I want to be free

You can be (rich and healthy) or (poor and ill).

You can have (readable and laconic code) or (confusing one).

“Oh no, I’ve said too much. I haven’t said enough” © REM. The following two examples do the same – so choose any ;]

echo time() + (60 * 60 * 24 * 14); //14 days from now

echo strtotime( '14 day');

Second variant also allows things like ‘-2 years‘.

Want the same in MySQL? Not a problem:

SELECT DATE_ADD( NOW(), INTERVAL 14 DAY )

Another my class has become a winner of PHP Classes Innovation Award – it’s the implementation of Binary Search algorithm. Yes, it’s the algorithm we all know from university – it’s strange for me, that it was considered as innovative.

I wrote this class as a test task while an interview for a new job. Results were so impressive for me, that I decided to share this piece of code: it finds result in 10Gb file for less than 5 seconds! File must contain key/value pairs (separator can be defined, by default it’s equal sign), and these pairs are sorted by keys. You define what key to search and get correspondent value very quickly.

For example:

Ann=5
Bob=3
Sandy=8
Zulu=1

If you search “Sandy”, you’ll get result “8″. Very quick :]

As a prize I selected an Apress book called “From Program to Product” – though I found it in PDF, it seems to be quite insightfull for me: we, developers, always think about code, and never about how to sell it. I have several product ideas, so I hope the book would help me to succeed.

P.S. Fun is that a few people emailed me to say how nice my new PHP Classes avatar is :] Thanks to Anton Dovgal for such a great picture of sad me.

Yes, my class Phonetic won the first place of the PHPClasses Innovation Award.

Thanks to everyone voted for me!

You can check a demo here.

My PHP class Phonetic is nominated on phpclasses.org Innovation Award.

Vote for it!

The class generates words that phonetically are equal to the given one, but are written differently.

I have intention to complete my draft of a CRUD PHP-class. Don’t know what is it? Easy!

Imagine you have a site where users point some places at Google Maps framed at your page. As developer of this site you will have to create several admin pages:

• a page to manage users: e.g. grant permissions to your friend or deactivate a gonzo user
• another page to tune options of the map points: fix a typo or edit coordinates of points

Just two pages, but I bet you’d need at least 3-5 hours to make a small draft form to manage these entities. To make things worse, let me remind you of paging, client and server sides validation, date-picker dialogs or even data integrity checks.

So, to cut the long story short, CRUD class generates all this for you in a couple of lines of code. So you just define what database table you’d like to manage – drum-roll! – you get a ready-made interface! (I call it a Table Manager Class – it helps you to manage any table in your system)

By the way, CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update and Delete. So CRUD class allows to play with data you have.

As Petrovich said (a laboratory assistant in my university), “first check what others have done”.

So, I found a CRUD class and I remember about Symfony framework admin generator.

While the former is rather crude (it doesn’t work in some conditions, settings are embedded in PHP code), Symfony’s generator is quite nice: settings are separated from logic in a Yaml file and the code is being regenerated for you every time you make a change.The drawback of the latter is that you have to deal with huge Symfony framework to have this feature.

So my idea is to prepare a stand-alone PHP class to make generation of admin inteface easier. I’m going to use an Ext.js JavaScript framework to beautify the interface.

Maybe someone has a better solution?

Andrisi suggests this to be like this: