João Morais » PHP

UTF-8 + PHP = Headache?

João Morais — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 08:55:43 +0000

As some of you know PHP doesn’t handle UTF-8 by default and that could lead to a terrible headache, at least till version 6 cames out.

Today I’ve spent some time looking for good articles on this subject. I’ve found two great articles that cover a lot of topics including strategies to use while working with MySQL:

Handling UTF-8 with PHP
Scripters UTF-8 Survival Guide

You can download the second one in PDF format and read it later.

Go PHP5!

João Morais — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:15:52 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I’ve found this project, it’s name is GoPHP5 and it’s main goal is to speed up the transition of old PHP applications to the newer versions.

I totally agree with this project ideas and support them 100%, in my opinion it doesn’t make sense to keep developing applications using old PHP versions.

At the moment there are already a couple of big projects associated such as Drupal, CMS Made Simple, phpMyAdmin and others.

If you’re going to develop a new project or develop new features to an existing one, take a look at the website, spend some time reading and GoPHP5.

At the moment I’m only working with PHP5 and I’ve got to say, the new features are great.

Symfony Framework

João Morais — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:48:33 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I was looking for a PHP framework after a few searches I found one that fits my needs, and that is Symfony framework!

Some of the features are:

Built on top of PHP 5, for me that’s a plus since I’m only working with PHP 5 at the moment.
MVC support makes application building faster and easier.
CRUD generator will reduce code repetitions and useless boring time spent on building this tasks.
Lots of support, when you start learning something new, all the support available you can get is a plus.
And a lot of other features, such as: Ajax support, smart URL’s, cache management, multilingualism and l18N support, scaffolding, among others. You can check the features list at Symfony Project website.

The only thing I think it’s a bit hard, is the learning curve. What I mean is, you really have to “waste” some time to get to know how the application works, but I think in the end it will compensate.