schlitt.info - php, photography and private stuff ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ :Author: Tobias Schlitt :Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 08:35:38 +0200 :Copyright: CC by-nc-sa =========== Programming =========== - Python. Good, bad, evil -3-: Flow control exceptions My grandma is a wise lady. She told me many useful mantras which I should repeat every night before going to bed. One of these is Never use Exceptions for flow control. And she is so right with this. It is even so true, that every OOP newbie should get this mantra tattooed on his hand. During my experiments with Python I sadly found it violated in a central place: When it comes to implementing an iterator. - Python. Good, bad, evil -2-: Native sets One thing I really liked in Python is the data structure set, which is built into the language core. A set in Python is defined as known from mathematics and beside mathematical use cases, it is helpful in everyday programming live. In this episode of my series on Python, I give you a short insight into how sets work in there, how you can achieve similar results in PHP and why I like the Python approach. - Python. Good, bad, evil -1-: Missing brace Every programmer should learn a new programming language once in a while. Be it for inspiration or just for fun. After some homework in C# some years ago and quite some Java at university (again), Python was my language of choice. This is the first article in a series I plan to write about what I like in Python, what is disturbing but works out and what is really evil. In this article I give a short overview on my motivation to dig into Python and start with a first topic: The missing braces. - PDV → VIP, now on github! phpDocumentor for VIM (PDV) is a project which resulted from my efforts to create a comfortable programming environment for PHP in the VIM editor. Since the server which hosted the SVN repository is to be switched off the next days, I finally moved development over to github.In addition to that, I seized the chance to rename the project itself to VIP (VIM integration for PHP). The repository does not only contain the PDV script iself, but also a filetype plugin for PHP, some useful color schemes, a PHP skeleton file, settings for other (related?) programming languages and more. - Heap, heap, hooray! I recently had the problem that I wanted to retrieve the smallest items from a stream of data. When talking about a stream here, I refer to a data set that I do not want to load into memory completely, since it has quite a few elements. The best way to process such data is a stream approach, where you work always on a single item at a time, iteratively, without loading the full data set.In my special case, I had a database with 140,000 records. The processing of these records could not happen in the DB, since I needed to create vectors from text and perform calculation on these. Basically, I needed to check each vectors distance to a reference vector and keep only the k closest ones.So, what is a good approach to solve such a task? I decided to implement a custom data structure based on a max heap to solve the problem. In this article, I present the solution and compare it to two different other approaches in terms of a small benchmark. - eZ Components Open Book Attention: This blog post is in German, due to the fact, that the book is also in German. In short: Kores and my book about eZ Components can now completely be found online, for free. Das von Kore und mir verfasste eZ Components Buch, gibt es jetzt als Open Book komplett online zu lesen. - Scalar type hints in PHP Ilia recently brought up the topic of scalar type hints again. I would love scalar type hints, but a sensible implementation is not easy. I summarize some approaches in this post and talk about the problems they raise. - An awful lot of files in SVN Derick was always bitching at me when doing releases for the huge amount of time needed to process the Webdav components sub directory. We always supposed, that the Subversion performance issues here resulted from the Webdav test suite, which consists of an awful lot of small test files and some sub-directories. I finally found the time to refactor the tests and the performance improvement is astonishing. - Defining a framework At this weeks IPC, I attended the talk "Framework? No thank you, I will use my own!". In this article I take up my controversal thesis, that it might be wise to create your own framework, and explain my view in detail. In addition, I analyze, what a framework actually is and how it is typically seen in the PHP world. Do you use an OSS framework? Or did you build your own? - GOSUB for PHP Since version 5.3 PHP supports the GOTO statement. While this statement is useful to solve daily programming tasks like implementing finite state machines, it has some serious drawbacks against other programming languages that support the structured programming paradigm. Therefore the PHP core developers decided with one voice to enhance the language by a GOSUB statement.