ext/apr - exercise or joke?

Well yes, it started as an exercise (and others thought it is a joke) ;)

My intention was to export apr_md5_encode() to php which generates MD5 password hashes similar to those found in .htpasswd files. PEARs File_Passwd already does that, but with plain vanilla PHP - generating one password takes about 0.2 seconds and more.

Currently I'm trying to make apr_threads usable - wouldn't threads in PHP be cool? Yes, they'd definitly be :) It's just a segfault away from working ;)

<?php

class Thread1 extends APR_Thread {
    function run() {
        // do some work
    }
}
class Thread2 extends APR_Thread {
    function run() {
        // do some concurrent work
    }
}
new Thread1;
new Thread2;
?>

Thanks to Derick, Sara and the whole php.pecl gang - I wouldn't have managed to get that far without their tremendous help!

Update: overflow:auto in Mozilla

If you want the page to scroll when the scrolling-enabled DIV has nothing to scroll you'll have to wrap the contents of the scrollMe function into the following if statement:

function scrollMe(event)
{
    if (event.currentTarget.scrollHeight >
        event.currentTarget.offsetHeight) {
        // ...
    }
}

Have fun!

Dropping server load with HTTP caching

Ever watched youself browsing e.g. a web forum?
Noticed that you viewed the same page several times?

Well, this means extraordinary and useless load for your server if there's no caching mechanism implemented in the web application. Even if there is some file or db cache you can still improve performance with implementing some http cache.

The easiest way is using PEARs HTTP::Header:

<?php

require_once 'HTTP/Header/Cache.php';
// only cache a few seconds for frequently
// changing pages like a forum;
// Header_Cache will exit automatically with
// "HTTP 304 Not Modified" if the page is
// requested twice within 3 seconds
$cache = &new HTTP_Header_Cache(3, 'seconds');
$cache->sendHeaders();

// ... load from file/db cache
// ... or rebuild page
?>

Probably the greatest caveat of using HTTP caching is, that our beloved Internet Explorer with standard settings doesn't even send an request to the server if it just notices a "Last-Modified" header (sic!), so one'd have to press the reload button (without CTRL) that a new page is displayed after the defined amount of time.

A dead end again? Decide yourself...

I finally managed to implement support for Internet Explorer in HTTP_Header 1.1.0 :D

Class inheritance or Containers?

While talking with Daniel and Lorenzo about "Tree Reincarnated" I regularly stumble across the question what approach to use to implement different backends: "Class inheritance or Containers?".

I personally feel that using the container approach leads to massive code duplication, while using class inheritance avoids the most (most, because there's no real multiple class inheritance in PHP).

Container

<?php

class PublicAPI
{
    var $container; // !SpecificAPI

    function doSomething()
    {
        return $this->container->doSomething();
    }
}
?>

Class Inheritance

<?php

class SpecificAPI extends PublicAPI
{
    function doSomething()
    {
        // do something only this class needs to do
    }
}
?>

So what do you feel about this topic and how you'd handle that?

UPDATE

While looking again at Daniel's nice diagram, I feel like we've already reached the point where solving this problem with class inheritence is impossible (despite using aggregate*() - you're right Lorenzo, again :) have nice holidays! ).

Tree_Admin_Simple_MDB2 would have to extend Tree_Simple_MDB2 and Tree_Admin_Simple_RDBMS...

Mike's arrived at the dead end, again ;)

Javascript & Flexy

If you ever used Flexy, which I consider a really great TE, you have most probably already stumbled across Flexy's inability to step into <script> blocks.

A really easy method to overcome this problem is to define scriptOpen and scriptClose properties in your base objects outputted by Flexy:

<?php

class FlexyObject {
  var $scriptOpen = "n<script type="text/javascript"> <!--n";
  var $scriptClose = "n//--> </script>n";
  var $scriptData = "var foo = 'bar';";
}
?>

Outputting above object with the following template wont work:

<html>
<script type="text/javascript">
  {scriptData:h}
</script>
</html>

Instead:

<html>
{scriptOpen:h}
  {scriptData:h}
{scriptClose:h}
</html>

...works like a charm... ;)

Alan said, Flexy wont step into Javascript blocks because that caused massive problems with the Smarty convertor...

Scrollable overflow:auto Elements in Mozilla

Doing some extensive Javascript work lately, I managed to make HTML elements styled with //overflow:auto// scrollable in Mozilla.

Just place this snippet at the bottom of your page with DIV elements that have scroll as classname:

<script type="text/javascript"> <!--
  // enable scrolling for overflow:auto elements in Mozilla
  function scrollMe(event)
  {
    var st = event.currentTarget.scrollTop;
    st += (event.detail * 12);
    event.currentTarget.scrollTop = st < 0 ? 0 : st;
    event.preventDefault();
  }
  if (document.body.addEventListener) {
    var divs = document.getElementsByTagName('DIV');
    for (var d in divs) {
      if (divs[d].className && divs[d].className == 'scroll') {
        try {
          divs[d].addEventListener(
               'DOMMouseScroll', scrollMe, false);
        } catch (ex) {}
      }
    }
  }
  // -->
</script>

I already posted a feature request to embed something similar in pearweb.