Archive - PHP RSS Feed

Whoops: Magento supports PHP 5.2.0 or newer

April 17, 2009 in Mac, Magento, MAMP, Mysql, PHP with 6 Comments

You need to run PHP 5.2.0 or newer for Magento. This is normally not a problem for MAMP but a recent reader has asked about determining which version is running on their Mac when this error does occur. I just wanted to make a quick post on checking PHP versions in MAMP, because it seems if your Mac has other versions of php installed you can end up having odd results when trying to run Magento in MAMP.

You can determine which PHP version your MAMP server is running by opening the MAMP ‘start page’ and clicking the phpInfo link in the top menu. This will also tell you which php.ini file is being used.

You can also run:

 php -version

Run this in a terminal (Terminal.app), to print the PHP version that is on your PATH. You can determine which php is being run by typing:

which php

To find any php binaries on your Mac you can run the locate command in a terminal:

locate php | grep "[^\.]php$"

The pipe into grep just filters out any files that have php in the path, but are not php binaries, and also removes any files that are of the form filename.php which would otherwise turn up in the search.

You can execute any of the php binaries this command finds with the argument -version to find out what version of PHP it is. This may help you to identify any versions of PHP you have installed that you do not want anymore.

For example:

/usr/bin/php -version
/Applications/MAMP/bin/php4/bin/php -version

If anyone has any other tips for solving this or questions please post them below. Hopefully we can make sure this problem doesn’t trip anyone else up!

shuffle() or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love PHP

March 15, 2009 in Language Design, PHP with 0 Comments

I have said some not very nice things about PHP on this blog, and I’m sure over time I’ll be adding more such criticisms. This time I’d like to highlight a handy little feature in PHP, one that is a great deal easier to use than it’s Java counterpart.

Shuffling the elements in an array is probably a programming exercise in every single 1st year computer science textbook, it’s easy enough to do, but because it’s been done roughly 100 million times before, it feels moronic doing it again. So it’s nice when programming languages offer it as standard language functionality. PHP does by way of the shuffle() function and Java does by Collections.shuffle() static method. Seems simple enough, except that an array is not a collection in Java. So you can’t take your int[] and shuffle the elements quite so easily.

If you have an Integer[] in Java you can just pass it into Arrays.asList(array), get the collection and shuffle it. Uh oh, I said Integer[] which sadly is not the same as an int[]! So the difference between the two means I’m going to need to convert all the elements of the int[] into a Integer[] before I can shuffle it, geez, if I have to iterate the list once to convert type, I may as well just not put them back where I found them!

So this is me admitting there is an advantage to a dynamic language. I maintain I’d still rather pay the upfront cost of a few extra lines of code here-and-there for type safety, try getting a PHP IDE to reliably autocomplete instance methods for you, when it doesn’t know the type of a variable! Perhaps I need to start using Eiffel…

My list of PHP language features with hard-to-imagine-use-cases: #1 – The @ symbol that supresses errors

November 26, 2008 in Language Design, PHP with 4 Comments

I’ll preface this post by saying that the hours spent chasing bugs after 1AM are seldom remembered fondly. So perhaps that’s causing some bias in my opinion – bear it in mind.

I’m really learning PHP as I go along, so you can imagine my suprise when at 3AM I discovered the reason I wasn’t seeing an out of memory error was because in PHP:

@<any statement></any>

is the same as an empty try/catch:

try {
   <any statement>
} catch {}</any>

Continue Reading…

Page 3 of 3«123