Havard Eide looks at another aspect of the Standard PHP Library in a new blog post today - iterators.

[It's] a set of classes in the SPL that implements various iterating patterns: ArrayIterator, AppendIterator, FilterIterator, LimitIterator and NoRewindIterator. Hopefully you'll get a idea of what these are capable of and that you can get some new ideas for your day-to-day tasks.

He breaks it down into example of each, explaining what they can be used for, how they work and a code example of each in action (with output). You can find more information in iterators and their functions in the SPL section of the manual.

"Cross-over" developers out there (those that use PHP and Javascript on a regular basis) can sometimes get confused by little syntax things. Stoyan Stefanov got tripped up by just such an issue.

The front-end developer is a strange beast who has to jiggle to and fro and code in several languages literally at the same time - javascript, html, css, php or some other server side language, some SQL dialect... No wonder that sometimes we make silly mistakes.

His issue was with appending - in Javascript, it's a plus but in PHP, it's a period. Unfortunately, the problem can be hard to track down since Javascript also has a use for the period operator - treating the preceding thing like an object.

On ibzi's blog today, there's a quick guide to introducing caching to your PHP application via a simple PHP file to create the cached pages.

Caching your pages can be pretty useful, especially if you have PHP-generated pages that uses a lot of MySQL queries. Once your pages are cached, your server won't waste speed and RAM on regenerating the pages, it will just load it from the cache. I'm going to show you how to get PHP to cache your pages, and you can probably do this within 5 minutes.

You'll need to be able to add (and use) an .htaccess file for Apache to use this method, but once it's set up, the simple script works like a charm. It prepends the caching functionality to each page and checks to see if a copy already exists. If it does, it displays it and if not, it will display it and create the cached file.

In his latest blog entry, Jacob Santos looks at objects and his seeming faciation with every little thing they do - specifically the Array objects.

I suppose I'm fixated on objects, but damn it, they are awesome. Recently, I've been thinking of creating a framework that takes array and file functions and creates a class wrapper around them. It would have been nice if PHP offered an object for handling Arrays and Files. SPL does manage some sorting for arrays, but I would like to fully manage arrays through the internal Array methods.

He dives deeper into the Array objects, looking at how to use them, appending them to each other, how much overhead making the object causes (testing), and the results of those tests.