Christan Stocker has posted a finding of the day that he ran across and wanted to share to help out other developers out there:

For okapi we needed to have a function which loads any class with any number of arguments. This is not so easy in PHP as it looks like [...] Since 5.1.3 you can use the reflection extension to do this much nicer.

The difference comes in at about half the time for both side of the examples - with the switch and via reflection.

New on the Debuggable blog, Tim Koschutzki has posted a method to get the fund() method in the CakePHP framework's models to bend to your will.

CakePHP allows you to use your own "find-types" for the Model::find() methodology. Those of your who are familiar with the find() method know that there are currently four types in the core: 'list', 'all', 'first' and 'count'. However, sometimes it is nice to specify your own type.

He shows an example of the end result - a find() call with a custom type that automagically gets translated correctly. His script overrides and enhances the usual find call in an extended object (extended from AppModel) that uses a switch/case statement to define the custom types and their find() search calls.

In a new post to the Web Tech blog over on SitePoint, Toby Somerville has posted something he calls "RoughTime" - his method for displaying a more "human friendly" output of a timestamp.

When asked the time, we generally don't need to be military accurate with our response [...] we generally communicate the approximate time. i.e. 'its nearly ten' or 'its just gone half past three'. Yet on the web, time is generally shown as '12:24:13 AM', or similar '" not very visitor friendly.

His RoughTime uses two switch statements to map the hour and minute values to different strings. For example, minutes between 15 and 20 become "quarter past" and the hours are changed over from numeric versions to their word counterparts.

Rob Thompson has posted about some simple benchmarking he did comparing the speed of a series of "if" statements versus one "switch" with multiple cases.

I got curious about which is actually more efficient at matching a random integer with a set of conditionals. So, I setup a script to create a set of large scripts to test the speed of these different constructs. Using the 'time' command, I measured the speed at which the condition could match a random number.

His results found that the switch statement is generally more than 2 times as fast at matching a simple integer. His tests, however, didn't go through much more than this simple test. It'd be interesting to see what it would do with something more complex (like longer strings or handling the result of an evaluation inside the definition of the switch().

DevShed continues their series looking at some of the fundamentals of working with PHP in this new tutorial posted today. It looks at one of the flow control statements the language has to offer and a very useful data structure - the switch statement and arrays.

In our last exciting adventure (back in early November), we braved crocodiles, ravenous editors, most of the PHP statements, and beginning loops. In this edition we'll cover the final statement, the Switch, and discuss arrays. So sit back, order your R2D2 robot to bring you a cold, frosty Jolt Cola, and let's get cracking.

They start with a simple example of a switch statement (to echo out strings) and follow it with a detailed description of the different sorts of arrays - numeric indexed, associative and multidimensional versions.

As mentioned by Ed Finkler, there's a list of signs your PHP needs refactoring from Soledad Penades.

I have had to go through a php application recently which has given me more than one headache and has required me to use all my possible patience. While working with it, I thought This is good material for an article, so that nobody else does the same in the future, and nobody else will need to experience the same displeasure as I have had to.

So here are the signs your PHP application needs a serious refactoring, right now

Included in the list are things like:

• Uses global variables
• Everything's an array
• The neverending switch
• Interface inconsistency

It hits on one of the thing that bugs me too, the problem of "Brackets galore" - so many subarrays that you have to resort to three or more sets of bracketed keys to get to the value you want. It's bad enough trying to follow someone else's code without having to "trace down" an array to figure out which of the values they're talking about.

Matthew Weir O'Phinney has a new post on his blog today talking about overloading arrays in PHP 5.2.0 using the magic __get and __construct functions.

Several weeks back, a bug was reported against Zend_View that had me initially stumped. [...] Basically, __get() no longer returns a reference and returns values in read mode, which makes modifying arrays using overloading impossible using traditional methods.

He gives a code example of the problem and two ways to get around it - one using a switch statement to get around the problem and the other ("best solution") was Matthew's option to extend the ArrayObject class.

Matthew Magain has some interesting observations over on the SitePoint Ruby on Rails blog today - specifically that PHP developers are the most likely (out of those working with other web-based languages out there) to make the switch to Ruby on Rails.

Of all the graphs in The State of Web Development 2006/2007 report that SitePoint and Ektron published recently, the one that stood out the most to me was the one showing the platform currently being used by developers planning to start using Ruby on Rails.

It wasn't the fact that the graph shows PHP developers to be likely to start using Rails-this makes sense, as someone is more likely to experiment with another open source platform if they're already using another open source platform-it was the fact that PHP developers are more than three times as likely to start using Rails, even more so than Java developers!

Unfortunately, the study mentioned isn't too cheap, otherwise it would be interesting to see the info behind this graph....

Right on the tails of a new release of the Cgiapp set of libraries, Matthew Weir O'Phinney has posted a first tutorial in a series covering its usage. In this tutorial, he looks at a creating a "template switcher" for Cgiapp2-based applications.

To make it simpler for developers to access this templating system, Matthew created the Cgiapp2_Plugin_Template_Interface, a standardized interface for the template plugins. It's this interface that he demonstrated an example of, giving only a few lines of code (all that's needed) to switch between Smarty and Savant templating systems.

Via this post from Christopher Jones we learn about Kian Hui Teo's blog post talking about making the switch between the normal PHP 5.1.x installation and the Zend Core for Oracle.

The post outlines a process to allow both the Zend Core and a normal installation of PHP 5.1.x to live peacefully (and still be able to switch from one to the other at any time). It's actually a relatively simple ten-step process to follow, especially if you've had much experience with installing PHP from scratch. When complete, you can start up one or the other, making it easy to test scripts in both or to just use the functionality in one (as he needed with PDO).