On the SitePoint PHP Blog today, Troels Knak-Nielsen has written up a post concerning the current state of functional programming in PHP.

With the rise of Javascript, and languages like Python and Ruby, functional programming is becoming more mainstream. Even Java seems to be getting closures in the next version, so does this leave PHP lacking behind or is there an unrealized potential hidden within?

He looks at a few different aspects of functional programming and sees how well PHP fits into them (like dynamic dispatch, binding a variable to a function and an implementation of currying for a function). This last option is the only "true" functional feature that PHP can realistically handle.

Frustrated with the lack of something simple (like mysql_fetch_assoc) in the new mysqli extension, this new function was created an posted about on the Internet Super Hero blog - mysqli_stmt_get_results.

By help of the new function, you can create a mysqli_result object from a statement that returns data (SELECT and other - version dependent!). Then you can use the mysqli_result object to process the returned data: fetch results, access meta data - all you can also do using a mysqli_result object returned by mysqli_query().

Included in the post are a few code examples showing the simplicity of the function and how it can still be used with the standard mysql_* functions to grab the results.

In a new post today, Maggie Nelson starts with the wrong way to do something - passing an array from PHP to a database - and works backward to make it all right.

It would be really useful to have an easy way to pass arrays as bound parameters to queries or procedures from PHP. This would be especially useful if you're letting Oracle handle most of your data manipulating (as you should).

She includes an example of how she's like it to work. Sadly, it doesn't but there are some ways that a developer could get close. Here's her process:

• No queries in loops, please!
• In the ideal world...
• Put all your DML in stored procedures.
• str2tbl
• The list_pkg package
• list_pkg in your procedure
• list_pkg in your PHP
• Leveraging list_pkg

The list_pkg is based around this article from AskTom.

http://www.phpdeveloper.org/form/view/type/addnews PHPDeveloper.org: PHP News, Views, and Community In a new post Paul Jones points out some of the new behaviors that the extension is showing in the latest of the PHP 5 seres (version 5.2).

He starts with a code example that would work with a previous version of PHP/PDO that would allow for the binding of a single value to multiple places in the SQL statement. But:

Sadly, this is no longer the case in PHP 5.2.1. For valid reasons of security and stability in memory handling, as noted to me by Wez Furlong, the above behavior is no longer supported. That is, you cannot bind a single parameter or value to multiple identical placeholders in a statement. If you try it, PDO will throw an exception or raise an error, and will not execute the query. In short, you now need to match exactly the number of bound parameters or values with the number of placeholders.

Unfortunately, this is used quite often in Paul's Solar framework, so an update to the Solar_Sql_Adapter::query() method has had to been made to allow for the binding of multiple items automatically. It works by incrementing the bind location (like ":foo") with numbers at the end - simple and effective - and you can still pass an array to it and have it automagically work.

As mentioned over on Ajaxian.com, there's a new Ajax framework in town that's looking to "ease the development of rich Ajax applications, by generating the appropriate JavaScript code" - AjaxCore.

AjaxCore takes all the dirty work of JavaScript code generation and provides a solid foundation. The concept is to extend a Generic AjaxCore class and defining methods that handle the Ajax driven events and binding them to HTML objects.

It uses Prototype to work with the DOM and Ajax connections and to help you with binding the scripts to the different elements on the page. Code can be linked to certain elements and have that (server-side) code automatically executed when an element is referenced. You can find out more from the AjaxCore homepage and the Ajaxian post also includes a simple inline example to get you started.

In this new post on PHPEverywhere from John Lim today, there's a look at a PDO issue he's found involving a binding issue.

Today I downloaded the latest version of the PHP5.1 beta from snaps.php.net and tested PDO again for compatibility with ADOdb, the PHP database library i maintain. Then i compared the results with my last serious test in July 2005. In general, I find PDO remains in early beta state (functionality documented, but bits are not implemented).

One of my previous complaints was that binding did not work. I was worried that it was a coding problem on my part, but apparently that was not the case: the same code that failed in July works fine now, but there are still some glitches.

He gives the code that's causing him a problem, and mentions the error it throws as well as a few other problems that he's noticed along the way.

(Note: check out Wez's response to this posting as well...)