PHP

Oblivious References and cURL Adventures

Comment

PHP references are tricky. They’ve always been. People question their performance, compliance with modern software architecture practices and trends. However, show me a single PHP language construct people do not question and I’ll buy you a beer.

I have to admit, it’s been much better since PHP5 came out. We do not have myriad of unintentionally cloned objects anymore, and the ampersand madness has stopped (however I know somebody who continues using it despite all the years passed since it lost its meaning):

$object =& new MyClass();

Don’t get me wrong, I love PHP, and I’ve been advocating its strength for years. Every time I heard somebody criticizing it I responded with a “You just don’t use it right” kind of answer, and was right every single time (well, you know, you can’t be wrong on the internet, it’s always the other guy who is wrong).
Continue reading »

MongoDB, PHP

MongoDB Server-Side JavaScript and Custom ID

Comment

Everybody loves ObjectId. It’s convenient, you never run out of numbers, and you feel yourself a hardcore programmer working with hex. You can even extract a timestamp out of it, which comes in handy quite often. After all, you can freely move data between collections and databases being sure every ID is unique.

However, some timid souls do not like it. I can’t take out of my head the picture of a customer trying to tell his 12-symbol-long receipt number by phone I recently witnessed, poor thing barely managed to provide it to the customer service. So, the task was clear – we need a simple transaction number that corresponds with following requirements:

  1. Consists of a predefined prefix followed by a number: AZ1854
  2. Numbers are consequent providing the prefix is the same
  3. We want it to be created as easily as possible, lazy programmers are good programmers (are they?)
  4. We continue using ObjectId for internal purposes as primary key (_id), which means the custom ID will be stored in another field.

To deal with all that we will create a MongoDB JavaScript function, save it into the database and call it whenever we need to create a new transaction. Sounds complicated? Of course it doesn’t!

Continue reading »