Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for May 5th, 2004
Investigating Firebird
Perhaps it is time for a second look at Firebird, an open source relational database based on the Interbase source code.
Firebird was born when the Interbase source code was released in July 2000 by then Inprise Corp. (Borland Software). There is a whole second story on Inprise/Borland and what transpired during those years – too much to be told here. However, some interesting history can be found on the Firebird site.
Many who have had past experience with Interbase may have had some sour grapes over the db platform (myself included with a past client and a Cobalt RAQ server – ugh). However, the latest build from Firebird, version 1.5, is a culmination of a port from the original C to C++. The system includes solid support for stored procedures and triggers, which is forthcoming soon in other open source databases. Firebird’s advantage is support for these key features dates back many years under the Inprise name (Interbase).
Their latest fact sheet is what caught my eye as well as the ability to load it on OS X as well as Windows, Linux and numerous Unix flavors. You can review the fact sheet at …
Lazy PHP: Part 3
Following on from the last blog on Laziness in PHP,
some more Lazy Initialization, this time applied to class loading.
In most programming languages, objects are “expensive” in terms of performance. In PHP, the “cost of objects” is felt even more, thanks to PHP ditching it’s memory between page requests (see Part 1) among other things.
To demonstrate the point, here’s a simple form controlling class (based loosely on the form controllers in WACT);
class FormController {
var $initial_action;
var $invalid_action;
var $valid_action;
var $validator;
/**
* This action will be performed if the form has not yet
* been posted
*/
function registerInitialAction(& $action) {
$this->initial_action = & $action;
}
/**
* This action is performed if the form IS posted by
* invalid data was submitted
*/
function registerInvalidAction(& $action) {
$this->invalid_action = & $action;
}
…
