Oliver Nassar

In the past I've spent a great deal of time trying to understand the different between PHP5 abstract and static classes/methods. I find out, use the differences on whatever I'm doing, and the forget. No more. I will document my understanding here to help myself, and some day others, out.

Methods (not classes) can be defined as static (eg. not static class Oliver{} but rather static function talk()) in order to call them without going through an instantiated object. From my perspective, it makes code cleaner and less messy by wrapping related functions in a class wrapper instead of defining them globally. It should be noted though, that classes with static methods CAN be instantiated, and those methods can be called either statically (via the :: double colon notation, or via the -> right arrow notation on the instantiated object).

In developing my own mash-up of a framework, drawing inspiration from a lot of different areas, I ran into an interesting hurdles.

Since my framework is MVC based, I ran into a problem whereby calling an action/method in a controller should only be fulfilled if the number of parameters passed in was valid. So for example, if I was dealing with a user's model, and I wanted to return the email address for the user, I would normally access it via a url pattern such as: http://www.website.com/users/details/email/

In working on a custom framework (that's uniting a lot of the best of the existing ones, but keeping it lean and cutting out what I don't need), I ran into a configuration roadblock which caused me to write some nifty code.

Basically, this framework has a bunch of settings/config files, and some of the files (ini format, using parse_ini_file) are seperated by the following keywords:
local,development,staging,production