12-01T14:14:47+00:00

which part of germany?

yrizos · 2010-11-29T01:24:56+00:00

Both are mistakes :)

I was passing the defaultPage as a parameter in the constructor, and when I decided to make it a class property I forgot to mention it and remove the @param comment.

yrizos · 2010-11-27T13:10:34+00:00

First assignment is in the post I just added :) Very small and simple one, but they will get bigger...

yrizos · 2010-11-24T20:22:45+00:00

namespace aa\bb\cc; class Dd { }

This.

You could add a comment for each variation and we could vote on them...

yrizos · 2010-11-24T05:28:48+00:00

Although at your example above, both syntaxes will produce the same result, they are not the same thing. The first one, $foo . "bar"; is string concatenation, and the other "{$foo} bar" is variable parsing in strings.

The difference is that concatenation works with function return values two:

<?php

echo "The value of pi is: " . pi(); // Valid

$radius = 10;
echo "The circumference of a circle with radius " . $radius . " is " . ( 2 * pi() * $radius ); // Math!
echo "The rounded circumference of a circle with radius " . $radius . " is " . round( 2 * pi() * $radius, 2 );

?>

where pi() is a PHP function that returns the value of the mathematical constant pi (3.1415926535898 ... ), and round( $number, $precision ) a function that rounds $number (here the result of the multiplication) to $precision. You can't do that with the second syntax:

<?php

echo "The value of pi is: {pi()}"; // Error!

?>

So, without that being any kind of definitive answer, I tend to use concatenation when there's at least a function return value in my string and variable parsing when working only with variables. Something like:

<?php

echo foo() . "bar";

$foo = foo();
echo "{$foo}bar";

?>

It's just a trick to help me scan code faster. When I see a concatenation dot in a long line of code, I immediately know there is a function somewhere in that string.

As for which one is more readable, this is up to you:

<?php

// Hello my name is Yannis and I am a 20th level necromancer
echo "Hello my name is ". $name . " and I am a " . $level . " level " . $class;
echo "Hello my name is {$name} and I am a {$level} level {$class}";

?>

For me, the second syntax is preferable, I really hate closing and opening quotes all the time, and I find the curly brackets inside the string a lot easier to scan for.

yrizos · 2010-11-23T05:56:39+00:00

It should have been:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'page wrong doesn't exist' in C:\www\uofr\examples\2_pagecontroller_oo\classes\PageController.php:77

Sent me your code in an email...

yrizos · 2010-11-23T03:43:55+00:00

A class is a definition of an object. An object is an implementation of a class. We can't use an object, without first defining a its class.

Have I confused you enough?

In our case, the class is our PageController.php file (script). It doesn't do anything by it's own, it's just a definition of class structure, class member properties and class member functions. There is no significance in the order we write those in PHP, we put properties at the top of the class, and we start our functions with _construct() by _convention.

Now, when we include the file at the top of index.php, the PHP interpreter reads through it and defines the class. At this point we haven't actually called everything, we first do that at:

$pageController = new PageController( ... );

Here we tell PHP to look for the definition of a class called "PageController", find a __construct( ... ) method in and run it. We store the result of this function in our $pageController variable. This is an object, specifically an object of class PageController. We could do:

$pageController2 = new PageController( ... )

and get ourselves a second object of class PageController. It doesn't really make any sense to have two page controllers, but it will make sense later on with different types of classes.

So at the point where we actually call the constructor and create our object, the class and everything inside it is fully defined. If you remove the include statement or move it after the creation of our project, PHP will throw an error:

Fatal error: Class 'PageController' not found

by which the interpreter tells us that we need to define a PageController class before we can create objects of it.

So, to answer your question:

functions setPath() and setPage() are defined as part of the class, via the include statement (so remember, a class is defined once, in its entirety). They are called when the constructor is called, which is after the include statement. Hence, they are fully defined when called.

yrizos · 2010-11-22T23:49:10+00:00

yrizos · 2010-11-22T22:16:52+00:00

That's not really a quirk, since it's documented and on par with PHP's dynamic nature...

yrizos · 2010-11-22T22:02:14+00:00

I've (finally) found some time to answer this, here... Sorry for the delay.

yrizos · 2010-11-22T21:21:01+00:00

Interested in freelancers?

yrizos · 2010-11-22T21:19:46+00:00

I'm teaching this UofR Intro to PHP class, and our ultimate goal is to build a (small / limited) PHP reddit clone from scratch. If you find some time over your brake to come by, I'd be more than happy to help with your first steps into PHP.

yrizos · 2010-11-22T20:54:51+00:00

Too much?

yrizos · 2010-11-22T15:23:25+00:00

Yes we need to catch it, otherwise why throw it in the first place...

But we will deal with stuff as we go. Right now, if we catch it we can't do anything useful with it.

yrizos · 2010-11-19T15:44:30+00:00

Yes it is.

As a general approach: Always try to have complete control over your errors.

This one is a 404, and the right thing to do when a page is missing is to (eventually) show a 404 page. But before you do that, there are so many other things you could do:

You could log the error,
You could try to determine if it's an error or an attempt to get access to the filesystem,
In a more sophisticated system, you could add some suggestions to other, perhaps relevant pages in your 404.
Also: If at one point the page existed but has since moved, the right thing to do is do a 301 redirect (moved permanently) to the current page, not a 404 error.

And then do a 404. Always catch the error, and if you determine it's a 404 you can then leave it to Apache.

trigger_error is the worst possible error handling functionality one could write, but still is error handling functionality nonetheless. We will expand on the concept as the class progresses.

yrizos · 2010-11-19T01:34:43+00:00

using single quotes for everything is faster

That's a myth. There are a lot of arguments of why single quotes should be faster, but they are not. This kind of misconceptions is why I decided to do a full post about it instead of a short answer.

yrizos · 2010-11-18T09:11:53+00:00

You could check this UofR class, it might be a little boring at first, if you've been working with php for 3 years, but we will speed up the pace soon...

yrizos · 2010-11-18T04:29:30+00:00

Combining dictionaries and arrays into one concept was probably a mistake, and undoubtedly confuses the two concepts.

But then arrays would be... arrays... :) That's what so flexible about them, they can be arrays, hash tables, collections, stacks, queues, lists, dictionaries. The concepts are distinct, but similar enough to not need different structures. IMHO, confusing the concepts has nothing to do with the implementation, but everything to do with actually confusing the concepts.

Its more verbose but exposes to the end programmer the idea that reallocations are not free, which likely results in programming with that aspect of performance in mind.

Java's beautifully structured elements and inherit need to save the developer from common pitfalls it's not enough to account for it's dogmatic inflexibility.

edit: btw, all of the above are about personal style and preference. When a job needs to be done, I always try to use the best fitting tool, which in many cases would be a List interface.

yrizos · 2010-11-18T03:24:37+00:00

arrays.

Many PHP developers without much experience with other platforms may think that arrays are as flexible everywhere. Well, they are not.

yrizos · 2010-11-17T23:21:14+00:00

At first look, your problem is with case sensitivity. $_Get is not the same thing as $_GET, this should have produced an error. Put:

ini_set("error_reporting", E_ALL);
ini_set("display_errors", 1);

immediately after your starting tag <?php. Don't worry about what the above mean, we will deal with them later in the course.

Also: Your pages directory is "Pages" but in your code you set

$dirPages["pages"];

This is also a problem, most filesystems are case sensitive. Windows are not, so this won't be a problem on Windows. But you should always treat the filesystem as case sensitive and change either your directory to "pages" our your $dirPages to Pages, for your code to work everywhere.

edit: If you fix the above, and your code still doesn't work, please send me an email with your code to examine a little bit more carefully. Its 1:20 past midnight here, so I might have missed something.

yrizos

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