PHP HELP, PHP TUTORIALS, OBJECT-ORIENTED PHP5 PROGRAMMING

In this sixth part of a seven-part series, I explain how to use the power of reflection to find out if a class has been defined abstract and final, and if it implements a specified interface. Performing all of these tasks is a straightforward process, so you shouldn’t have major problems using these reflection methods within your own PHP applications.

In this third part of a five-part series on the data mapper design pattern, I start developing a basic user mapper class. This class allows you to map user domain objects to their associated database table in a fairly easy way.

Welcome to the final installment of a series that shows you how to use restrictive constructors in PHP 5. With a decent variety of code samples, this series recreates for you a few common scenarios where the implementation of both protected and private constructors can greatly improve the behavior of different classes in the context of a given application.

In this fifth part of the series you will learn a couple of additional methods included with the PHP reflection API. The first one will allow you to check the existence of a specified class property, and the second one will permit you to retrieve all of the static properties defined by that class at once.

In this second part of a series, I make the MySQLi_ResultWrapper class a full implementer of the Iterator SPL interface. Implementing the rest of the methods declared by the interface is a straightforward process that allows us to traverse MySQL result sets by using a plain “foreach” construct.

In this second part of a five-part series I go one step further in the implementation of the Data Mapper design pattern in PHP 5. Specifically, I build a simple MySQL abstraction class which performs a few common tasks. These include connecting to the database server and running hard-coded queries, fetching database rows and so forth.

In this third installment of a four-part series, I show you that a private constructor can be truly helpful when strictly implementing the Singleton design pattern. In this case, the pattern will be applied within a class that behaves like a simple MySQL abstraction layer, but the same concept can be extended to other classes.

In this fourth part of a seven-part series, I demonstrate how to use the PHP reflection API to retrieve useful information about the properties declared by a specific class. Reflection allows you to do more with properties of a class than determine their visibility or learn the values assigned to them, but that's what we'll be covering here.

In this first part of a short series, I'm going to introduce you to using the Iterator, Countable and ArrayAccess interfaces that come with the Standard PHP Library. You'll see how to implement some of the methods declared by the Iterator interface within a class that manipulates MySQL result sets via an intuitive API.

In this first part of a five-part series, I introduce you to implementing the Data Mapper design pattern in PHP 5. This pattern attempts to solve the issue of the strong coupling that often exists between the domain objects present in an application and the underlying persistence mechanism. This benefit comes at a cost, since data mappers add a new layer of complexity. Living with this minor trade-off is quite worthwhile, though, as you'll see.

In this second part of a four-part series, I rebuild the example application developed in the previous tutorial. As you'll recall, it used a protected constructor to prevent the instantiation of the base array iterator class. In this case, a better result will be achieved by declaring the iterator abstract; still, the example demonstrates a simple utilization of a restrictive constructor in a concrete situation.

This third part of a seven-part series explores the methods of the PHP Reflection API. You will learn how to take advantage of their functionality to retrieve useful information about the methods defined by a reflected class.

What exactly is a restrictive constructor, and why would you want to use one? If you're a PHP programmer who uses such design patterns as Singleton and Factory, this series of articles on restrictive constructors will give you another tool to use in your applications.

In this second part of a series, I explore some handy methods of the PHP Reflection API. They allow you to retrieve miscellaneous information about a class, including its name and containing file, as well as its starting and ending lines.

In this first part of a series, we'll begin exploring some of the methods included with the Reflection API bundled with PHP 5. The interface allows developers to collect relevant information about a reflected class, including its name, its declared constants and properties, in a extremely straightforward way.