A new version of the Rediska library has been released today, version 0.2.1. Rediska is a PHP client for Redia, a key/value database system (written in C) that's similar to memcache.

It can be used like memcached, in front of a traditional database, or on its own thanks to the fact that the in-memory datasets are not volatile but instead persisted on disk. One of the cool features is that you can store not only strings, but lists and sets supporting atomic operations to push/pop elements.

The library includes multiple server support, content hashing, keys as objects and full Zend Framework integration. You can find out more about the project on its site or just download the latest version.

DevShed continues their look at filtering in PHP5 applications with this third part covering checks on boolean values.

As I said before, the filter extension can be used for more than validating integers, since it provides the required functionality to checking other data types. Thus, in the next few lines I'm going to discuss how to use the extension for validating Boolean values.

They give a few lines of example code to show how different values (like "1" versus 1 and "true" versus true) are affected by PHP's dynamic typing.

Davey Shafik has taken a look at return values and keeping them standard when handing them back from the results of a database query.

In #phpc we recently had a discussion about function return values; specifically from database queries. I'm going to go on a (admittedly, rather sturdy looking) limb and say this applies to pretty much any function that returns from a data resource, not just a database .

His personal preference is to return the results data if there's matching information but to return a false value if there is an error/not results were found. He includes a snippet of example code to show the structure he's talking about. Some of the comments on the post mention things like exception handling, other similar methods other developers use and the use of nulls.

In this new post to his blog, Brian Moon compares two things that, on the outside, might seem a lot alike but do have their differences under the hood - a null value and the isset function.

I am working with a newcomer to PHP and he asked me about setting a variable to null and how to check that. He had found some example or information that showed that setting a varaible equal to null would unset the variable. So, he was unclear if he could then reliably check if the variable was equal to null. Having avoided null like the plague in my years of PHP, I was not sure. So, I mocked up a quick script to see what the states of a variable are in relation to null.

His test verified that a variable, set equal to null will be found to be equal to null, will be set (isset) and will be found empty by PHP's empty

Sameer has posted his "easy way" to validate user input coming in over a POST request:

Validating POST data from a form is a common requirement for a developer. If the number of form fields are few than the validation is a small matter. But the case is different when the form contains more than 15 or 20 fields and some of the fields are mandatory. The following code will give you an idea of how to easily validate mandatory fields, whatever the number of fields.

His method prefixes the form fields with a certain string (in his case "c_") and uses that to loop through and act as a hook to check only the form values that were submitted (and nothing else that happens to be in the $_POST array). Any number of checks could be added on to this simple example including type checks, length and validating off of another field - like a password confirm match.

In a recent post to his blog Mike Bernat gives a quick tip on how to change the default value of a data-time input field in a CakePHP application.

Automagically generated date/time input fields normally default to the current date and time. For a couple of reasons, I had to change this to another default value.

His included code shows how to modify the default behavior of the form input field for the date with an array of parameters including the hour, minute and meridian (am/pm) values for the element.

In a new entry Knut Urdalen looks at something that some PHP developers might have forgotten about - the return value of the include statement.

PHP never stops surprising me. I just found out that you're able to return values from the inclusion statements (require, require_once, include and include_once) through an example of Zend_Config.

His example puts an array of values inside the include file with a return statement. This script is included from another and, because of the return, the array data is passed back out into a waiting variable set equal to the include statement.

I want Enums in PHP

That's how this new post on the PHP in Action blog starts this morning. The one thing that he wants is enumeration support in PHP. He shows how it can currently come close with a "roles" system:

Useful examples I've encountered in web programming are states or stages in a process and user roles. Another kind of example is one I used in PHP In Action: an authorization system with three fixed roles or categories of user: regular, webmaster and administrator.

He sets up an example class that sets constants for the different access levels rather than just relying on strings to handle it (which, as he points out, could very easily be misspelled and not throw any kind of error) .

Hasin Hayder had been working with the Facebook API and stumbled across a bug in an application they had created for the social networking site:

The method which we used to count number of friends of a specific user who has added that application was returning 1 when there is no friend actually installed it.

He gives the SQL query and the PHP code he was originally using to find out the number of users for the application. The problem came from the fact that the returning value wasn't an array - it was a string. The corrected code (that checks for array-ness) is also included.

Stijn Leenknegt has posted a suggestion of his directed towards the developers behind PHP6 for a different way to return array values that he'd of found handy in working with his latest application (a Zend Framework app).

In his example, he currently returns the result of a get() call on a registry value to a variable and gets the first value (of an array) from it. His suggestion, though is to simplify it down to something like:

$one = Zend_Registery::get('myArray')[0];

Making it even easier (and more elegant) to work with returned array values.

So dev team of PHP, could you discuss this idea and maybe you can add this to PHP6.