TCPHP Sep 17, 2005 Meeting
Good programming practices, programming structure, and error handling.

attendees:

Matthew Purland  - speaker
Blaine Garrett
John Petterson
Allie Micka
Scot Jenkins
Steve Franklin
Dave Ornsby
Rodney Griffin
Jim Caughman
Jason Heiser
John Phillips
Keith Connelly
Dan Rue

Introductions:

We're in search of new meeting space.  The following suggestions were mentioned:

Black Bear Crossing (Como Park)
60th & Nicollet - (Keith Connelly)
Courage Center in Golden Valley (Rodney Griffin)

Recommended Books:
Code Complete
Design Patterns

• drupal is all procedural code

• don't use the one function per file for includes

• only do one layer of includes (don't have a function/file that includes other files)

• Use include_once() or require_include() over include() or require(), respectively.

2 kinds of error handling
1. syntax - use echo, die, etc... to debug
2. runtime - db is down, how should your code react

check data types
check connections are open
check string lengths, input validation
check return codes of fn's
check data returned by a function is what you expect it to be

custom error handlers, trigger_error

xdebug [1] - "pickel" module; good for debugging 

pear library written in C

pretty prints vardump

does a full stack track on any error message

php.ini setting:
display errors on/off
log errors on/off

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