While searching through quotes to include in our company newsletter, I came across this:

“Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it,

for that determines our success or failure”

Read that again…

“Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it,

for that determines our success or failure”

The mind is a very powerful thing.  For example, I don’t believe I’m the only one to experience being in a store next to a visibly sick individual and after they sneeze I start to feel like I’m getting sick.  It’s impossible to get sick that quickly but my mind starts thinking of the possibility of catching the virus this stranger had… and how I have so many plans, I can’t be sick… what am I going to do… and instantly I start to think that I’m sick.  The mind has the ability to quickly convince us something is happening that isn’t!

The thoughts in your head, positive or negative, directly affect your attitude.  Your attitude directly affects how others react to you.  Those closest to you, your family and your co-workers, are able to tell what type of thoughts are going through your mind by a simple look at your face and they react accordingly.

So what is my point?  Take a self inventory!  Are most of the thoughts that go through your mind positive or negative?  The situations that you face on a daily basis are NOT as important as how you decide to handle them.  When a difficult situation arises and you start to see it in a negative light, remind your self…

——————————————-

“Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it,

for that determines our success or failure”

-Norman Vincent Peale

——————————————-

Think positively… Aim for success!

You may be amazed at the outcome when you do!

Today is already becoming “one of those days”

A loosely written specification provided me with an ambiguity I did not account for:  the client wanted expiration dates and ordering dates to be based upon business days, whereas the specification said “days” only.  So, I found myself scrambling to figure out the best way to perform date functions against a business day concept.  I found some solid information here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1044921/a-good-business-calendar-library-in-java – how is everyone else solving this issue?

There are no doubts that PHP made a huge impact on Web development industry. Because of it’s flexibility, PHP finds it’s usage in many areas, starting from simple Web sites and ending with complex Web applications (i.e. frameworks, shopping carts, etc…).

So, today I’d like to share with you how can a simple feature bring back/more fun to daily development. Let’s talk about “magic methods”.

“Magic methods” are class methods that start with double-underscores “__”. PHP has more than 1 of them, however today we’ll make usage only 4 of them: __set, __get, __isset, __unset.

So, what’s so special about them? You could use them to make your object more adaptive, you could have dynamic and unlimited properties.
For example we have a simple User class:

class User {
private $name;
}

At the time of it’s writing I don’t know how many properties it will have, and later when I’ll need new properties, I’ll have to add them, right?. However there is another option, to have a super class that will handle calls to unknown/non-existing properties. The idea would be to store all data in an associative array (a map if you want) and place this functionality into a super class that we’ll extend.

class AbstractModel {
  private $data = array();
 
protected function __set($name, $value) {
  $this->data[$name] = $value;
}
 
protected function __get($name) {
  if (array_key_exists($name, $this->data)) {
     return $this->data[$name];
  }
  return null;
}
 
protected function __isset($name) {
  return isset($this->data[$name]);
}
 
protected function __unset($name) {
  unset($this->data[$name]);
 }
}

__set method will be called when we’ll try to assign a value to a non-existing property.

$obj->nonExistingProperty = "Some value";

will trigger

__set("nonExistingProperty", "Some value");

__get method will be called when we’ll want to retrieve value of our property.

echo $obj->nonExistingProperty;

will trigger

__get("nonExistingProperty");

Similar to __set and __get, __isset and __unset will be triggered when we’ll use isset and unset functions on non-existing properties.

Usage of our “magic”.

class User extends AbstractModel {
}

include "User.php";
define ('NL', '<br>');
 
$u = new User();
 
$u-&gt;name = "John Rambo";
$u-&gt;age = 87;
 
echo $u-&gt;name . NL;
echo $u-&gt;age . NL;
 
if (isset($u-&gt;name)) {
  echo "Name is set" . NL;
}
 
if (isset($u-&gt;age)) {
  echo "Age is set" . NL;
}
 
if (!isset($u-&gt;email)) {
  echo "Email is NOT set" . NL;
}

Output:

John Rambo
87
Name is set
Age is set
Email is NOT set