I spent quite a lot of time comparing the different behaviours of the various drivers in the hope I could find out how PDO drivers are supposed to work. The PDO documentation and the specification do not cover each and every detail. PDO really needs some love...

He picks out the FETCH_UNIQUE constant as one that needs a little work and tries to track down exactly what it's doing. One issue he found was that it requires combination with other flags to make the unique part of it work correctly (like FETCH_OBJ or FETCH_COLUMN). He works through several examples, both ones that apply the unique call and others that don't, comparing the results.

symfony and other applications rely on the server's PATH_INFO being set properly. Unfortunately, I use a nonstandard server that doesn't natively support CGI [...] but I can't figure out how to do a urldecode in my configuration.

To get around the issue, he created a file he prepended to each request (via auto_prepend_file) that took the value and urldecoded it to put it in another $_SERVER value.

Basically, what he [Ben Ramsey] conveyed to me (and his blog entry supports this) was not to use ext/filter or Zend_Filter at all. Nearly every second slide regarding functions of the ZF component or the extension contained remarks like "This doesn't work yet, it's a TODO", "this won't validate XY properly".

Of course, other community members (Pierre-Alain Joye and Ilia Alshanetsky) come back in the comments to refute Christopher's claims. They note that it's not the filter extension that has the problems, rather that some of the features are missing outside of the core filtering functionality.

Greg Beaver fixed it immediately, but the fix was NOT incorporated into the 5.2 releases for windows - however the file for the source releases is correct. If you are getting errors that look like this

If you're getting an error like they mention ("cannot use scalar value"), you'll need to go over and grab the latest Go-pear from the CVS repository and install it instead.

He said the current state of the Internet includes a litany of broken items, but with a little help from PHP there may well be some hope for the Web yet.

The article talks about some of Rasmus' other thoughts on the status of the web, and how, with the right functionality and knowledge spread out through the PHP community, the language can compensate for some of the "stupidity" that web programmers (and users) regularly see.

He also talks a bit about a "rich application delivery system", MySQL versus PostgreSQL, parsing and compiling speed, and opcode caches.

Your AJAX answers from my AJAX questions post are below, I hope everyone finds them helpful.

The questions answered include:

• How can I find out whether a connection is broken?
• Why would you want to use HTML_AJAX when there are far better tools for the job, pure javascript solutions such as prototype or jquery?
• What is the best way to 'degrade' a website when Javascript/XMLHttpRequest support is disabled?
• When utilizing an AJAX API such as Google Maps, how do you execute embedded Javascript commands in a page generated on-the-fly?

...as well as a few more. Where appropriate, he also includes code to help illustrate his point.