Today while playing around PHP and stuff I have been thinking of patterns of handling optionally existing variables.

The 2 most commonly used ones are:

if (isset($var) && $var != null) doSomething($var);
// or
if (isset($var) && $var != 0) doSomething($var);
// or
if (isset($var) && ($var != '') doSomething($var);

if (!isset($var)) $var = something();

However my experience points me that in the majority of the cases it’s enough to check the boolean value of the variable to proceed:

if ($var) doSomething($var);

if (!$var) $var = something();

Which reads very kosher. But then we have a problem of getting notice that the variable is undefined, which is not kosher.

So the way kosherize the snippet is to enforce variable definition before usage. Meaning we would like to either use its value if it’s defined, or to initialize it with null. But of course I don’t like to use isset() for that. So what to do? I found an answer!

$var = &$var;

As you can see in this way you declare further usage of the variable. If the variable exists – it does nothing. If it’s not it is silently initialized with null. No notices are yielded. Also it’s better than if(isset()) combination because of readability – the only alphanumeric tokens on the line are variable names.

Isn’t it nice?

Shame on me! I’ve discovered that wordpress.com provides syntaxHighlighter functionality just today. So I hurry to report that the only 2 posts in this blog, which contain code snippets have been immediately converted:

<a href="http://sevalapsha.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/copy-nodes-xml-documents-java-dom/">
    Copying nodes between XML documents with Java DOM
</a>
&amp;
<a href="http://sevalapsha.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/prototype-google-analytics-javascript/">
    Prototype styled Google Analytics javascript snippet
</a>

BTW, isn’t it weird I don’t have one snipped in PHP yet?

Today was the 1st day of me working in the new company (yes, my dear friend, I bid farewell to Nielsen Online) – EasyToBook GmbH – as Software Architect. Unfortunately I’ve got no chance to either design any architecture or to develop any software yet, but succeeded to meet nice and talented people and spent some sweet time reading the documentation.

Time passes and doesn’t wait, and some of the plans don’t be realized, you know. So due to last year inactivity my PDT committer rights were expired and I was appointed with the Eclipse Committer Emeritus status. How sad.

I will still try to not loose connections and relations with my good old friends and will do my best for the project’s success (even if it will be just mental support).

Recently, while playing with Scala/Python/PHP comparative implementation of lazy algorithms (I will hopefully describe them some days later) with colleague and friend of mine Michael Fuks, I sorrowfully discovered that, despite there are several SPL units, which define basic Iterator interfaces and functionality, most of the functionality available for arrays is missing for Iterators.

So I decided to fill the gap and started to reimplement for Iterators the applicable non-trivial array functions and also started trying to simulate iterator comprehension (generator routines) in PHP which is missing there too. For this reason I opened a GoogleCode project of php-iterator-utils – please observe my first experiments here.

In addition I need to notice that latest NetBeans build (6.8) branch has great PHP 5.3 support and feels more stable, fast and functional than Eclipse PDT

Got the Programming in Scala eBook. I hope to get time and build an experimental Eclipse Plugin with it.

I’m happy to announce that Eyal Schneider, the collegue of mine, has been finally convinced to open a blog to share his knowledge and experience.

I’ve just failed to install JDT over clean Eclipse Platform RC1 (and this time a bug has been opened):

An error occurred while installing the items
session context was:(profile=PlatformProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.provisional.p2.engine.phases.Install, operand=null –> [R]org.eclipse.ant.ui 3.4.0.v20090504, action=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.touchpoint.eclipse.actions.InstallBundleAction).
Error while loading manipulator.
Error while loading manipulator.

Retrying causes the message immediately. Reverting to the previous installation stage does not help. Restarting does not help either.

It’s very sad that what they call Release Candidate is still rare. Waiting for the release…

About 2.5 years passed since I posted the development activity comparison of major PHP frameworks. Since then I’ve got about 4.5k hits from search engines, which IMHO is not such a bad sample to summarize people’s interest in each of them.

Again, no conclusions – just pure numbers

http://tr.im/lnXq:

As you can easily guess from the subject, I had compatibility issue with installing Cisco VPN Client over my Windows XP x64 installation – the bastards refuse to release 64-bit version drivers. That was not a big deal for me, since I used to connect to the office from my ThinkPad T42 anyway.

But just these days Windows 7 has been pre-released, so to play with it a bit I installed the x86 version of it over VirtualBox.

Hence, in this very moment I’m tunneled through 6 network interfaces:

1. Some neighbor’s wireless router
2. Wireless adapter
3. VirtualBox’s adapter
4. Cisco’s virtual adapter
5. Cisco’s VPN server
6. Office workstation’s adapter