PHP HELP, PHP TUTORIALS, OBJECT-ORIENTED PHP5 PROGRAMMING

Late Static Bindings (LSB), a powerful feature bundled with PHP 5.3, are much easier to master than you might think. Achieving intimate knowledge of them requires only an average background in working with objects and classes. This article concludes a six-part series that shows you what you can do with LSB.

In this fifth part of a six-part series on late static bindings, I define some sample classes which are responsible for creating some block-level (X)HTML objects, such as simple divs and paragraphs. Once we get these classes up and running, we'll be ready to test the factories created in the previous part and see if they’re actually as functional as they look.

In this fourth part of the series, I demonstrate how Late Static Bindings can be useful for implementing the abstract factory design pattern. The feature will be used at the instance level within the constructor of an abstract factory class, where at least one of its concrete implementations is tasked with factoring a couple of block-level (X)HTML objects, such as divs and paragraphs.

In this third part of a series on late static bindings, you will learn how to use the “get_called_class()” function bundled with PHP 5.3 for determining at runtime which class has been called in a static context. In certain situations this function can be used as a replacement for late static bindings, but LSB has a wider range of possible uses; keep this in mind when developing your own object-oriented applications.

In this second part of the series, I show you how useful late static bindings can be for dealing with a hierarchy of classes in static environments. In this case, the classes that compose that hierarchy are simple implementations of the registry design pattern, but this feature can be utilized in different situations and yield similar results.

PHP 5.3 introduced a number of valuable features to the popular and constantly developing language, but some of them seem less useful at first glance than they actually are. Late static bindings fall into this category. This article series shows you how to unlock the true power of LSB to work for you.

Being one of the most popular contenders in the exciting, but very often complex, terrain of software design, the Strategy design pattern is a well-trusted paradigm. It allows you to build more flexible and efficient applications by appealing to the functionality of two of the big pillars of solid object-oriented programming: favoring Composition over Inheritance, and encapsulating the concepts that vary. This is the conclusion to a six-part series that shows you how to use the Strategy design pattern to validate incoming data.

In this penultimate part of the series, I will build a strategy class that validates URLs using the built-in PHP function “filter_var().” This process is similar to defining other strategy classes discussed in previous parts, so you shouldn’t have major difficulties understanding its underlying logic.

In this fourth part of a series on the strategy design pattern, I extend the functionality of the sample validation program by adding another strategy class to it. The new class will check the validity of a supplied email address.

In this third part of a series on validating incoming data with the strategy design pattern, I create a brand new strategy class that can check whether or not a supplied input value is a float number. The addition of this class extends the capabilities of the sample validation program that I’m building in this series.

If you’re a PHP developer who wants to learn how to implement the Strategy design pattern in a real-world project, then you might want to take a look at this article series. Over the course of its six tutorials, you’ll walk through the development of a modular and flexible application, which will use this powerful pattern to validate different types of data, including integer and float numbers, email addresses and URLs.

Welcome to the final installment of a series that provides an overview of the Iterator, Countable and ArrayAccess SPL interfaces in PHP 5. Made up of six parts, this series teaches you how to build a fully-working MySQL abstraction class that takes advantage of the methods inherited from these native interfaces to manipulate database record sets easily by using an array syntax.

If you’ve been doing some research lately on the web about how to implement different design patterns, be it in Java, PHP or Python, you'll probably have noticed that the Strategy pattern is one of the most popular contenders in the field. It has been covered countless times in all types of media, ranging from books and magazines to e-zines and personal blogs. In this article series, I'll show you how to use this popular design pattern to accomplish one of the more common tasks a website must perform: validating user-supplied data.

In this fifth part of a six-part series on the Iterator, Countable and ArrayAccess SPL interfaces, I implement the rest of the methods declared by the ArrayAccess SPL interface within the “MySQLi_ResultWrapper” class that you saw in a previous part. Once this process is completed, the class will be able to treat records in database result sets as if they were plain array elements.

Welcome to the final part of a series on implementing the Data Mapper design pattern in PHP 5. This series teaches you the key concepts that surround the development of data mapper classes. It complements the corresponding theory with a decent variety of code samples.