While pure object-oriented languages produces mainly exceptions to signal an error, PHP started out as procedural and so it has a wide range of errors that can be raised along with exceptions.

He talks about a few of the most common error related issues:

• Exceptions
• Errors
• Error Types (E_NOTICE, E_PARSE, etc.)
• php.ini directives
• PHP functions for setting error handlers

If you have a Zend Framework Front Controller plugin which throws an exception, then the action is still executed and then the error action is then called, so that the displayed output shows two actions rendered, with two layouts also rendered. This is almost certainly not what you want or what you expected.

He points out the more correct process it should follow - dispatch the request and catch the error there before the request continues. The error is then tossed to the error controller for correct handling. He includes the code to do just that, showing how to wrap the routing in a try/catch and push the exception over to the error controller with an "error_handler" plugin created with an exception type of "other".

While I would personally prefer an exception to be thrown in the first place, it is pretty easy to convert errors to exceptions in PHP.

His example is pretty simple - you set a custom error handler in your script that pulls in the error information and tosses an exception based on the error number the handler is given. Then you can use the try/catch method to see if your script has tossed an exception of the fatal error type. Nice simple solution to handle an interesting little problem.