Stefan Esser has released a new update (really two, but one is the latest) to his Suhosin patch for PHP - version 0.9.27.

The previous update (0.9.26) updated the utility with an improved randomness fixing a few issues with an ini setting and the uploadprogress extension as well as adding in a few new settings and updates to the randomizing functions that come included in PHP.

The 0.9.27 update (the most current) updates the patch with a lazy loading change that allows it to work correctly on systems that have it disabled by default (causing the previous patch to not work).

You can grab this latest release, 0.9.27, from the suhosin website.

Recently, Cormac posted this look at a method for lazy loading on variables in an object with the magic __get method.

I used the magic method __get() to load the images into the [Product] object when they were needed. __get() is called whenever something tries to access a variable that is not set or publically accessible, so basically I used that to load the images whenever some other piece of code tried to access Product::images.

He includes a quick bit of code that fires off an internal private method for the class that loads up the images. In his example, if they're already loaded, it never gets called.

Alex Netkachov has shared six tips in a new post on his blog today for how you can write less PHP code and get more done with it. It's based around another post from Arnold Daniels talking about a temporary variable method in PHP.

This tip is useful to "lazy" developers who do not even think about variable names. They may prefer magic names like ${0} and 0 is good enough variable name, why not...

His list consists of:

• Use || (or) and && (and) operations instead of if.
• Use ternary operator.
• Use for instead of while.
• In some cases PHP requires you to create a variable. [...] To handle all these situation you can create a set of small functions which shortcuts frequently used operations.
• Explore the language you use.
• When it is better to write more and then read the code easily, do not be lazy.

Check out Vidyut Luther's response to Alex's comments as well as one from Richard Heyes.

On the Stubbles blog today, there's a warning from Frank Kleine about using the session.auto_start setting in your PHP installation and it preventing you from working with objects. As per the PHP manual:

If you do turn on session.auto_start then you cannot put objects into your sessions since the class definition has to be loaded before starting the session in order to recreate the objects in your session.

Frank points out that this also includes calling session_start before defining other classes to be used. They've come up with their own solution, though, using a base interface object for all of their classes. This object is included in each of the pages, eliminating the worry about having multiple objects and classes to mess with.

Andrei Zmievski has posted something new to his blog today about a feature of PHP6 that's finally been hammered down - HTTP input (request) decoding.

There have been no fewer than 4 different proposals floated before, but this one combines flexibility, performance, intuitiveness, and minimal architectural changes, and has only a couple of small drawbacks. Let's take a closer look.

He details the functionality - what it is, what's been decided on, and the advantages of the method. The basic approach is a "lazy" one where PHP will only store the request when it comes in, no filtering or anything, until you want to do something with it (i.e. get it via $_GET, $_POST, etc). When the request for data is made, PHP looks at the encoding settings and formats the data accordingly.

Advantages he mentions for this method include removing the guess-work on PHP's part for which encoding the request is and that it removes some of the overhead by not processing the data until it's actually needed.