David Walsh has put together and posted a class he's created around creating generic objects to help with code organization.

I like using PHP classes to keep my code organized and easy to maintain. I know that they consume more memory than simply using an array or variable system, but if memory is an issue, I'd get more memory. Saving time by coding in a maintainable fashion is more important to me than upgrading a server. I've written a very generic, flexible PHP class that I use in my PHP code to get and set variables for use within the page.

His class is included as are two example of its use - a basic option that sets properties on the object and an example of its use with a database, parsing the results into an object with a load() call.

On his blog, Maarten Balliauw has an interesting new post dealing with the use of generics in PHP:

Assuming everyone knows what generics are, let's get down to business right away. PHP does not support generics or something similar, though it could be very useful in PHP development. Luckily, using some standard OO-practises, a semi-generic array can easily be created, even in multiple ways! Here's the road to PHP generics.

He shows the two ways to make generics possible - the hard way (simple inheritance and type hinting) and the more flexible way (a GenericArrayObject that extends the normal ArrayObject to make appending and validating the contents of the array simple).

Both this post on the Zend Developer Zone and tis post on the International PHP Magazine's website point to a new article over on the IBM developerWorks website by Jack Herrington, Batch processing with PHP.

What do you do when you have a feature in your Web application that takes longer than a second or two to finish? You need some type of offline processing solution. Check out several methods for offline servicing of long-running jobs in your PHP application.

He talks about cron and its role in offline processing (including a basic primer on its format) before getting into the example itself. He looks at three examples:

• building an email queue
• building a generic queue system
• dumping out the database

Each example comes complete with code and descriptions to help you work them up on you very own system.

vlado, thinking more about a previous post, started wondering what exactly you'd need to do to get macros working in PHP. Read on for his answers.

What is the closest we can get to that without actually changing anything in php (poor man's version? What minimal sugar does php need to make it comfy? What is the natural syntax for macros in php? I definitely don't know the answers to these questions but let's try.

He doesn't create working code, but he does make it a PHP-ish looking solution. He also suggests that while PHP doesn't have this ability (yet?), the generic function pattern can help mimic its functionality pretty closely.

There's a project out there for those that might need a bit more to their syntax highlighting than the standard PHP functionality might allow. Enter GeSHi, the Generic Syntax Highlighter - and it's latest snapshot on it's development track to version 1.1.1.

GeSHi started as an idea to create a generic syntax highlighter for the phpBB forum system, but has been generalised to this project. GeSHi aims to be a simple but powerful highlighting class.

GeSHi supports PHP5 and Windows, and has even been used to highlight code on ASP pages. Numerous blogs, wikis and forums use GeSHi, including Dokuwiki, Mambo, phpBB and WikkiWiki.

From the development branch comes another snapshot on the way to 1.1.1. This one adds beginning support for VHDL, courtesy of Lingzi Xue and Java, thanks to Tim Wright.

You can check out the complete specs of the software here, or just download it and give it a try...