TCPHP

1. Business:
   • 12 People attended. Pistachios and grapes were consumed.
   • J. Wynia would like to start a lending library for TCPHP people. He has a box o' books to loan out
   • Duncan Shannon has registered an IRC channel for the group to use but it is not implemented yet.
   • Everyone approved of a plan to install some sort of implementation of PHPWiki on the TCPHP site. As usual, anyone
     with any big ideas for the site were and are encouraged to follow
     through with it themselves by getting an account on tcphp.org and having at it.
2. "You aren't using Bayesian Filtering?"
   • Bayesian
     Filtering uses various algorithms to learn which email to delete from
     monitoring your preferences and compiling statistics on what words
     appear most in the stuff you identify as spam.
     Paul Graham seems to be the guru of this method.
   • There are attempts at this in various languages,
     mostly in software that acts as a proxy server between the client and a pop3 email account.
   • Named after The Reverend Thomas Bayes, genius mathematician from the 1700s who created the science of bayesian statistics , which, as far as
     I can tell, works just like the infinite probability drive postulated by Douglas
     Adams.
   • Latest Mozilla
     builds are trying out bayesian spam filtering
     .
3. Disadvantages of GPL licenses
   • Everyone says, " oooh! GPL is free", but if you want to
     build a commercial product using GPL'ed products, then you are forced to
     release your product under GPL and that means giving away the source
     code. You can still charge for it, but you must distribute the source
     code.
   • Apache and PHP are under a BSD license and that means that you don't have to give away
     the source code when you include those tools in a commercial product.
   • So with GPL you can't sell a product without the source code and
     you can't pay a fee for the rights to release a program without source code.
   • Most who license their software with GPL
     aren't really aware of the implications of this. Often they are the
     ones howling when they find a software product that has used free, GPL'ed
     software but is charging and not distributing the source code unless you buy
     the product. This is perfectly legal under the license terms.
     They only have to distribute source code if you BUY.
4. Why do new versions of PHP keep breaking my scripts????
   • The PHP developers have sometimes handled changes to the default configuration poorly.
   • They upset a lot of people when they switched from
     having register_globals turned off by default to turned on by default.
     This broke a lot of software and the volume of posts to lists and forums can
     testify to this.
   • J. gave another example of PHP on windows.
     They suddenly changed the name of the command line executable
     to php.exe and put it in a different folder. This caused
     headaches for Sokkit

     .

   • Expect PHP5 to break certain things. They will
     probably use the major version change to throw in a lot of changes. One of
     these is that objects will start passing values by reference instead of by
     value. This is mostly a positive thing but will probably
5. PHP5
   • "Can somebody tell me approximately when it will happen?
     3 months? Year? "

     "Nope, and if someone does tell you it is pure
     speculation and you can add or subtract 6 months to/from the answer you
     get."
     -Rasmus (Posted to PHP-DEV mailing list on January 23,
     2003)

6. Introduction to dir psuedo-object:
   • This is treated syntactically like an object but is
     in fact an associative array.
   • Documentation is
     here.
   • Useful
     article here on O'Reilly
   • Very useful for looping through
     directories.
7. Error Reporting
   • Many developers not aware that you can adjust the
     error reporting level in both an .htaccess file and in php.ini

   • Best practice is to set error reporting to E_NONE
     for production environments and E_ALL for development

   • If your errors spill out for all to see in a
     production environment, that is a security problem because that could show
     people the files, user ids and directories you use.

   • Error reporting level can be set to alert you when
     an undeclared variable is used.
8. Design Patterns
   • PHP:
     Patterns is an excellent web log devoted to discussing and
     using established design patterns in PHP.

   • A major design pattern is MVC, or Model View
     Controller. It separates the presentation layer from the logic.
     It uses one file to handle all the navigation around the site, for
     example, so one does not have to maintain a huge web of interacting
     pages.

   • At least two attempts in PHP to incorporate design
     patterns : phrame and phpmvc2
9. phpgacl : PHP General Access Control List
   • This is a module that can be used in many different
     situations. Any time you need to grant access to developers but don't
     want them to all have the same privileges, phpgacl can be used
     to create a very granular set of access rules.
10. Why would you want to compile your php code into C?
    • Faster execution times

    • Easy to create distributions of your code for other
      people so that they can't see the source code
11. How should I compile my PHP code into C?
    • IonCube is a service that allows you to send PHP code and have them compile it for a small fee
    • Zend has expensive software for sale that you would install on your own system and use for the same thing.
    • Discussion of another compiler under development at phparchitect web log.
12. Heredoc, theredoc, everywhere a doc doc.
    • In a funny little corner of the php documentation, we are introduced to heredoc syntax. This is an alternate way to work with quoted strings in your code.
    • Heredoc allows you to open a quoted string by defining what to use instead of a quote(>>>EOT)
      Then allows you to close the string with the sequence of characters you just defined.
    • ">>>" is the command to say "What comes right after this is the characters I will use to start the quoted string.
    • "EOT" is defined as the replacement for a quote or double quote.
    • The quote is ended with "EOT" as well

      $some_people = "Fred and James,";
      $string2 = >>>EOT
      $some_people I'm really not interested in "escaping" my damn quotes anymore, OK?
      EOT

      echo $string2

Meeting Notes as Remembered by Tim McGuire (weblog)

Please email if you have some kind of problem with the notes