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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.
- Since the web is in constant evolution and merges a variety of technologies and languages, developing web applications (specially mid-sized and large-scale ones) has become a challenging process. Indeed, applications require extensive planning, modeling and testing, before reaching a stable depl...
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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.
- Unquestionably, the introduction of a more robust object model in PHP 5 has provided developers with additional features that allow them to build efficient and thorough object-oriented applications without the need to appeal to the ugly programming hacks used frequently in the bad old days of PHP ...
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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.
- One of today's most powerful approaches for retrieving information about the internal structure of classes and interfaces in PHP 5 is via the language's native reflection API. What's more, not only does this API comes packaged with a huge variety of methods that let developers perform all sorts of ...
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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.
- As you'll probably know, with the release of PHP 5 quite some time ago, the language was provided with the ability to specify the visibility of properties and methods in classes, something that had already been implemented in more mature programming languages such as Java and C++. In a pretty str...
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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.
- Overlooked by many developers, the Reflection API that comes with PHP 5 is a powerful reverse-engineering extension of the language that permits developers to analyze, inspect and retrieve valuable information about selected classes and interfaces by means of a set of convenient methods. So, if y...
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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.
- Even though PHP is intrinsically a weakly-typed language, as it doesnt internally impose any constraints on the types of values that can be held by a given variable (with the exception of type hinting and type casting), its introspective capabilities are quite impressive indeed. Native old functio...
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Welcome to the final part of a ten-part series that shows you how to use the Swift Mailer library to build email applications. This final part of the series will explain how to use the batchsend() method, and how to specify the Return-path MIME header within emails.
- Frankly speaking, building a full-featured email application with PHP has always been a challenging task, even for seasoned developers. The process often demands that developers deal directly with the internals of both the SMTP and POP3 protocols, and it's worse if the application must provide su...
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In this ninth part of a ten-part series, you'll learn how to use a couple of methods provided by Swift Mailer to directly embed attachments into email messages. These can be very helpful when sending newsletters that contain numerous images, which you dont want to be filtered and discarded by popular web-based email systems such as Hotmail and Yahoo.
- Among the huge variety of email libraries written in PHP 5, there's one that stands out from the rest due to its well-structured programming interface, strict use of the object-oriented paradigm, and (if all of these features aren't good enough for you), its incredibly flat learning curve. Of cours...
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In this eighth part of a ten-part series on the Swift Mailer email library, you'll learn how to attach files that have been dynamically generated to an email message. In addition, you'll see how to use Swift Mailer's setFileName() method to modify the name of an attachment before it's sent, which speaks for itself about this library's flexibility.
- In case you havent heard about it yet, Swift Mailer is a comprehensive library written in PHP 5 and freely available at http://swiftmailer.org. It allows you to develop email applications very quickly and with minor effort, through a cohesive and highly intuitive programming interface. So, if your...
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Welcome to the seventh tutorial of a series on Swift Mailer. Comprised of ten parts, this series introduces you gently to using this thorough PHP5-based email package. It complements the corresponding theory with numerous code samples that you can incorporate into your own PHP applications.
- If youre a PHP developer whos looking for an approachable guide that teaches you how to take advantage of the most relevant features provided by the powerful Swift Mailer email library (available at http://swiftmailer.org), then this group of tutorials might be the material that you really need. ...
