If you are a PHP developer and use PHP for high end application development, you definitely felt the need of a good ORM like Java used to have Hibernate. Object Relationship Mapping is indeed needed for an application at the level of enterprise solution. in PHP though some of the fraemworks support ORM, some not.

If you happen to be using any framework which, does not support ORM, do not get disheartened. There are atleast two projects running which can fulfill your needs at least partly or even fully.

Propel is one such venture. Another similar project is CoughPHP. You can try either of the two and definitely, it will help.

Happy Coding!!

Those who are seriously considering to learn Zend Framework and looking for some resources to start with, I have a few links to share with them. But before you start learning any framework, you need to brush up your language and technical skills. Please, do remember, your framework might not guide and guard you from all practical challenges. You might need to add additional codes or extend the code base.

The approach: You should have Zend Framework latest version downloaded. There are two good books, I can recommend you to purchase, with which you can start your basic building blocks.

1. Surviving the deep end is an online book where the approach of the author is excellent. If you read the few chapters available there, you will gain some idea about the framework, the MVC model and a mind to start with.

2. Zend Framework in action  is another book, on which you can depend a lot for the initial phases of coding. PHP|Architect’s Zend framework is also another book, which has some vaulable insights.

Once you have the initial concepts, have some idea about the basic APIs and usage of controllers like ZendDb, ZendAuth, ZendForm, ZendAcl, ZendView etc, the next approach will be to consult reference manual, API resources and online articles.

I know that point onwards you need no guidance, but for the initial start, the resources I provided are really good enough.

Of late, I was working with a problem where I had to prepare a report in grid format with pagination facility. Above all every page of the report will have a summary section. The summary section will display summary of some of the columns like unique count, maximum, average, minimum value etc. This require using the main query as a subset of another query to extract the summary result. Again the main query had join of ten tables. This became a great challenge for optimization. As we cannot allow more than 15-20 seconds for page load, which suggests the query should execute in less than 1 second.

I opted for View with MERGE option so that the view keeps the indexes of the table involved. Once the view created I faced a strange problem. All the numeric and date datatype fields were converted into varbinary datatype in the view. And that become very difficult  while I was sorting the result.

Ultimately I found a way out. Using Cast option in select statement. Somehow like this.

CREATE ALGORITHM=MERGE VIEW view_name as
SELECT CAST(age as DECIMAL) as age, CAST(DOB as DATE) as DOB
FROM table1
LEFT JOIN...
....................................................

And it solved the problem.

In the world of objects, encapsulation is a popular term. But sometimes we never pay enough attention to properly declare the access type of instance variables. Yes, I mean to say in terms of design and class architecture perspective. The basic advantage of object oriented programming is code re-usability. Meaning, using your class in a different program or changing your class shall not affect any other parts of code, which uses it. Now, if most of your instance variables are public and if (say) several other classes extends your class, or use its objects, then if any day you want to change the behavior of that instance variables, then all those codes will require re-work. Like say, if you want to ensure that the instance variables should have a value range and it will not accept any value outside that range.

Consider a class automobile with an instance variable no_of_wheels. Will you allow any other code to assign a value of fraction or a negative value to the member variables? It is better to declare the variable as private and use getter and setter method to control the assignment behavior. Only in this way you can achieve the truest meaning of encapsulation. Here is the pseudo code example.

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Class Automobile {
 
    private int no_of_wheels;
 
    public setWheels(int wheel_num) {
 
      this.no_of_wheels = wheel_num; //setting value to the class variables.
 
      if(this.no_of_wheels < 0) {
 
         this.no_of_wheels = 0 - this.no_of_wheels;
 
      }
 
   }
 
   public getWheels() {
 
     return this.no_of_wheels;
 
  }
 
}

I know, the question in your mind is then shall I not declare any member variable as public. Sure, you can  but ensure that it can have any range of values. If the type is boolean then safely, it can be a candidate of public access type. But I prefer keeping things private.

Please let me know if I am wrong.

I could not write for the past two months. I could not write because I didn’t have internet connection. Yes, it is a hard fact. In 2009, in one of the metropolitan cities, I struggled to get an internet connection. Why? The story is long, but in one liner, like most of the places in India, my current residential place too, didn’t have last mile network. I ran from pillar to post, went to all service providers, yet could not avail of a connection.

Finally, the ray of hope sparked and soon extinguished. I had no way this time, but to be offensive. That paid. However all credit goes to Airtel. In my opinion the finest service provider in India. Understanding my plight, they rapidly arranged connection in just two days. From the time I complained to their support, till I got the connection, they continuously updated me on the status and found thousand solutions to every problem they came accross.

I salute Airtel and request everybody to try their service. It’s simply excellent.

Thank you Airtel.