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Using The PHP SplSubject/SplObserver Classes

This article looks at the Observer/Subject design pattern using interfaces bundled with PHP version 5.1 and higher. This pattern is sometimes known as a Listener pattern and is useful for facilitating communication between objects--it's a way of informing interested parties when relevant changes have occurred.

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PayPal "Buy Now" Button

PayPal's "Buy Now" buttons are ideal for ecommerce impulse sales. They are easy for the customer to use and there's no lengthy check-out procedure. One click and you're on PayPal's secured site. They are also very easy to install and for this reason sometimes get ignored when it comes to tracking and securing sales.

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Using MySQL with PDO

PDO is a PHP extension providing a data-access abstraction layer that can be used with a variety of databases. This gives you the flexibility of changing the database backend without having to alter your access methods. Even if you use MySQL exclusively, PDO can provide advantages ...

The Magic __set_state Method

In PHP 4 there are only two magic methods, __serialize and __unserialize. PHP 5 .0 defines a number of new magic methods the most well-known being the constructor and destructor. Apart from beginning with a double underscore, magic methods in PHP are (usually) invoked indirectly.

Object-Oriented Features New To PHP5

PHP 3 was released in mid-1998. Some basic object-oriented (OO) capabilities were included, more or less as an afterthought, to "provide new ways of accessing arrays." No significant changes were made to the object model when version 4 was released in mid-2000. The basics of object-oriented programming (OOP) were there--you could create a class and single inheritance was supported. With PHP 5 ...

Interview with Wez Furlong

Wez Furlong is Chief Architect at OmniTI, Inc., and a PHP core developer responsible for the streams abstraction layer, the PDO extension, and the SQLite extension among others. We caught up with him at the php|works conference where he presented a seminar on PHP Data Objects (PDO).